Fighting for Peace.

Sierra Leone, which recently captured the world's attention with pictures of crudely amputated babies and young people--the handiwork of a bewildering and murderous group of "rebels" calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF)--is now being analyzed primarily as the United Nations most recent and perhaps final failure, the place where bold post-cold-war idealism about putting ordinary people above realpolitik was finally defeated by mindless terror. Writing in the prestigious New York Review of Books (29 June 2000), James Traub, an American journalist, was unambigious. Sierra Leone, he wrote, "has a chance to be remembered not simply for brutal warfare, but as the graveyard of UN peacekeeping--or at least of the doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention' for which UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has become the chief spokesman". It is clear from his tone that Traub disapproves of the concept of humanitarian intervention in the first place, that what is happening to the United Nations in Sierra Leone w as easily predictable, if not fitting. I will return to this point, for it is important in understanding why so laudable a venture as the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone should now be concerned about its basic justification. But first, it is important to understand the character of the Sierra Leone crisis, to inquire into its apparently intractable nature, the reasons for its terrors, coups and counter-coups, and its brutal and prolonged war.

The United Nations, Sierra Leons and Human Security

Sierra Leone was arguably the first modern State in sub-Saharan Africa, possessing its first western-style university, its first significant class of highly educated elite, its first press, lawyers, doctors, engineers and academics. For nearly two centuries, it was known as the "Athens of West Africa", sending out educators and Christian missionaries to spread "the lights of western civilization" to other parts of Africa and even beyond.

Sierra Leone is a small former British colony, created at the turn of the eighteenth century as a result of a sustained intellectual and moral debate about humanitarianism and realpolitik--the abolition of the slave trade and European colonization of Africa. So it is almost fitting over 200 years later, in the midst of another sustained debate about humanitarianism and realpolitik following the end of the cold war, that Sierra Leone would again become the focus of international attention. The British abolitionists who helped found the State intended it "for the h appy establishment of blacks and people of colour, to be shipped as freed men ... under the protection of the British Government". They were to enjoy "both civil and religious liberty as in Britain".

At the time of its independence in 1961, in addition to its highly qualified and experienced civil service, its prestigious university and growing literacy, the nation of about 2.5 million (now 4.5 million) possessed an abundance of natural resources, ranging from some of the world's highest quality diamonds to iron, manganese, titanium, gold and valuable agricultural produce such as cocoa and coffee. A recent World Bank study--Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implications for Policy (15 June 2000)--informs us that an abundance of such primary and "lootable" commodities can only be a recipe for civil wars, but this is surely retrospective and the question must be asked: why is it that such a good beginning should end in such an incomparable disaster? It is a question that must also be asked of many other African countries that find themselves in similar but less dramatic predicaments.

Some scholars of Africa approach the problem merely from the vantage point of politics: they analyze it in terms of the continent's drift from western-style democracy after independence to single party dictatorship--with all its terrors and corruption--and then its collapse, almost as a deterministic process following the dictates of the continent's peculiar history and nature.

In the case of Sierra Leone, the "precursors" of the current troubles are deemed to have been President Siaka Stevens' brutal and corrupt regime (1968-1985), the imposition of the one-party State in 1978, the brutality of the security forces, the banning and exile of opponents, the undemocratic change of leadership bringing in President (formerly Major-General) Joseph Saidu Momoh and his markedly inept governance.

This approach is seductive; it fits in very neatly within the prevalent neo-liberal intellectual conceit. But it is important to remember that if one sets out to find precursors to contemporaneous problems, one is bound to find precursors to problems, and nothing but precursors to problems. And the conclusions will be wrong. Dictatorship and corruption do not necessarily lead to war; neither does poverty. It is easy to forget, given Sierra Leone's abysmal and violent state, that before the current troubles started in 1991, there were fewer incidents of violent crime-- armed robbery, rape and murder--in the whole of this very poor country than in Toronto (Canada), one of the safest large cities in North America.

This war, as I will argue, is to a large extent the result of foreign invasion. The RUF was created outside of Sierra Leone by a Liberian rebel leader and, apart from its mercurial, corrupt commander Foday Sankoh and a handful of others, its core membership was initially made up of Liberian and Burkinabe mercenaries. This war is about greed not political grievance, about loot not politics, about diamonds not human rights or poverty alleviation, or good governance or civil society.

And why are the State and its agents so ineffective in meeting the challenge? These questions go beyond viewing the RUF in the context of its random, millenarian violence, criminality and predation, to inquiring into the weaknesses of the State and its basic ineptitude. For if you take away the foreign component, the RUF problem would be little more than an issue for the police in a well-run State. But years of single-party misrule helped to erode the institutional fabric and legitimacy of the State: collecting taxes, for example, a problem even during the colonial days, became essentially a matter for informal, criminal networks.

So questions about the collapse and near-total destruction of the Sierra Leonean State must be modified. The crucial questions should be: why is it that a wholly self-interested and criminal organization like the RUF can recruit, support and inflict such violence and terror on the population?

In pre-colonial days, predatory African politics, especially in the drought-prone regions, ensured their legitimacy by leadership claims to making rain--a fraud not very different from the modern politician's claim to be able to control inflation. But in the harsh, non-ritualistic, secular world of post-colonial politics, such a claim would be laughable. The basic institutions of the State have to be rebuilt, and this is a task that must necessarily go hand in hand with any peacekeeping mission confronting such complete State collapse.

