But Kabbah had a foreign friend who was willing to do all he could to restore Kabbah’s government to power: the British Foreign Office’s representative in Freetown, Peter Penfold, who interpreted the UN resolution differently than the lawmakers in his home country. Exiled by the coup to a hotel in Conakry, Guinea, Penfold was more or less cut off from his bosses in London: His satellite telephone didn’t work, crucial documents were either lost or destroyed by the German embassy in Guinea, which allowed Penfold to send and receive coded faxes, and high-tech communications gear delivered to him was left at the airport because it was too big to fit through the door of his hotel room. So chances are that he may not have been entirely aware that Britain had outlawed all arms deliveries to Sierra Leone, and he helped coordinate Kabbah’s contract with Sandline to provide Sierra Leone weapons in exchange for diamond-mining rights.
When it became known that the British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone was helping coordinate a gunrunning plan in contravention of British law and UN sanctions, a gigantic political scandal erupted in London. Foreign Office secretary Cook had built his reputation on mercilessly prosecuting the Conservative government’s secret delivery of arms to Iraq in the late 1980s, and he returned to his residence one night in April 1998 to find a fax from solicitors acting on behalf of Sandline, saying that it was under investigation by Customs and Excise for sanctions busting. The diamond war in Sierra Leone was capable not only of causing the deaths of thousands of innocent victims, but of jeopardizing the political careers of foreign politicians as well.2
Sandline sent 35 tons of Bulgarian AK-47s to Sierra Leone for use by the Sierra Leone Army and the Kamajors, but the brewing political scandal in London put deeper involvement on permanent hold. Meanwhile ECOWAS reinforced ECOMOG and its Nigerian soldiers in Freetown in an all-out military bid to restore Kabbah’s government. Interestingly, this force was considered “leg itimate” despite the fact that Nigeria had been expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations for the army’s gross violations of human rights within its own country, which culminated in the military murder—under the dictatorship of the Nigerian General Sani Abacha—of environmental activists in 1996. Worse still for the prospects of brokering peace was that, at the same time it was deployed to Sierra Leone, portions of the ECOMOG command stationed in Liberia had more or less gone into business with Charles Taylor, whose support of the RUF was well known. Taylor was a close friend and political ally of Sani Abacha, and some of Abacha’s soldiers assigned to ECOMOG in Liberia saw the opportunity to enrich themselves by stripping the country of railroad stock, mining equipment, and public utilities and selling them abroad.3 Sandline and EO may have gotten results, but the fact that they were private armies apparently made them more unpalatable than ECOMOG to world tastes. It appeared that the developed countries were willing to put Sierra Leone’s rescue in the hands of a less effective security force—one that was prone to flagrant corruption, bribery, savagery, and a disdain for human rights—just because it was quasi-governmental and not run by profiteers—at least not so openly.
ECOMOG’S ATTEMPT TO WREST control of Freetown from the RUF/AFRC was a human rights disaster. Its first order of business was to free the capital from AFRC and RUF occupiers and reinstate Kabbah to power, an operation that nearly involved destroying the city in order to liberate it. In fierce street-to-street fighting, ECOMOG lost hundreds of soldiers and the RUF/AFRC forces looted and burned everything they could in retreat. Drugged RUF child-soldiers wearing clothes donated by aid organizations dashed into Freetown’s burning streets, blindly firing deafening volleys of gunfire in the general direction of their enemies, hitting anything that happened to be in the way. ECOMOG was largely doing the same thing, its soldiers modifying their uniforms by fighting shirtless or with bandanas flapping around their heads. It was often hard to tell who was who, and RUF fighters began tying white bandanas around their heads in order to be recognized by their comrades.
While ECOMOG attempted to liberate Freetown, the Kamajors ran roughshod throughout the bush, storming RUF defenses and engaging in some of their hardest-fought battles, now armed more substantially by both the Nigerians and Sandline than they’d ever been before. The Kamajors proved to be a force unto themselves; although they were ostensibly fighting on behalf of the government, they soon proved to be beyond the government’s control. They fought the RUF, but they also looted villages, stole food, and killed civilians suspected of aiding the rebels. Their vigilante tactics would later be a stumbling block to peace once UNAMSIL deployed in 1999.
