Tubman backs Taylor return

There has been a critical international reaction to comments by a Liberian presidential candidate. Winston Tubman, who recently qualified for a run off against the incumbent president and Nobel Peace laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, said that former warlord and dictator Charles Taylor would be free to return to the country. Taylor, an indicted war criminal and convicted scumbag, is presently on trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone for his widely believed meddling in that country's civil war. He's yet to face trial for his role in his own country's conflict. Taylor's wife, a Liberian senator, is expected to be part of a Tubman administration if he wins. Tubman is a nephew of a former Liberian strongman.

A West African view of the situation in Guinea

Sierra Leone Express media offers a neighbor's perspective of the instability in the Republic of Guinea.

The nature of reconciliation

Al-Jazeera's Barnaby Phillips (a former BBC journalist) has an interesting blog on reconciliation in Africa. In it, he suggests that one of the things Africans do better than people in other parts of the world is to figure out how to live with each other after conflict. He cites the tension and difficulties in places like Bosnia and Northern Ireland following prolonged civil conflict. He notes that people in Africa would find it absurd to be fixated by the outcome of a 14th or 17th century battle.

He adds that in African countries from Mozambique, to Angola, to Sierra Leone, rebel and government forces that fought on opposite sides in brutal civil wars, marred by atrocities and massacres, are now united in national armies, and apparently oblivious to recent divisions.

He also cites post-conflict stability in places like Biafra/Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa. Philips concludes that the lessons Africans take from conflicts is that the price of disunity is too high to pay.

Yet that approach has its own flaws. Countless dictators, from Mobutu to Meles Zenawi, have exploited this very sentiment. The Rwandan dictatorship itself, praised by Phillips, uses the pretext of unity to crush all opposition... as the newly formed Rwandan Democratic Greens were the latest to learn first hand.

In the mid-90s, both Sierra Leone and Liberia were embroiled in savage civil wars, which sent hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring countries, including Guinea where I lived. Countless Guineans complained about the sclerotic, corrupt rule of Gen. Lansana Conté and his cabal. But few were willing to rise and challenge the dictatorship. When I asked why, I was told that Conté's regime was bad but at least the repressive stability was better than the alternatives they saw on the southern border, with women and children having their limbs chopped off by drugged boy soldiers.

But that forced unity has a price of its own. The forced unity didn't solve any of Guinea's myriad of problems; it simply delayed their explosion for a decade or so. When the problems finally did erupt, beginning with the general strike of 2007, it was not pretty. There were riots, at least one major massacre, mass rapes, reports of small scale ethnic cleansing and very real fears (expectations in some quarters) of a Liberia/Sierra Leone-style full scale civil war.

Thanks to the intervention and strong will of a sane military man, Gen. Sékouba Konaté, and to mobilization of the international community and especially of Guinean civil society, the country appears to have gotten past the worst of it. If not for a fortunate sequence of events (including an unmitigated disaster with an unexpected silver lining), things could have been much, much worse.

Phillips makes the valid point that honest dialogue is essential to move forward in post-conflict situations. But true reconciliation involves a voluntary partnership of equals not fake 'unity' imposed at the barrel of a gun.

Che, Lumumba and... Foday Sankoh?

I was in the library last night and noticed in the new arrivals section DVD entitled The Empire in Africa (I won't link to it because I don't want to encourage any one to spend a dime enriching the pockets of its makers). My curiosity piqued, I took a look and was nauseated to discover it was an apologia mythologizing the Revolutionary United Front. The RUF were the Sierra Leonian rebels who became infamous for the forced conscription of children, for the drugging of those child soldiers and for chopping off the hands and arms of women and children.

This was not the invention of some international propaganda campaign, as the 'documentary' implies. I lived in Guinea at the height of the Sierra Leonian civil war and met numerous refugees who fled the RUF's savagery, including a few who had lost limbs.

The Sierra Leonian government and military were filled at the time with brutal and thieving scumbags, no doubt. But no one's dared make an apologia to them. Whatever anti-corporate ideology the RUF might allegedly have had when it formed in the early 90s quickly evaporated. It became nothing more than an unimaginably savage organized crime gang that used ANY means necessary to line the pockets of its leaders.

The documentarian who made this offensive trash owes an apology to all the people killed, maimed and displaced by his sainted RUF.

Evil Scum Taylor begins spewing his lies

Earlier this week, former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor took the stand in The Hague during his trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Taylor, henceforth known here as Evil Scum Who Ought to Rot in Prison for The Rest of His Pathetic Life (Evil Scum for short), denied being responsible for any of the accused offenses.

