Crimes Of War Project > Expert Analysis

February 2001

Sierra Leone: Case Study
by Janine DiGiovanni

Abdul Sankoh doesn't understand the events that led up to the Lome Accords, nor what amnesty granted to war crimes suspects really means. All he knows is his own story.

On April 30, 1999, at 1:45 PM while he was walking home for lunch from the elementary school where he taught, he was ambushed by rebel soldiers. A group of soldiers from an offshoot of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) tied him up, beat him and demanded that he reveal his occupation. Abdul knew what the rebels did with teachers, so he lied. He told the men that he was a farmer, but it did not do any good. One soldier called for an ax. As Abdul lay begging them to stop, the rebels chopped off his right arm. Then they raised the ax again. He cried out for them not to take his left hand, because it is the hand that he writes with.

ìI said, please, please don't take the left one. I can't live without my left hand,î Abdul recounted. The soldiers took it anyway. Then while he lay incoherent with pain and covered in blood, Abdul cried out to them: ìPlease kill me! Just kill me now! I can't live like this.î

They did not kill Abdul. Instead, they drew their axes again, and hacked off his right ear. Then, to silence his screams before he fainted from pain, they hacked off his lips. As one last final act of humiliation before wandering off in search of their next victim, they searched Abdul's pockets and took his money.

Dr. Volker Herzog, a slight, bearded German who normally works as chief of staff at a major Berlin clinic, was on duty when Abdul arrived at the Connaught Hospital in Freetown. He could not believe what he saw. Somehow, the village teacher had managed to walk through the bush, bleeding, to a base of Nigerian peacekeeping soldiers, who brought him by helicopter to the capital.

ìI had never seen a human being look like that,î Dr. Volker said, still haunted by the image a year later. ìHis lips were hanging off his face. His arms were stumps ñ somehow, they had not gotten infected. His ear was chopped off leaving a gape on the side of his head.î

The doctor and his surgical team, volunteers for Medecins San Frontieres, did what they could to try to piece Abdul back together. They sewed his lips back on, but there is nothing but gaping black scars where Abdul's once had arms and an ear.

Abdul is teaching again, but not at the village elementary school. He works now at an MSF-run amputee camp, a dismal place with more than 1,000 victims like him. More than one year on, telling the story of his attack is still traumatic: Abdul shakes with rage and frustration, and his eyes burn with something beyond tears.

Abdul's case is savage, but not unusual. Sierra Leone, one of the most beautiful countries in West Africa, has white sand beaches that stretch for miles. A former British Colony renowned for its diamonds, was once one of the most developed Colonies, with extensive reserves of iron ore, bauxite and other minerals. It boasts the world's third-largest natural harbor, and was home to West Africa's first university.

The country is still renowned for diamonds, and it is still beautiful, in a scarred, embittered kind of way, but today Sierra Leone is infamous for misery, evil, human rights violations and some of the decade's worst war crimes. As a result of the country's bitter, decade-long civil war, it ranks 174th-ñlast-ñin the UN Human Development Report. If you're born in Sierra Leone, you can expect to live to age of 38. The infant mortality rate is 164 per thousand and 69 percent of the adult population is illiterate. The capital, Freetown, is looted. Most of the country's educated have emigrated.

It is difficult to calculate how many civilians have suffered during the 10-year conflict because Sierra Leone has ceased functioning as a state, and a large portion of its territory remains under rebel RUF control. The figures go something like this: 5,400 children forced into combat, forced labor or sexual slavery, 20,000 amputees, 75,000 dead, 2 million displaced (about the population of Kosovo), and an unknown number of women raped.

According to Human Rights Watch", the New York-based organization that played a lead role in alerting the world to atrocities in Sierra Leone, Foday Sankoh and his RUF soldiers are not the only ones responsible for the widespread crimes of war in Sierra Leone. All factions, including soldiers of ECOMOG, the Nigerian led UN peacekeeping mission, the Sierra Leone Army, the RUF and other rebel factions are guilty of violations.

One researcher calls it ìa human rights messî saying that all sides have ìbroken the rulesî of the Geneva Conventions on internal armed conflict.

For the most part, the Geneva Conventions govern the rules of international conflicts. However, Common Article 3, of the Geneva Conventions applies to internal armed conflicts. It sets forth minimum protections and standards of conduct to which the State and its armed opponents must adhere and prohibits such flagrant violations of human dignity as: murder, torture, ill-treatment, and hostage-taking, all of which the RUF has committed. Moreover, Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, which specifically addresses internal conflicts, prohibits the bulk of the RUF's tactics.

The RUF specifically are guilty of: massacres; individual murders; the use of civilians as human shields; mutilation and amputation; rape and sexual assault; abduction and violations of medical neutrality-ñall violations of Common Article 3.

The RUF's practice of recruiting children is a violation of the Additional Protocol II, Article 4, which prohibits the use of children under 15 as fighters. The RUF's other common practice, that of forcefully drugging civilians, is not specifically prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, but under Additional Protocol II the prohibition of ìviolence to the life, health and physical or mental well-being of persons,î is probably sufficiently wide to include forceful drugging.

The other players in Sierra Leone's war include ECOMOG (the Nigerian-led intervention force that helped the Sierra Leone government cling to power throughout the RUF assault on the country) and the Sierra Leone military and police forces.

