B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  But merely for an instant: only the first chapter in a two-part internal war in both countries was concluded; an equally deadly second part was about to begin, this time opening in Sierra Leone. Kabbah pursued negotiations with the RUF, which did not participate directly in the elections, signing an accord with Sankoh at a 1996 peace conference in Abidjan. For the first time, RUF thus received international legitimation, even though Sankoh reneged on the agreement in short order. The army again seized power in May 1997, installing Major Johnny Paul Koroma as head of a new junta, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), composed mainly of northern and western members; shortly before, Kabbah had ended the Executive Outcomes contract, thereby losing a part of his protection. The RUF was invited to join the government; Sankoh would be appointed deputy president and several RUF officials would receive posts.

  The international community, heavily invested in restoring constitutional rule, was infuriated. The brief rule of the AFRC/RUF coalition proved entirely predatory, and Sankoh in power made no contribution to peace. ECOWAS met in Conakry in June 1997 and determined to overturn the coup, authorizing an ECOMOG force and proposing a comprehensive embargo. After efforts to return Kabbah to power by negotiations failed, an ECOMOG force, mostly Nigerian, ousted Koroma by force in February 1998, and Kabbah resumed office. However, the AFRC army defected to the rebels.

  Efforts followed to create an entirely new security force and to encourage the emergence of local civil defense forces on the Kamajor model. A new mercenary contract was signed with Sandline, a British outfit tied to diamond merchants that employed many former Executive Outcomes personnel; Sandline was apparently promised a diamond concession in return. In the face of international objections, Sandline soon disappeared from the scene. Security remained precarious, dramatized by a January 1999 raid in Freetown by RUF and ex-army fighters; the capital was looted and six thousand civilians killed before the invading force was driven out, mainly by ECOMOG. The enfeebled condition of the government was starkly evident. At this juncture, the UN Security Council authorized a peacekeeping force for Sierra Leone, UNAMSIL. Slow to arrive, by mid-2000 UNAMSIL forces numbered eighty-seven hundred.

  The shock of the Freetown devastation brought pressure for a renewed settlement with RUF. Yet another peace conference convened in Lomé, Togo, in May 1999; a disastrous accord resulted, inscribed ever since as a paradigmatic instance of imprudent conflict resolution. The Kabbah delegation held a very weak hand; at that juncture an estimated 70% of the country escaped its control, and the RUF along with allied former soldiers occupied the diamond mining zones. The RUF was absolved of all past crimes and given four key cabinet posts, and Sankoh was named to a position that in practice placed him in charge of the diamond trade.43 In the eyes of the many Sierra Leonean victims of RUF violence, the highest rewards went to the worst criminal.

  The Lomé settlement was short lived. Sankoh overreached in May 2000; the RUF seized five hundred UN peacekeepers as hostages and again attacked the capital. British forces were sent to rout the RUF; Sankoh and other RUF leaders in Freetown were imprisoned, and UNAMSIL joined in an offensive with ECOMOG. Thereafter RUF was in retreat. International pressure on Taylor to cease his supply and support of RUF increased. An RUF incursion into Guinea to attack encampments of anti-Taylor militias brought heavy losses, and the Guinea army pursued the RUF into Sierra Leone. British forces secured Freetown and took over training of a new Sierra Leone army. The Kamajors received growing support, and became a larger threat to RUF. The RUF lost control of the diamond fields, and its smuggling operations were constrained by new international measures on “blood diamonds.” A process of disarming combatants and providing them some compensation for their surrender gained momentum; in the end some seventy-two thousand emerged. A number of RUF fighters slipped across the border into Liberia, accompanied by Sankoh deputy commander Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie, who was to join Taylor’s forces.44 Sankoh by 2003 was indicted by a newly created Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone; he died in prison, and Bockarie perished in Liberia not long after.

  Although it was not immediately evident, by January 2002 the war had completely ended, enabling preparations to go forward on schedule for national elections in that year. Kabbah won reelection, and the RUF, running as a political party, received only 2%. No part of Sierra Leone had escaped the terrible ravages of internal warfare; only slowly did the semblance of a functioning state take form around the political superstructure legitimated by successful elections.

  In Liberia, the false peace of 1996 leading to the fear-driven 1997 landslide election of Charles Taylor as president soon came apart. Despite the legitimacy conferred by respectable elections, his predatory past cast doubt on the likelihood of his behaving appropriately in office. And, indeed, his warlord habits soon reappeared in his assertion of personal control over state revenues, his continued backing of the RUF, and his management of an ongoing illicit diamond trade. Moreover, his violent attacks on opponents resumed, especially those presumed sympathetic to such former rival militias as the defunct ULIMO factions or the LPC; he had told a Monrovia Baptist congregation that “I will be ferocious.”45 Indeed he was, and by 1999 opposition militias began to reform.