Evil Scum, who is 'credited' with destabilizing much of West Africa during the 1990s and much of this decade, is charged with 11 counts of murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery and the use of child soldiers and terrorism in his role backing rebels in Sierra Leone's 1991-2002 civil war.

He has not yet been charged for any of the countless crimes he is widely believed to have been responsible for in his native Liberia.

Evil Scum's lawyer was on CBC Radio's As It Happens program earlier this week giving the former warlord's point of view.

Sierra Leone: a poor, rich nation (guest essay)

By Holly McCarthy

I don’t normally watch too many movies, but I was stuck in LA with nothing to do and time to kill before I caught my flight back home. And so I decided to watch Blood Diamond. The movie touched me in more ways than one; it made me cry over the plight of the children of Sierra Leone; it made me realize how lucky we all are to live in a country that’s free of war and strife; and it made me think twice before going gaga over a diamond.

I’m not too big a fan of movies that are hard-hitting and tending towards the realistic, but Blood Diamond struck a chord in me because of the relationship between the characters of Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hansou, one of them a crooked diamond trader who finds a little bit of humanity inside him, and the other a tormented soul in search of his son who has been abducted by the rebels and forced to kill under the influence of drugs.

The movie brought home the fact that the war in Sierra Leone is very real, that people are mutilating children, robbing them of their childhood and forcing them to become soldiers in a war they don’t understand, and that the root cause for all this mayhem and carnage is the stone we call a diamond, the miraculous transformation of common coal into a precious stone through nature’s magic and munificence. It’s an irony that a land so rich is full of people who are dirt poor, that the very reason for the civil wars in the land is the precious diamonds that lie under the soil.

Charles Taylor, erstwhile president of Liberia and the man mostly responsible for the large scale destruction in Sierra Leone, is now awaiting trial in the Hague, and three of the generals who were tried for ordering their troops to cut off the limbs or otherwise mutilate children and those who opposed them have been found guilty of 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the past ten years. But it’s not a happy ending for Sierra Leone – there’s news that Taylor may be a free man soon because the Hague is finding it difficult to find donors in this period of economic recession.

But even if Taylor is put behind bars for life, some other dictator will step in to rape the land and keep the spoils, not caring about who or what they destroy in the process. The Dark Continent and its nations can only see the light when they’re well and truly rid of the natural resources that they hold, the bounty that unscrupulous people are willing to sell their souls for!


Editor's note: This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of the online school. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

A measure of justice at last in Sierra Leone

Yesterday, three senior members of the former Sierra Leone Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group, including its second-in-command, were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown. The RUF gained infamy in the 1990s for their savage tactics, including the use of child soldiers, the amputation of the hands and arms of victims and the carving of the RUF's initials into the bodies of victims.

The BBC reported that the judges concluded the rebel chiefs "significantly contributed" to a joint criminal enterprise with former Liberian President Charles Taylor [also standing trial for crimes against humanity] to control the diamond fields of Sierra Leone to finance their warfare. They were also found guilty of forced marriage - the enslavement that countless young girls suffered when their villages were raided and they were forced to "marry" a rebel. The convictions mark the first time the forced marriage charge has been successfully handed down in an international court of law.

The RUF's leader Foday Sankoh died in custody before facing trial.

TIME magazine had this interview with the Special Court's prosecutor, who expressed satisfaction at the verdict. When asked about the potential conflict between justice and peace, he pointed out that the two were complimentary. "I guess [the] proof of the pudding is that the country held an election in August and September 2007 where not only was the opposition not expected to get in, they were allowed to get in. That's pretty positive. What the court has done is reinforce the peace and restore the rule of law to allow events like that to happen," he noted.

The three will be sentenced at a later date.

Cocaine trafficking in West Africa approaching crisis point?

Friends of Guinea blog has a piece on the drugs' cartels invasion of West Africa. Reprinted with permission.


The Washington Post has an article by the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime on a problem that's causing increasing concern: drugs trafficking in West Africa.

The sub-region has become a major transit point for cocaine smuggling between Latin America and Europe. Originally, activity was centered in Guinea-Bissau, a borderline failed state that has been without a strong central government for a decade.

However, The Post's article reports that the cartels are threatening to branch out into Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Last month alone, more than 600 kilos [of cocaine] were seized in a plane with fake Red Cross markings at the airport in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and at the international airport in Bissau, several hundred boxes were unloaded from a jet.

