Introducing the case study: Sierra Leone
Introduction
“Sierra Leone’s [civil war] one of the world’s most horrifying wars”
Six years ago, in the spring of 2010, Sierra Leone was awarded the African Peace Award by ACCORD (African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes). It has come a long way since the end of the civil war in 2002 and has now been recognised for its effort of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. This chapter seeks to give an understanding of the processes Sierra Leone has had to go through to get to where it is today. It will be focusing, as this whole dissertating on youth and especially their roles through the whole process as well as how the war has impacted on them. To understand the post-conflict situation, there need to be an understanding of the civil war and how Sierra Leone got to where it is today and how this has affected the people along the way.
“Sierra Leone’s troubled history reflects a familiar pattern in post-independence Africa: a brief experiment in democracy in the early 1960s quickly replaced by thirty years of one-party civilian government or military rule.”
Sierra Leone is still recovering from the civil war, which lasted 11 years; from 1991 to 2002. The civil war has affected all layers of society and has affected people in different ways. It is relevant to think about the history of Sierra Leone as this sets some of the context of the conflict in the country. Sierra Leone has an extensive colonial history and its road after the independence was not easy as we will see below.
Historical overview
Portuguese explorers gave Sierra Leone its name, they thought ‘the high coastal ranges resembled lions … the area was called Sierra Lyoa, meaning Lion Mountains’, and thereof comes the name Sierra Leone. From this point trade started between Europe and Sierra Leone, and not long after slave trade was included. This lasted until the British in 1787 helped 400 freed slaves return to Sierra Leone to settle in the "Province of Freedom" or Freetown. This also marks the beginning of the colonial era. Other groups of free slaves soon joined the settlement. In 1808 this Freetown settlement became a crown colony this help ‘facilitate the enforcement of the Slave Trade Abolition Act.’ Still most of the country where in the hands of traditional leaders but ‘in1896, the rest of the country was declared a protectorate’ to protect resources such as timber, palm oil and peanuts.
Declining politics
Sierra Leone gained its independence in 1961, based on ‘the 1951 constitution provided a framework for decolonization’, with Sir Milton Margai as Prime Minister after the completion successful ‘constitutional talks in London in 1960.’ Sierra Leone decided on a parliamentary system within the British Commonwealth. Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) with Sir Milton in front held ‘the first general election under universal adult franchise in May 1962.’
Upon his death in 1964 ‘the pattern of corrupt politics began and accelerated’ when the state no longer was seen as stewardship in the public interest ‘but as the power base for personal gain and aggrandizement.’ Democracy did not last long in Sierra Leone. In the 1967 elections where Stevens won a contested democratic election, he seemed to have won an inconclusive general election’ and therefore defeated the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP). An opposition party defeated the SLPP, for the first time since the independence. Siaka Stevens used a combination of tactics to gain control over Sierra Leones politics, such as ‘guile, flattery, bribery, and intimidation.’
This was followed by a series of coups, one was a military intervention encouraged by the previous president Albert Margai, led by Force Commander Brigardier Lansana who put both Stevens and the Governor General under house arrest, before he himself ‘was promptly removed from office by a group of young officers under the leadership of Major Juxon-Smith.’ Another coup was staged by a group of officers and Stevens was at last, in April 1968, sworn in as the democratically elected president.
Albert Margai continued to contest the presidency of Stevens and his military attempt of hindering Stevens from getting into power has been said to have ‘paved the way for what became a military nightmare of the nineties.’ Stevens‘s presidency marked the start of an unstable period both politically and economically for Sierra Leone, with several coups and coup attempts. In 1978 Sierra Leone became a one-party state; All People’s Congress was the only legal party. Stevens ruled the country with an ‘iron fist’. The suppressing regime of Stevens – not allowing other political parties or ‘popular political action’ – he had a strong grip on society and destroyed the civil society, which lead to increasing resentment against the APC rule.
The events leading up to the start of the civil war, the decline in political support and legitimacy, as well as decline in the economic situation for Sierra Leone was driven by an increasingly more forceful president, who used executions and military force against his opposition when cooption did not work. Through his constant use of the military forces to stay in power, and attempting to build up an infrastructure as an attempt to gain popular support within the national boarders as well as to gain Pan- African recognition, he ended up bankrupting the state treasury and losing the confidence from the people of Sierra Leone. This was all part of the start of the declining economy and the cycles of violence in Sierra Leone. As well as fueling an increasing discontent and distrust in the government by the people of Sierra Leone, in addition to increasing the conflict and hatred between different groupings in Sierra Leone, which lead to a militarisation of the people of the country. At the end of Stevens ‘Seventeen –year plague of locusts’ he had managed to thoroughly corrupt ‘every institution of the state.’
