I'm doing a small report on Sierra Leone, but I can't understand why the RUF attacked them, I'm reading it off Wikipedia and other sites, but it's hard to understand. We, the young people, do suffer a lot in this country. So, some of the original invasion force were SLPP supporters but not all of them. First, as widely known through the recent conviction of Taylor, the civil war in Sierra Leone cannot be explained separately from the Liberian civil war. Sankoh thought the SLPP Mendes opposed to the APC would support him to take over the country. 216-217 & 219).
The final negotiations to end the war allowed Sankoh and the RUF to go into politics, but Sankoh continued his moves to grab power and was arrested in Freetown on May 17, 2000. How were politicians and the two political parties involved in the war?
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. In the mid 16th century occurred events of profound importance in the modern history of Sierra Leone: these were the Mane invasions.The Mane (also called Mani), southern members of the Mande language group, were a warrior people, well-armed and well-organized, who lived east and possibly somewhat north of present-day Sierra Leone, occupying a belt north of the coastal peoples. 2003a, ‘Sierra Leone: warfare in a post-state society’, in RI Rotberg (ed. He didn’t attack the country to save it from the APC and install the SLPP into power, but to gain power for himself and his financial backers – Muammar Qaddafi of Libya and Charles Taylor of Liberia.
In 1999, in a report on the attack on Freetown, Human Rights Watch wrote, “This latest rebel offensive brought to the capital the same class of atrocities witnessed in Sierra Leone’s rural provinces over the last eight years and is the latest cycle of violence in an armed conflict that has claimed an estimated 50,000 lives and caused the displacement of more than one million Sierra Leoneans.”[xxiii] A Physicians for Human Rights report states that at least 5,000 civilians were killed during this battle for Freetown. When a country has the type of extractive institutions that Sierra Leone inherited from the British and then intensified by its post-colonial leaders, fights over power, over who gets to benefit from the extraction, are common. Sankor moved to Segbwema, further east in Kailahun District, and continued to work as a photographer.
[xxi] Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the American Bar Association 2006. 2000. The primary cause of the ending of this atrocities period was the defeat of the RUF by combined domestic and international military forces. What about Qaddafi and Taylor? Although diamonds seemingly played a significant role in financing the war once it started, diamonds more likely contributed to corrupting state institutions in the pre-war period, thereby increasing grievance, rather than directly triggering the conflict. 487, 490-491 & 503-504). Opposition to the RUF rebels grew quickly, and as they spread through the country opposition became stronger with the formation of civilian militias (the Kamajors and others) by the third year of the war. When Taylor invaded Liberia on Christmas Eve 1989, Sankoh was with him, and it was with a group of Taylor’s men that Sankoh invaded Sierra Leone. Introduction | Atrocities | Fatalities | Ending | Coding | Works Cited | Notes. Although the sole name of Foday Sankoh is widely known by the public, the RUF was actually founded by three Sierra Leoneans who received a military training together in Libya in 1987-88: Foday Sankoh, Abu Kanu and Rashid Mansaray. By the time war began in Sierra Leone in 1991, the state had already withered, leaving much of the country beyond the capital of Freetown outside its weakening capacity for governance. Of the country’s estimated population of 4.5 million, roughly 2 million people were displaced internally near the end of the conflict in 2000, with several hundred thousand additional displaced in surrounding countries. No major voting irregularities occurred in any of these elections. It is important to understand the fluidity between groups—individuals switched sides regularly and groups formed coalitions that merged and split across the conflict. Stohl, R 2000, Center for Defense Information, http://www.cdi.org/program/issue/document.cfm?DocumentID=651&IssueID=93&StartRow=1&ListRows=10&appendURL=&Orderby=DateLastUpdated&ProgramID=23&issueID=93 [accessed May 6 2012]. However, the concept of lumpen does not clearly touch upon the real problems of marginalised youth in Sierra Leone since it neglects original causes of the emergence of the lumpenproletariat; instead, it merely focuses on their criminal behaviour or lack of ideology. In this context, Section IV addresses the history of the emergence of the RUF, and then traces their motivations and sources of external support which paved the way for the war to come. As Sankoh consolidated his power in the group with the beginning of the war, he also started to eliminate his potential rivals – mostly educated radicals – within the group; the number executed was allegedly reported to have reached almost at 300 (Keen 2005). All rights reserved. The Causes of the Sierra Leone Civil War: Underlying Grievances and the Role of the Revolutionary United Front, ‘The root of the conflict is and remains diamonds, diamonds and diamonds.’ (Ibrahim Kamara 2000), ‘To the economist, this is war motivated by greed.