ECOMOG’s own scorched-earth tactics reduced Freetown to a smoking, corpse-filled hull of a city, but they did chase the RUF back to the bush to defend their diamond mines. Then field-commander Issa Sessay and Major General Sam “Mosquito” Bokarie helped Johnny Paul Koroma, the AFRC leader, flee to the eastern RUF stronghold of Kailahun and into Liberia, discovering in the process that he had hidden a large cache of rebel diamonds in his clothing to facilitate his escape.4 According to the United Nations, Koroma had enough goods to ensure quite a comfortable life in Europe. Mosquito and Sessay took the diamonds from him and sent him into Liberia at gunpoint.
Kabbah was restored to power in March of 1998. RUF leader Foday Sankoh was captured in Abuja, Nigeria, ensnared in a gunrunning plot. He was arrested and shipped back to Freetown, where he was sentenced to die for his role in supporting the AFRC junta. If ever the sordid tale of Sierra Leone should have ended, it should have ended there.
But the RUF’s insatiable lust for money and power is not easily extinguished. The RUF quickly regrouped in the wake of its defeat at the hands of ECOMOG and planned its worst assault yet: an all-out bid to take over the country and its wealth of diamonds. Although nearly a quarter of Nigeria’s entire military was based in Sierra Leone at the beginning of 1999 and the rebel leader was on death row in Freetown, the RUF rearmed with the help of Charles Taylor’s presidential plane, trading diamonds for weapons from Niger. It staged a bold assault on Freetown on January 6, 1999, code-named Operation No Living Thing. The date is burned into the mind of anyone living in the capital at the time. In the words of journalist Sebastian Junger, war does not get much worse than it did on that day.
JOSEPH KAMARA REMEMBERS the humid, overcast day well—it was the day he lost both his hands and his family in the space of about twenty minutes. He was in his home near Kissy Harbor in eastern Freetown when he heard a rocket sizzle down the boulevard in front of his house, exploding in the street several hundred yards away. He ran out the front door to see what was happening and saw two “technicals” careening down the street stuffed with RUF fighters. Technicals are pickup trucks that have been modified into combat vehicles; many have had their windshields and roofs taken off with a chainsaw and all of them have a heavy machine gun or antiaircraft gun bolted into the bed, weapons too heavy to fire without being stabilized. One of the trucks broke off from its high-speed run and skidded to a stop in front of him, spilling fighters bristling with gun barrels.
“You! Today you’ll die!” yelled one man, whom Kamara assumed was the commander. He tried to plead with them to spare his family, but the other soldiers ran into the house and dragged out his wife, 6-year-old son, two teenage daughters, and his brother. The brother was shot immediately, one bullet through the head with a nickel-plated revolver. Kamara remembers his body falling straight down, as if all the bones had suddenly been removed. Then a Molotov cocktail was pitched through the doorway of the house, a modest concrete cube, but one that was comfortable by Freetown’s standards.
Kamara shouted to his family to run while he tried to distract the soldiers. Everyone fled but the 6-year-old, who hid behind the carcass of a car about twenty yards away. He didn’t want to leave his father.
Kamara pled with the soldiers for his life, but they forced him to his knees and placed the hot barrel of the revolver to his head.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he screamed. “I don’t know you. I’ve never done anything to
you.”
“We must cut off your hands,” the commander told him, matter-of-factly. “Those are our orders.”
He was then forced to lie on his back in the street with his arms outstretched. He wanted to yell to his son to leave so that he wouldn’t have to witness his mutilation, but did not want to reveal his hiding place to the soldiers. An ax was raised into the smoke-filled sky while the surrounding soldiers pinned him down and stood on his hands. It took more than a dozen blows to sever each arm, just below the elbow. The strangest sensation, he said, was that one minute he could feel his knuckles being ground into the asphalt by the soldier’s boot and in the next he watched as the man kicked his arm away as he felt nothing.