Stevens stepped down in 1985 and Major General Joseph Saidu Momoh replaced him. He continued the repressive, corrupt and ineffective government, leading to further economic collapse and unsuccessful involvement in the neighbouring county Liberia’s civil war. Throughout most of the 1980s the government expenditure seemed to ‘out stripped revenues,’ this lead to a ‘long route to the International Financial Institutions and a series of Structural Adjustment Programmes … worsen the economic and political situation, as devaluation and deregulation triggered widespread inflation, unemployment’ and the ‘effect of adjustment was the intensification of popular political action as workers resorted to strikes’.
This led to a situation where the bankrupt government did not manage to pay its civil servants who in desperation resorted to ransacking ‘their offices, stealing furniture, typewriters, and light fixtures’ and it was ‘noted that the government hit bottom when it stopped paying schoolteachers and the education system collapsed.’ The consequences of this was that teachers started to charge the parents of their students, which lead to only professional families being able to afford paying for the education of their children.
The civil war
The war in Sierra Leone, begun March 23 1991, ‘when a small rebellion took shape on the eastern border with Liberia’. The war included ‘two main players, the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF) and opposition forces of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and its ally, Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC)’. With a situation where the state was losing the major trust and support from its people, the alternative that the rebel movements gave seemed quite favourable. Youth were unemployed, uneducated and frustrated with the current political situation. The RUF (Revolutionary United Front) advertised themselves as a ‘people’s movement for the national recovery’.
There are several disputes around the motivation for the rebel fighters in Sierra Leone. In the previous section we saw a description of both economic and political decline. Richards argues that war in Sierra Leone was politically rooted rather than a huge amount of criminal acts committed by bandits which have been the argument of others. Some have also argued for diamonds and other valuable resources have been one of the major fuels for the civil war.
The lack of a functioning education system led to the number of children on the streets soared and without education or any economic opportunity they became alienated from the government and the road to the rebel group RUF (Revolutionary United Front) became shorter. But also many educated youth found themselves unemployed, and attracted by the RUF. The politics of youth in the pre-war context in Sierra Leone was based on a lumpen culture, which reflected ‘a mixture of reggae and genja, elements of Qaddafia’s Gerrn Book, and rather abstract Pan-Africanist notions, led these youth ultimately in the direction of rebellion through the Revolutionary United front.’ The RUF they took advantage of people‘s discontent and grievances, gained support and strength from them. They were also able to take advantage of the relatively easily extractable diamonds.
The youth’s involvement in the civil war in Sierra Leone is highly significant. They made up high numbers of the soldiers, both for the rebels, but also for the government forces. In the conflict in Sierra Leone the rebels captured youth from different villages as ways of recruiting new members. But many also joined to fight for their county and their rights, the rebel RUF advertised themselves as a people’s movement which made it more attractive to join them. The war in Sierra Leone was highly influenced by a globalized world. We can see this through the adaption of ‘western’ cultures both through the clothing, music and films, and the use of media. The rebel forces used western films such as Rambo to socialise their newly recruited youth soldiers into violence. One might even start talking of cultures of violence, because violence became so normalised in Sierra Leone.
The end of the civil war
The end of the civil war in Sierra Leone was relatively chaotic. The process of ending the conflict started with the Lome Peace Agreement in 1999, this was a third attempt to resolve the conflict and end the civil war. ‘Initially, the ceasefire was successful, but the attacks and killings resumed, and demobilized child soldiers accompanied by ECOMOG were abducted once again.’ With support from the UN and British government forces Sierra Leone went through a DDR (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration) process which helped stabilize the country and in May 2002 elections were held. This is said to be the end of the violent conflict in Sierra Leone, even though it has many more challenges to face.
Previous peace accords failed because the RUF continued fighting, to gain more power and control as well as to keep control over the ‘conflict diamonds’, which had funded the conflict. But also lack of trust and respect kept the conflict going. The Lome Peace Agreement seemed to fail because many RUF soldiers had been soldiers and fighters since childhood and had grown up as warriors and maintained their urge to fight and RUF maintained control over large areas in the north and east. The RUF conducted re-abduction of demobilised youth soldiers and could continue their fight. When the PUF captured 500 UN mandated peacekeepers the fighting started again. ‘UK intervention at such a critical juncture in Sierra Leone ultimately saved both the [UN] mission and the peace process.’