It notes that fighting this problem will be difficult.

Poverty is the biggest problem. These countries are the worst performers on the human development index -- their populations at the bottom of the "bottom billion." Unemployed and desperate youths are vulnerable to being recruited as foot soldiers for criminal groups. West African countries must take control of their coasts and airspace. This requires hardware (boats, planes and radar), know-how (investigative techniques and container security) and counter-narcotics intelligence. Some of these capabilities can be developed nationally, but some assistance will have to come from abroad.

Another obstacle is those countries' public institutions, which are weak and plagued by corruption.

TIME also ran a piece on Guinea-Bissau becoming West Africa's first narco-state as did the UK Independent. A Russian news site reported on the seizure of a ship ferrying a huge load of cocaine of the coast of Conakry earlier this year. The UN's Office on Drugs and Crime has a thorough report on the West African cocaine trafficking problem.

The long road to recovery

The UN's IRIN news service has a series of articles on the troubles many Sierra Leonians are having, five years and one democratic transfer of power after brutal, nearly decade long uncivil war.

From young boys who already admit to having no future to war orphans haunted by hideous memories to a young teenager suicidal because of his horrific experiences during the war, it's a poignant reminder that it may be tragically easy to start a war or otherwise engage in an orgy of violence in the name of fake noble goals, recovering from such horror takes much, much longer.

Reconciliation in Sierra Leone

The English version of Le monde diplomatique has a really interesting article on the dynamics of post-conflict reconciliation as it relates to Sierra Leone. Not at the macro/national level but community by community

Forced marriage: now a crime against humanity

Radio Netherlands' fantastic The State We're In reported on an intriguing story that I had not been aware of. The Special Court for Sierra Leone has ruled that forced marriage is now a crime against humanity.

The Special Court's chief prosecutor David Crane explained, "The main thing we hope to accomplish is to tell their story and have this established as a matter of law that these crimes were committed and that individuals were responsible. We hope to establish a precedent and indeed a deterrent to others, against committing the same kind of crimes."

This analysis by the Global Policy Forum points out that forced marriage by Sierra Leone rebels was not merely part of some cultural custom, not that this would excuse the practice in anyway. But rather, kidnaping women and forcing them to marry, raping them repeatedly and forcing them to bear children was an established part of the rebels' strategy.

Women were threatened with death if they tried to escape, Crane said, and some were scarred with the initials "RUF" cut into their bodies, putting the women further at risk if they were captured by government soldiers or allied militia, who would think they were rebels.

Sierra Leone ex-child soldiers

The English version of Le Monde diplomatique has a good piece exploring how former child soldiers from Sierra Leone's civil war are being re-integrated into society.

Trial of the world's worst war criminal resumes

Yesterday marked the resumption in The Hague of the trial of Charles Taylor, someone largely responsible for destabilizing the much of West Africa. The barbarian who formerly held Liberia hostage* has been indicted on multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his widely assumed role in backing the heinous Sierra Leone rebel RUF during the 1990s.

*-Note: I know people whose lives were turned upside down by this scumbag and his drugged "men." So if you're looking for neutral, dispassionate analysis of the Taylor trial, this is not the place.

According to the prosecution, and most outside analyses at the time, Taylor armed, financed and trained the rebel army in exchange of diamonds.

Among the 144 witnesses to be called by the prosecution, 77 will be direct victims of the rebel crimes, eight will be experts and 59 will be called to testify the connection between Taylor and the crimes committed in Sierra Leone. Among them, will be "insiders", former associates of the warlords.

Tensions before Sierra Leone runoff

The Center for Global Development offers its analysis of the recent elections in Sierra Leone. The opposition All People's Congress won legislative elections and its standard bearer will face the outgoing vice-president, of the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party, in a presidential runoff.

However, departing president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, whose spent a mostly useless two terms in office, threatened to declare a national state of emergency if violence between APC and SLPP supporters did not stop. A draconian step, particularly considering the fact that no one has been killed in the clashes.

General elections in Sierra Leone

South Africa's SABC has a profile of the All People's Congress, one of Sierra Leone's main opposition party. The West African nation will hold general elections on Saturday.

Update: The Christian Science Monitor also has a piece on the country's first post-war elections since the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers. The Council on Foreign Relations has an analysis of Sierra Leone's troubled youth.

Help for Sierra Leone's amputees

A column in The Christian Science Monitor praises the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone's groundbreaking first war crimes' convictions. But it also said that such justice must also be accompanied by reparations to the victims of the country's hideous civil war.