Once the amputation was complete, the soldiers fired a chain of machine-gun ammunition into the flaming remains of his house and then sped off looking for more victims. Delirious with pain, eyes stinging with tears, Kamara looked for his son, but he was gone. He staggered to the nearby Connaught Hospital in the hope that the doctors could keep him from bleeding to death. He never saw any of his family members again.
Scenes like this took place throughout Freetown for the next four days as the capital continued its now familiar plunge into chaos and anarchy. Recalling the horror of the May 1997 coup just two years before, international aid groups wasted no time evacuating their people, as did the media organizations and the diplomatic corps. Once again, Freetown’s population was left to fend for itself in the face of battalions of crazed RUF soldiers, with only ECOMOG to hide behind.
ECOMOG soldiers, caught off guard by the assault, went haywire and embarked on their own version of Operation No Living Thing, executing suspected RUF on the Aberdeen bridge and dumping their bodies into the river below. Roadside justice was the order of the day. Anyone remotely suspected of being involved with the RUF was tortured, raped, and summarily executed by the Nigerian soldiers, including an unknown number of perfectly innocent civilians whose elbows were tied behind them before they were shot at point-blank range. One retarded 9-year-old boy, whose plight was highlighted in the documentary film Cry Freetown, was stripped naked, beaten, and tortured by Nigerians who suspected him of being an RUF sniper. It’s hard to tell which is worse; that ECOMOG beat and tortured children, or that the RUF had enlisted young kids so extensively that ECOMOG was put into a position where it had no choice but to suspect even the least suspicious of being an RUF killer. Alpha jets and artillery emplacements fired on civilian targets and some soldiers in the Sierra Leone Army imitated the rebels they were ostensibly fighting, taking the arms or legs off anyone they suspected of being a rebel.5 ECOMOG’s wanton targeting of civilians and their property led Sierra Leoneans to quip wryly that the force’s acronym actually stood for “Every Car or Moving Object Gone.”
ECOMOG eventually routed the RUF from the city once again, but this time the death toll was nearly 6,000.
Still, no one outside the orbit of West Africa seemed to pay much attention to the matter. Operation No Living Thing was given brief and perfunctory treatment in Western media, which was busy with other matters that dominated the news. At the time thousands of Africans were dying over control of diamonds sold in shopping malls around the world, U.S. president Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, and everyone else was preparing for digital disaster from Y2K.
Nevertheless, the horror was too graphic to ignore completely. With little thought to the causes of the conflict, the U.S. Department of State dispatched negotiators—including envoy Jesse Jackson—to the region with one goal: End the war and secure a peace agreement. The agreement that was reached in Lomé, the capital of the small West African nation of Togo, was nothing less than a hands-down victory for those who started the war in the first place, for no better reason than to control and sell diamonds, a fact that seemed to escape all scrutiny from the diplomats and negotiators in Lomé.
With a single frenzy of bloodletting, one that was openly named after its intention to kill everything in the RUF’s path, the rebels effectively won their diamond war, at least for a time.
THE 1999 LOMÉ PEACE ACCORDS, signed by the RUF, AFRC, the Sierra Leone government, and the United Nations, is a diplomatic work of art. According to the agreement, the RUF would end their hostilities in exchange for amnesty for war crimes committed since the beginning of the conflict and its leaders would be appointed to government posts. RUF leader Foday Sankoh—still in jail awaiting execution for his role in the 1997 coup—was to be released from prison and installed as the vice president under Kabbah, the man he and Johnny Paul Koroma had ousted two years earlier. Sankoh was also to be appointed as the chairman of the country’s Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development. In other words, the internationally brokered peace accord gave the RUF total control of everything it had fought and killed for from the very beginning—the diamond mines. In exchange, the RUF agreed to demobilize and disarm to a UN peacekeeping force, dubbed UNAMSIL. After disarming, the RUF was to be given legal status as a political party. It’s hard to imagine that the band of killers who’d murdered thousands and sold the country’s most valuable natural resource out from under it for the past decade could have been happier with the agreement.