Definition of youth in Sierra Leone
“It is a misnomer in many parts of Africa to call a fourteen year old carrying an AK-47 a child soldier since local people may regard that young person as an adult”
The Sierra Leone National Youth Policy from 2003, after the end of the conflict saw youth as any person between the ages of 15 and 35, ‘this does not exclude any young Sierra Leonean liable to Youth related needs, concerns and influences.’ Even so, there are many that argue that defining the age group ‘youth’can be quite difficult for many different reasons, see previous chapter. So finding the exact number of child or youth soldiers can be challenging. Michael Wessells and David Jonah write that ‘the definition of ‘child’ and ‘youth’ soldiers is culture bound and needs to be problematized’. In rural parts of Sierra Leone, as well as many other rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, ‘people regard childhood as having ended when a young person has completed the culturally scripted rite of passage’. In Sierra Leone, as many other African countries, has a wider definition of youth that ‘can include people in their forties.’
So setting exact age ranges for the terms children and youth proves difficult. Limiting these terms to a specific age range is also very typical approach for western societies. So determining the percentage of youth in the population can be problematic. There are several different suggestions of the percentage of youth in Sierra Leone varying from 20% to over 50%.
The politics of terms and its meanings means that youth often meet many prejudices in form of the labels given to a person; youth, from several angles makes reintegration of youth even harder. There are several negative analyses that both doubt that former youth soldiers will be able to return in light of what has happened, others characterize the youth soldiers as hardened killers ‘who have become traumatized, numbed to violence and have become ‘damaged goods’ who have little or no prospect of returning home or recovering’ Some argue that these negative images can easily become ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ and do not fit well with the resilience and flexibility of the Sierra Leonean youth and community. This is a very negative prospect for youth in post-conflict areas. This does not fit in with an inclusive peacebuilding process.
Participation patterns in Sierra Leone prior to the civil war
As the historical overview suggest, the participation in Sierra Leones politics prior to the civil war was rather limited. Even so called democratic elections were contested. The political sphere seemed to be influenced more by the politics of force and power, than by the power of the people.
Youth participation was not at all recognised before the civil war. The government system in Sierra Leone before the outbreak of war has been categorized as a dictatorship, and some of the contributing factors for the war have said to be ‘centralization of power; massive state corruption, including maladministration by traditional chiefs; massive unemployment, particularly among young people.’
‘Prior to the outbreak of hostilities between Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the government in 1991, Sierra Leone’s youth were already facing prospects of an uncertain future due to a combination of factors.’ This uncertainty made youth an easy target for recruiting soldiers willing to fight for a better future. Youth themselves see poverty and lack of education as some of the root causes of civil war in Sierra Leone, as well as ‘believing that the conflict stemmed from social inequality, the mismanagement of Sierra Leone’s natural resources and the political marginalization of young people’.
Participation during the civil war
Youth have been said to have been a significant part of the fighting forces during the civil war in Sierra Leone. A concrete example is that RUF the end of the war consisted of 50% children, so under 18 year olds. There are no clear records of the number of youth as a group in the rebel forces but we can only imagine the numbers they made up. On the gender perspective 25% of the children in RUF were girls. Children, youth and adults, boys and girls, women and men all play different roles and participate in different ways during conflicts and war time. A report from Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children says that during the civil war in Sierra Leone many youth ‘were forced to fight, to flee or to work as commercial sex workers or in the diamond mines.’ And during the conflict almost half of the population in Sierra Leone ended up displaced.
There are several factors that made numbers youth participation in the civil war in Sierra Lone so high, some of them are explored here. Youth’s participation ‘in the politics of violence in Sierra Leone has its roots in that country’s political past. The mobilisation of youth in politics was a strategic move that targeted the group that was arguably most affected by decades of economic decline and social degradation.’ It has also been argued that youth’s ‘participation in armed hostilities is facilitated through the trade of small arms and light weapons.’ The combination of political motivation and the availability of small arms made it practically possible for youth and children participate; and are some of the reasons for youth’s involvement in the war.
The biggest reason for the high number of young participants in the war seems to be due to forced recruitment and abductions. There are academic arguments for both voluntary and forced recruitment of children and youth for armed groups in Sierra Leone. The living conditions both prior and during the war ‘often blur the boundaries between voluntary and forced recruitment … entry of child soldiers by militarized group, invites reflection on multiple causations and linkages of macrosocial and microsocial processes that influence the process of entry into soldiering.’ Child and youth soldiers own testimonies often offer a more complex image of the recruitment process, as well as showing variations between and within the RUF and CDF.