When my colleagues--Ian Smillie and Ralph Hazleton--and I met to plan the research, which resulted earlier this year in our now widely circulated the Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security, we tried to confront the question of the RUF's persistence in the context of a collapsed State, as well as another more vexing question: what motivates the ragged collection of RUF teenagers and very young adults--people who even with the most liberal interpretation cannot be said to be politically, never mind ideologically, conscious in any meaningful way, people who so determinedly commit atrocities so horrible and so bizarre that they must shock even the most blind nihilist?

I had struggled with this question before, in 1997, when I was writing an earlier reflective piece on the war.

It was clear even then that, minus its leadership and its mercenary component, the RUF was dominated by young boys and girls--some as young as 9 or 10 years--who were violently inducted into the group by a process of de-institutionalization. Young captives are drugged and forced to commit atrocities on family members; that way, they cannot desert--in any case, the RUF kills the deserters it captures, and pro-government forces have been known to summarily execute those it captures or who surrender. So there is, as British veteran Sierra Leone watcher Paul Richards argues, a "Darwinian process" at work through which these child soldiers become "human rights abusing products of human rights abuse": "Leading fighters--many abducted ... fear civilian revenge and being placed on trial for human rights abuses. They depend on the violent solidarity of the movement."

My argument is this: the RUF undoubtedly emerged in the midst of a widespread national debate about scrapping the failed one-party State, re-instituting multiparty democracy and curbing corruption. But neither its leaders nor its backers were a part of this national debate, and they were wholly driven by mercenary interests. These interests revolve mainly around the rich diamond fields, which serve to underwrite the RUF's weapons purchases and act as the glue that holds together the otherwise ideologically bankrupt RUF.

It is important to note that a good number of RUF leaders who joined the group voluntarily, such as the notoriously blood-thirsty former commander Sam Bockarie, are ex-illicit diamond miners, and that any serious RUF military confrontations have been directed primarily at the diamond-rich districts of eastern Sierra Leone.

We made this argument in The Heart of the Matter and drew this modest conclusion: "Only the economic opportunity presented by a breakdown in law and order could sustain violence at the levels that plagued Sierra Leone after 1991." We focused on the political economy of conflict now being made popular by scholars such as Paul Collier, David Keen and others. This approach is antithetical to that of Robert Kaplan and others who have depicted such conflicts as anarchic and driven by "ancient hatreds".

It is views such as Kaplan's, one suspects, which influence some of the best assaults, like Traub's, on the concept of humanitarian intervention. For is it not Kaplan who, in the book that followed his widely read 1994 Atlantic Monthly article "The Coming Anarchy", casually proposes that the way to maintain world peace is for the United States Congress to authorize the assassination of troublesome leaders as a political instrument, and to understand that democracy is not suited for much of the Third World? And that the concept of humanitarian intervention is bogus because world peace would actually make war more likely? The subtext is, don't get involved, we have no interest there: leave it perhaps to the mercenaries. Traub views this last option favourably as well, taking issue with our report for lamenting that legitimate Governments, like President Kabbah's of Sierra Leone, should be forced by world abandonment into "Faustian bargains" with mercenaries like the South African Executive Outcomes. But since mercenaries fight for money, it should be obvious-once that cat is out of the bag as a viable policy option-that they would be available as well to rebels. No one can predict the outcome of such an approach, especially as there are so many small wars in so many places with the resources to sustain them.

The UN intervention in Sierra Leone has undoubtedly been good, although there have been a number of very serious errors. As Brian Urquhart noted in The New York Review of Books (15 June 2000), the major problem was the lack of a robust military presence, one that could send a clear message to any predator that there is a stronger force than them in the field.

Recently, after the Jordanian component of the UN force fired back and reportedly killed 10 RUF rebels, some commentators wondered whether the RUF might react with more attacks on the jordanians. They misunderstand the basic character of the RUF: bandits fight only when they know they are not going to be killed, for their primary concern is to stay alive and enjoy the loot. This explains why the RUF has mainly targeted civilians rather than armed opponents. The big UN mistake occurred when a group of UNAMSIL soldiers meekly handed over their weapons to a group of teenage rebels. That surrender went beyond tactical defeat; it brought the whole UN mission into disrepute and contempt.

In the final analysis, however, episodic shows of strength will not curb the RUF terror, for over the years the rebels have shown a surprising resilience. And at the moment they have more than enough resources--arms and ammunition--to continue to embarrass the United Nations and to harass civilians. An all-out assault on them should not be ruled out. But even this must be supplemented by action on the economic front, since the war is all about making money through the illegal diamond trade. The recent UN Security Council embargo on Sierra Leonean diamonds which do not carry a government certificate is a good one, but it will not affect the RUF, whose diamonds are traded internationally as Liberian.

Unfortunately, the UN resolution mentioned Liberia only tangentially, placing an embargo on the victim rather than the perpetrator. Thus, Belgium quickly announced a ban on Sierra Leonean diamonds following the Security Council resolution, but made no mention of Liberia. Liberia's annual diamond production capacity is not much more than 100,000 carats. But in 1999, the Belgian Diamond High Council recorded imports from Liberia of more than 1.7 million carats-a high proportion of these are Sierra Leonean diamonds.

The UN Charter and the most elementary concepts of human rights and humanitarian intervention imply, over and above anything else, that complicity of States in violence and terror against civilians should he addressed squarely-this is not being done in the case of Sierra Leone, and this is the principal problem.

Lansana Gberie has Worked as a journalist in Sierra Leone, covering the civil wars in that country and Liberia for the Inter Press Service (IPS). He is now with Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) and is a research associate of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies. Mr. Gberie is co-author of "The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security", published by PAC.

Point of Fact: The conflict in Sierra Leone has created a devastating situation for children. Some 5,400 child soldiers aged 7 to 17 have been recruited. Children account for half of those killed and disabled by the fighting.