Western countries that helped negotiate the Lomé Accords enthusiastically supported the agreement, not because they were fair—but because it was a swift solution to what they perceived to be a nagging problem. Responding to criticism that the Lomé Accords were too favorable to the RUF, the U.S. assistant secretary of state at the time, Susan Rice, practically put it in those words when she said: “There will never be peace and security and an opportunity for development and recovery in Sierra Leone unless there is a solution to the source of the conflict. And that entails, by necessity—whether we like it or not—a peace agreement with the rebels.”6
Not everyone was convinced that for peace to succeed the RUF should be granted such a conciliatory arrangement. The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, in a bold but ill-advised move, signed an amendment to the peace agreement stating that he didn’t agree with giving combatants amnesty for war crimes, one of the document’s most important concessions to the RUF. By making such a statement, he essentially nullified the agreement in the eyes of the RUF before it was implemented and then sent 6,000 UN soldiers to Sierra Leone to try and enforce it.
Meanwhile, peace deal or not, the diamond channels were wide open. Hundreds of thousands of carats of diamonds flowed from the blood-soaked jungle of Sierra Leone to brides everywhere, and 7.62-mm Kalashnikov rounds flowed back. Rebels still controlled the diamonds and thus the country.
ENTER UNAMSIL. Created through UN Security Council Resolution 1270, and deployed to Sierra Leone in October of 1999, UNAMSIL originally consisted of 6,000 military personnel and 260 observers. The majority of them were again Nigerians, the UN’s first mistake among many. Given the atrocities committed by Nigeria’s last foray into Sierra Leonean “peacekeeping” through ECOMOG, it was natural that most Sierra Leoneans looked on them warily. And as far as the RUF was concerned, the Nigerians were nothing less than a hated enemy, one to which they were now expected to turn over their arms.
Compounding this lack of respect and authority were consistent rumors that some ECOMOG units—which were to be absorbed into UNAMSIL—had made arrangements with the RUF to share the spoils of their diamond plundering, in much the same way as they had with resources in Liberia. That the Nigerians may have been interested in agendas other than peace was clear to UN force commanders from the early days of the UNAMSIL mission. By the time the mission was deployed, Nigeria’s dictator, Sani Abacha, had died unexpectedly of a heart attack—some say it was brought on by an overdose of Viagra—and that nation’s dictatorial dynasty, which always relied on equal amounts of corruption and military screw-turning, was in question. Given the growing uncertainty over Nigeria’s leadership, top military officers commanding troops under the UNAMSIL banner were presented with a temptin
g opportunity to amass war chests and hedge funds in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.
But the biggest problem with the Nigerians was in their perception as aggressors and war criminals.
John Bolton, at the time the senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, complained to the U.S. Congress about this seemingly obvious obstacle. “Why should Nigerians have been embraced by UNAMSIL?” he questioned the House International Relations Committee in October 2000. “Given that the RUF effectively considered them the enemy, this was virtually a guarantee of a repetition of the Somalia problem, when [local warlord] Mohammed Farah Aideed saw the UN forces allying themselves with local clans and subclans that he considered his enemies. . . . Inexplicably, the lessons of Somalia do not seem to have been applied in Sierra Leone.”7
UNAMSIL fell apart almost before its acronym was christened. The original force consisted of a hodgepodge of member-states’ militaries, and they didn’t exactly represent the cream of the crop, seeming to have been culled from those smaller states that could be pressured into troop commitments by the more influential UN members who didn’t want anything to do with a morass like Sierra Leone. While effective, experienced, and well-equipped soldiers from countries like the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and France stayed home, soldiers from Nepal, Croatia, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Zambia, and Ghana were dispatched to Freetown. The idea, perhaps, was that countries in the common continent should be deployed to handle an African problem, but the result was that variously disciplined forces that had never operated in concert were thrust into what was at the time the hottest military zone on earth next to Kosovo. And the disastrous results of this strategy were almost instantaneous.
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