Wessells warns against thinking of all young soldiers or ‘youth soldiers’ as similar, and having had similar roles and experiences during their time spent with the armed groupings. This kind of thinking can make the DDR process problematic, it is important to understand that youth were taking on different roles and participating in different ways. Still it can be useful to look at some of the typical ways youth participated during the conflict. These include according to Wessells; ‘combatants, cooks, spies, and bodyguards,’ it was not uncommon for the youth to have several duties or roles at the same time. However there were some individuals who had ‘Specialized roles such as torturers or sex slaves.’ Drug use was not uncommon among youth and they were often forced to use different drugs, it was used to prepare them for combat. For girls and women the most common role was as sex slaves.
In RUF there were certain levels of forced participation in violence; Wessells writes that this has had a psychological effect ‘of normalizing violence and reducing one’s inhibitions against harming others.’ With this said, we should still not jump to the conclusion that ‘all atrocities committed by youth were in response to direct orders.’ The armed forces often took drastic measures to keep these newly recruited members in RUF from running away to go home again the rebel forces used a number of tactics. One of the tactics was to stop the harvest for the village so that food would not be a reason for the youth to try to escape to go home. They did this by cutting of the hands off the women in the village so they could no longer take care of the harvest and therefore the village would not have much food. Even the frightening stories of women getting their hands cut off was enough to scare women from other villages from going out into their fields, which further ceased the harvest.
A second tactic used by the rebels to stop the youth from running home was to make them commit atrocities or commit murder towards their own family, neighbour or fellow villager. This would make the youth too ashamed to ever return home. This also served another purpose; to start the ‘socialisation into violence’ for the young people.
Participation in the post conflict setting
“Sierra Leone, young former soldiers have contributed directly to ongoing cycles of political violence by remaining with military forces and fighting even following the signing of a ceasefire.”
The ceasefire in the quote above refers especially to the Lome Peace Agreement, which seemed to work for a while, but soon the fighting resumed. Wessells argue that it is crucial in a post-conflict or post-accord setting to engage youth in positive ways to enable them to participate positively in civil society and their communities.
The civil war was declared to be over in 2002. I will now look at participation after this event. At that point in time Sierra Leone was still facing major challenges to keep the peace, and had a huge task of building a sustainable peace in Sierra Leone. One of the biggest challenges it was facing was dealing with the legacy of youth soldiers and their reintegration into society.
Even with the high numbers of youth participation during the conflict, the civil war has resulted in marginalisation of youth, both in employment and the political life, as well as lack of education and a general lack of opportunities. Social marginalisation due to scepticism and fear of previous youth soldiers is a big problem. Having to face scepticism and prejudices makes youth’s participation in the civilian life difficult.
In 2008, six years after the war, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children launched a report that argued that:
“Greater investment in and attention to young people are urgently needed, in particular:
Young people will continue to play an important role in the country’s stability and reconstruction and, as such, demand much more attention and support.”
Their emphasis lies on education and skills training to give youth the opportunities, skills and knowledge they need to be productive and positive participants in Sierra Leone. The report argues that young people require much more attention than what they are currently getting for them to be part of a stable peace in Sierra Leone.
Peace Building Initiative also argues for peace education and education in general as being a key tool to increase and improve the positive participation of youth.
In Peace Building Initiative’s section on ‘Children, Youth and Peacebuilding Processes’ they write about how ‘youth are asserting themselves as true actors in the [peace] process’ rather than focusing on peacebuilding as ways of dealing with victimization and marginalization. It focuses on the positive aspects of youth participation in the peacebuilding process and the kind of roles they take on.
“Young people interviewed their peers about a range of issues to answer questions central to this research: What are the main problems of adolescents in your society? What are some solutions to these problems? What is adolescence, and how does someone become an adult in your society?”
In Sierra Leone youth have been active participants in research conducted by the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. This series of research designed and led by adolescent research teams and they were field-based and action-oriented studies. Many of these youth have ended up ‘in intensive follow-up advocacy and related youth-led programs.’ During the research the young researchers ‘worked closely with adults …[who] later used the young people’s results to shape policies and programs.’ So in relation to the Women’s Commission, the youth in Sierra Leone have been active participants in shaping their future and possibly the future for participation for other young people in different parts of the world, by helping to shape policies for big agencies.
Conclusion
This chapter have been exploring the history of Sierra Leone and its links with the current context. It has looked at youth’s participation at different stages in history and especially relating to the civil war. It shows active youth who have been key to shaping the political life. This chapter has shown the links between a corrupt government, economic decline and a failing education system has contributed to high numbers of youth participation. The next chapter will look closer at youth’s participation in the post-conflict peacebuilding.