  By 2000, the most active groups—Liberians United for Peace and Democracy (LURD) and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, which had core ethnic constituencies among the Mandingo and Krahn, respectively—had become significant irritants to Taylor.46 Some Liberian dissidents took refuge in neighboring Guinea; Taylor dispatched his army to attack their camps, in alliance with the RUF. This reinforced Guinean support for LURD, as well as triggering its army incursions into Sierra Leone. As a rogue tyrant, Taylor found himself being undermined by growing international opprobrium. The marginalization of his RUF ally by 2002 was a further blow.

  Thus, when LURD insurgents greeted him at the gates of Monrovia in 2003, he was isolated and unable to resist external demands for his ouster. Already under secret indictment for war crimes by the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone, he was promised safe exile to Nigeria in return for his resignation and departure. Despite the amnesty promise, under international pressure and perhaps reflecting the concerns of the newly elected Liberian government, Taylor was extradited in 2006 to face the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone sitting in The Hague, Netherlands. After his 2012 conviction, the lethal legacy of Charles Taylor finally appears to have been eliminated from the Liberian scene. A two-year interim regime was created, leading up to a successful transition to democratic rule in 2005 and the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The elections featured a mainly new roster of political parties, the legacy of the civil war militias mostly vanishing.

  Thus the long nightmare of unending internal war appeared to end. Several years of peace may be consolidating civility in society. Sierra Leone had a second round of postconflict elections in 2007 that resulted in alternation of ruling party, a positive measure of political normalization. Johnson-Sirleaf, with her long background of international experience and newly demonstrated political skills, enjoys a particularly favorable external reputation. Honored with a Nobel Prize, she was reelected in 2011, though not without controversy. An unusual attribute of postconflict Liberia is the exceptionally large leadership role of women, who hold a substantial fraction of cabinet posts and parliamentary seats.47

  Still, the obstacles are enormous. The legacy of warlord politics is not easy to eradicate, and the exploitation of key commodities is difficult to cleanse of criminal practices. The decay and destruction of infrastructure takes years to repair. Above all, the utter brutalization of society over an extended period leaves wounds that require extended convalescence. No part of either country escaped unscathed; the intertwined Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars stand alone among the internal wars surveyed in this chapter in the penetration of violence to all corners of both polities, including the capital cities. Thus engulfed in combat, few in either country were able to stand outside the conflicts. Most citizens experienced
violence either as victims or perpetrators, and in many cases they found themselves in both roles. Thus in everyday life one must live with the knowledge of past transgressions of friends and neighbors, with all the fears, animosities, and insecurities embedded in social memory.

  Women and children were special victims of the violence. The horrendous scale of violence against women and widespread use of rape as an instrument of terror, humiliation, and control left deep wounds. According to one international human rights legal specialist who interviewed many victims, most women in Liberia were raped during the internal wars.48 The sinister RENAMO innovation of systematic use of child soldiers was utilized on a large scale, above all by Taylor and the RUF. Many were abducted and often compelled to commit acts of violence against their family or neighbors to sever their links with their home communities. Others joined voluntarily for the reasons already noted—perhaps offered the promise of power or a means of survival or as a last desperate measure in the wake of the loss of one’s family. Most rural youth and urban marginals felt socially excluded to an extreme degree and resented the venal prosperity of the political class, which gave some appeal to the vague warlord slogans of revolutionary intent and elimination of corrupt rulers.

  Extensive postconflict interviews with former child soldiers reveal the multiplicity of motives. A study by Paul Richards reports that 87% of those interviewed had originally been abducted, though many cited promises of jobs, cash, or food.49 Mozambique’s experience, based on the first systematic postconflict effort to reincorporate former child soldiers, suggests that reasonable success is possible with a combination of invocation of customary mechanisms for community reconciliation and meaningful opportunity.

  Both countries borrowed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission formula that originated in South Africa to come to terms with hurtful memories and foster forgiveness and healing, with mixed results. The Sierra Leone commission was better conducted and more useful than its Liberian counterpart, which fell into the hands of opponents of President Johnson-Sirleaf. They discredited its labors by issuing a wildly excessive call to ban her from political office for thirty years for the small sums she and diaspora colleagues had contributed to Taylor when he was organizing his rebellion in 1989.

  Even at the height of the civil war, states never disappeared; their remnants continued to operate in Freetown and Monrovia during the first phase and then again in that moment of conflict remission in 1996–97. They remained important as the points of intersection with the international community, whose role was great in providing aid, humanitarian relief, and peacekeeping forces. Further, the shards of sovereignty invoked by diverse parties momentarily claiming state authority were one dimension of the complex fabric of disorder. The idea of the state remained fully alive in the social imaginary, as a presence that would return once the conflict ended; the numerous interim peace accords that punctuated the warfare continually reawakened expectations that fighting might soon stop. And the historically rooted state template persisted, running from the chiefly institutions that remained in place through the permanent government buildings in the district seats that were perhaps sacked but not demolished to the array of more ambitious structures that housed the central place of state rule. The possibility of normal politics going forward is enhanced by the relatively muted role of ethnic and religious difference in the internal wars. Some Liberian militias had ethnic constituencies, as did such Sierra Leone civil defense forces as the Kamajors. But the wars were never about ethnicity or religion.

