The Sierra Leone Civil War (1991-2002)
A school that was destroyed by RUF fighters in Sierra Leone. (Public Domain photo. Info can be found here)
In this civil war, the people were rebelling against President Joseph Momoh, who had been installed as president by the military in 1985. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) under Foday Sankoh trained in Libya and then came back to end this undemocratic regime. This was an incredibly poor country, but they did have access to a ton of diamonds, so the goal of the rebels was to take the diamond industry and cause the government to not be able to function. This caused many of those involved to sell illegal blood diamonds and/or drugs to pay for their war effort.
This became another of the extremely bloody wars in the region and tons of regular civilians were displaced by the fighting. Rebels would start the violence by starting with the decapitation of government leaders. This quickly turned into a wide range of mutilation of bodies as a tactic to scare their enemies. An estimated 20,000 people had body parts (arms, legs, lips, and ears) severed with machetes as a warning to towns close by to support whatever side was doing the violence. The government focused on the use of Child Soldiers as one of their main strategies, which would cause problems between the government and the rest of the international community.
Eventually the government realized that they couldn’t win because they were being attacked both militarily in the country and politically from the international community. They agreed to allow elections in 1996, but the military and the RUF took over power before these elections could go through. It took another 2 years before the elections were done and Ahmad Kabbah was elected president. In an effort to keep peace in the country Kabbah negotiated a ceasefire with the RUF called the Lomé Peace Accord 1999. In exchange for peace, he agreed to make the RUF leader Foday Sankoh the new Vice President of the country. This didn’t create peace immediately, but it was the beginning of the process that did.
This war would cause the death of tens of thousands of people, the dismemberment of countless others, and the displacement of 2 million people during the fighting. This war became a very popular one in the minds of western observers in years to come. The war was shown in the popular movie ‘Blood Diamond’ and was also one of the locations where weapons were bought in the movie ‘Lord of War,’ where Charles Taylor is seen buying weapons in the movie.
The location of Sierra Leone. (Public Domain photo. Info can be found here)