Journalists and human rights organizations have documented major human rights violations, especially in retaliation against the RUF, but their violations are reportedly nowhere near the scale of the rebels. ECOMOG and the Sierra Leone Army have been accused, however, of summary executions, looting, unlawful detention and failure to minimize civilian casualties.

If it is possible to quantify levels of horror, perhaps the worst was in January 1999 when the RUF attacked Freetown, venting their aggression and attacks on civilians.

Deemed ìOperation No Living Thing,î the assault is estimated to have taken the lives of 6,000 civilians in just two weeks. Some of the worst offenders were child-solders going under gruesome noms de guerre who amputated limbs seemingly without forethought.

One infamous commander was a young girl known as ìQueen Cut Hands.î They rampaged through the city burning homes and forcing out or killing the occupants. Of the bodies that piled up at the Connaught Hospital morgue, few were soldiers.

With substantial help from Nigerian peacekeepers who were serving in Sierra Leone as part of ECOMOG, government troops successfully pushed the RUF out of Freetown in late January. But shortly thereafter, Nigeria announced that it would have to withdraw from Sierra Leone because it could no longer sustain the $1 million per day pricetag of the mission. Britain promptly pledged 1 million pounds to ECOMOG troops and implored other nations to do the same. Simultaneously, Britain dispatched the Royal Navy Frigate Norfolk to provide medical supplies and other humanitarian assistance for Sierra Leone and drew up a plan to send troops into the country to assist ECOMOG.

The United States, however, did not want to commit funds to either the Sierra Leone government or ECOMOG to defeat the RUF. Rather, the Americans lobbied Britain to abandon the military option and pressured the Sierra Leone government to negotiate with the RUF in the hopes of reaching a peace deal. In particular, the Americans urged Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tajan Kabbah to release Foday Sankoh, who had been jailed on charges of treason, and include him in peace talks. In May US Special Envoy to Africa, Jesse Jackson, brokered a ceasefire agreement and on July 7, the two sides signed the Lome Peace Accords, which not only made Sankoh the vice-president of Sierra Leone and gave him effective control of the country's diamond mines, but also issued a blanket amnesty for atrocities committed during the war.

Whether or not the amnesty included war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law, or only crimes against the Sierra Leone State, is open to some question. Article 6, paragraph 5 of Additional Protocol II encourages States to grant the broadest possible amnesty to persons who have participated in the armed conflict when a peace agreement is signed. The intent is to allow for some scope of truth and reconciliation in order to return to a lasting peace with minimal acrimony. However, legal experts argue that such amnesties are aimed at offenses committed under national law by members of rebel or government forces and, perhaps, minor or technical war crimes, but not serious war crimes, such as those perpetuated by the RUF.

Human rights activists agree that the amnesty does not apply to war crimes. Shortly after the accord was signed, Human Rights Watch wrote a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, urging him to state publicly that it did not apply to crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or serious violations of human rights-ña position that other human rights organizations backed. Shortly thereafter, Annan announced that he did not consider the United Nations to be bound by Lome's amnesty. But even had he not made the statement, the Lome amnesty would only have covered crimes committed before the accord was signed, and as subsequent events would bare out, many more atrocities would be committed in the wake of the peace deal.

Despite the Lome Accords, the RUF continued its campaign to wield control over Sierra Leone's diamond mines, and renewed their campaign of overrunning villages hacking off the limbs of civilians who got in their way. In May 2000, less than a year after the peace agreement, the RUF launched another assault on Freetown.

The rebels, high on crack, marijuana, speed and cheap gin they drink from plastic containers, abducted some 500 UN soldiers from their bases and held them hostage. When the United Nations announced that the RUF was once again on the outskirts of the city, the news triggered pandemonium. With fresh memories of the rebels storming the city just a year earlier, nearly all of the foreign aid workers cleared out to seek shelter in Guinea, Gambia or Senegal, leaving ordinary Sierra Leoneans to fend for themselves against the rebels. The city descended into chaos, but government troops, backed by UN troops and pumped up by a deployment of British special forces, held out and pushed back the RUF.

British troops secured the capital and provided some sense of security to the war-weary civilians, and the United States appealed to the president of neighboring Liberia Charles Taylor, the man who allegedly armed and trained the RUF, to negotiate with the rebels in the hope of establishing yet another ceasefire.

By the fall of 2000, British troops launched a spectacular jungle raid to re-capture UN soldiers who had been taken hostage by the RUF in late summer, and it seemed as if ìOperation No Living Thing, Part IIî had been halted. But as British troops began withdrawing with a pledge to train and arm the Sierra Leone Army for three years, the RUF began stepping up its attacks against civilians.

Western governments are now making efforts to help the Sierra Leone government regain control of the country. In addition to training government forces, the British recently deployed a rapid reaction force to Sierra Leone to deter RUF rebels. They are also helping the Sierra Leone army prepare for an offensive against the RUF should the current ceasefire break down. The United States, in the last months of the Clinton Administration, sent hundreds of U.S. troops to Nigeria to train and equip West African battalions for participation in the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone. Most recently, the UN Security Council voted to establish a Special Court in Sierra Leone to prosecute war crimes. But how long the remaining UN and Sierra Leone government forces can hold off another bloody rebel assault, is a guess that no one in Freetown wants to wager.