  Somalia

  The Somalia conflict is both the most prolonged and intractable of contemporary wars, resisting almost two decades of efforts at resolution. There have been numerous successive “transitional regimes” cobbled together with extensive external mediation, most recently primarily through the Inter-African Governmental Agency for Development (IGAD), a cooperative forum for negotiation drawing together the states of northeast Africa. After the dissolution of an organized central authority in 1991, a complex amalgam of clan and subclan rivalries, warlord politics, Islamist mobilization and ineffectual if not counterproductive external intervention sustained an unending state of war, ebbing and flowing in intensity. Yet Somalia had once been hailed as a culturally unified society, whose state was legitimated by a robust Somali nationalism. It was the sole postcolonial African state to have an electoral change of leadership (in 1967) until Mauritius in 1982. After the assassination of the elected president in 1969, a military regime ruled with initial apparent success; Siad Barre at first basked in an external reputation as a progressive enlightened despot presiding over an apparently strong state with a widely admired developmental record. Well-regarded Le Monde correspondent Philippe Decraene, writing in 1975, declared that, “the transformations of Somali society now in course promise to be more profound than those of any other African society.”50

  Despite the shared language and culture, the deeply rooted clan identities trumped territorial national attachment in the ongoing struggle for access to state resources and then became even more sharply divisive when political competition degenerated into armed conflict. The half dozen maximal clan families (Darood, Hawiye, Isaaq, Digil, Reyanweyn, and Dir) and especially the much larger roster of clans and subclans provided a core template for alignments.51 The depth of clan attachments was remarkable; young boys learned to recite the genealogy back some twenty generations to an eponymous ancestor. The nested hierarchy of kin-based identity segments had enduring force in defining the social geography for most Somalis; emergent factions, whatever their original motivation, quickly acquired the clan identity of their leader. Still, other bases of social affinity operated. Merchants, warlords, elders, Islamist militants, youth, and women had different interests and various links to contending factions; competing personal ambitions added another dimension. So also did the contradictions arising from separate colonial traditions in Italian-ruled Somalia and in British Somaliland, uneasily amalgamated in 1960. Tensions arose from the outset; Isaaq clans that had dominated Somaliland found their importance greatly diminished in the larger Somalia arena. Divergent educational, administrative, and legal practices added further complications.

  The disastrous invasion of Ethiopia in 1977 was the turning point for the Somali state, and the regime had degenerated into a clan-based tyranny by the late 1980s. In clear decline, the narrow clan base of the regime (popularly referenced as “MOD” for Marehan, Ogaden, and Dulbuhante clans of the Darood family) became increasingly clear. In the words of Somali scholar Hussein Adam, Siad Barre “went beyond shouting about treason to bombing villages, towns, and cities, destroying water reservoirs vital to nomads in what he called enemy territories,” engaging in “indiscriminate jailings, utilizing terror squads and assassination units, and intensifying interclan wars.”52 Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, was especially hard hit by aerial attacks. The descent into anarchy began when one clan-based insurgency, the United Somali Congress (USC), with Hawiye roots, drove Barre into exile in 1991, but its leaders (Mohammed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi) immediately split in a struggle for power in the capital Mogadishu. Another armed faction, the Somali National Movement (SNM) composed of Isaaq, took control of the north, declaring the independence of Somaliland later that year. Yet another, the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), led by Abdullahi Yusuf, (made up of Majerteen and Harti of the Darood family, created another separate state in the northeast region of Puntland in 1998, though without declaring formal secession.53

  Three other new vectors came into play. The first was intervention by the international community, especially the UN, the United States, and the neighboring states, horrified by the appearance of ungoverned space. By 1992 the UN had mounted a large humanitarian relief program as well as an international force (UNOSOM), in which the United States initially participated. In 1993, the UN organized the first ineffectual state restoration project, following a conference of clan elders, militia leaders, and civil society representatives, from whi
ch emerged a transitional national council. However, the disaster overtaking US military involvement in 1993, dramatized in the film Blackhawk Down, led to American withdrawal, and UNOSOM itself was terminated in 1995. Again internationally organized conferences to restore the semblance of a state took place in Cairo in 1995 and Djibouti in 2000. On each occasion, an assemblage of Somali personalities presumed to speak for the major clans, militias, and other identifiable parapolitical forces, including growing numbers of diaspora participants, traced the outlines of a decentralized state, and designated personnel to occupy its top offices. The Fifteenth Peace and Reconciliation Conference held in Kenya in 2004, now under the primary auspices of IGAD, laid the groundwork for the present Transitional Federal Government (TFG), nearly all whose finance comes from the international community. The AU promised a peacekeeping contingent, deployed in Mogadishu. Much smaller than initially anticipated, with only fifty-one hundred Ugandan and Burundian troops by 2010, the AU force could control only the airport and port.