Mamdani, M 1996, Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Why did Foday Sankoh have this extreme desire for power? The characteristics of a shadow state were further strengthened by the patrimonial principles which had upheld Sierra Leone society for a long time. Richards (1996, pp.25-27) interprets this abnormality as implying ‘a typical academic response’ to accumulated social discontents and the intellectual anger of excluded elites. How did Foday Sankor become leader of the RUF rebels? As a result, this policy ‘helped to lay the foundations for the later failure of the state in rural areas’ (Peters 2011, p. 38). Yes, in a way, but it’s actually more complicated.
Richards (1996, p. 20) argues that Gaddafi could not go beyond ‘retain[ing] some residual sympathy for the RUF as one of the more sincere African attempts to apply aspects of his youth-oriented revolutionary philosophy’ because of his own problems with the sub-Saharan venture. This does not necessarily correlate with the patterns of other types of violations, for example, crimes that occurred when a population was under the control of the forces, like arbitrary detention, extortion, forced labor, forced recruitment and rape. 36, no. Who were the original RUF rebels that attacked in 1991? Greed and selfishness was another factor which made the rebel war come to Sierra Leone. Although diamonds played a significant role in financing the war, this factor solely cannot explain the initial intention of actors involved in the conflict. The opposition party was the SLPP, considered the party of the Mendes in the east and south. 2007. Rather he subordinated the army as a political instrument by ‘transform[ing] the Army Chief of Staff into a Member of Parliament in 1974’ (TRC 2004, p. 26). Kamara, I 2000, The Permanent Representative of Sierra Leone to the United Nations (UN), His speech in the UN Security Council (2000), cited in LA Times, ‘U.N. They attacked from Liberia into Mende country in Kailahun and Pujehun Districts. By 1991, Sierra Leone was a failed nation, mired in poverty, with an economy almost continuously shrinking for almost three decades. 2, http://www.fes.de/ipg/IPG2_2003/ARTKEEN.HTM [accessed April 28 2012].
The war resulted from a planned invasion by Qaddafi, Taylor, and Sankoh. Terms for Creating and Maintaining Sites, Documenting declines in civilian fatalities, https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Benetech-Truth-Myth-Sierra-Leone-1991-2000.pdf, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/sierra/, http://www.massviolence.org/Sierra-Leone-List-of-extremely-violent-events-perpetrated, http://www.c-r.org/resources/paying-price-sierra-leone-peace-process. Reno, W 1995, Corruption and state politics in Sierra Leone, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [xvi] The assault on the capitol culminated a campaign of terror in the north, arriving in Freetown in January 1999.
Was the Brutality of War in Sierra Leone a Reflection of Primitive Barbarism? With the growing interests of both parties – the RUF and government soldiers – in illegal diamond-mining, battles often occurred over diamond-abundant areas (Keen 2008). Reno, William.
2005. There are discrepancies between various data sources about precisely when killing reached its highest spike. Money from diamonds was also taken by Taylor, Qaddafi and RUF leaders for personal use. II. Section III traces the political and social circumstances (structure) of Sierra Leone from its colonial period until 1991 which increased discontent among its population. […] Actually we were fighting for awareness and also to have justice in the country. })(); Towards an Alternative Perspective: Against Hobbes, The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism, Do People Really Dislike the State So Much? They started off as a Democratic group for African.
Even after Stevens’ peaceful hand-over of power to Joseph Momoh in 1985, the situation went worse. I think that will make the country stable. At the same time, though, the availability of external support limited the domestic support necessary to win the war in the long term. Foday Sankoh did not stand by his earlier promises of equitably sharing of diamond revenues and used these funds to buy arms for himself. Written for: Gareth Austin It is an account of the victims of the Sierra Leone Civil War and depicts the most brutal period with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels capturing the capital city (January 1999).
However, for our purposes the last significant increase in killing as reported by the TRC is 1999. Britain recognised only the Crown Colony as part of the British Empire while dividing the Protectorate into many small ‘chiefdoms’ and then controlling them indirectly. Dorman, Andrew M. 2009.
Bates, RH 2008, When things fell apart: state failure in late-century Africa, Cambridge University Press, New York. [iv] Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the American Bar Association 2006. Although diamonds seemingly played a significant role in financing the war once it started, diamonds more likely contributed to corrupting state institutions in the pre-war …
Base on the principles ‘involve[ing] redistributing national resources as marks of personal favour to followers who respond with loyalty to the leader rather than to the institution the leader presents’, Stevens also behaved as ‘the ultimate leader of the Sierra Leone patrimonial system’ (Richards 1996, p. 34).