June 2000
The Revolutionary United Front at War
Posted Friday, June 23, 2000 by sjk
By Peter A. Dumbuya
The Sierra Leone civil war began on March 23, 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked the border towns of Bomaru and Sienga in the Kailahun District. With the support of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), the RUF aimed at toppling the faltering All People’s Congress (APC) “New Order” regime of President Joseph S. Momoh (1985-1992). Taylor’s support for the RUF stemmed in part from Momoh’s diplomatic efforts in the establishment and deployment of the West African Economic Community Cease-Fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in Liberia in August 1990 to end that country’s civil war. Thus, at the center of the tragic war that engulfed Sierra Leone were the deteriorating relations with neighboring Liberia since the military, led by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe, ousted President William Tolbert in 1980, and West African efforts at resolving the civil war there.
As the commander of the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Forces (RSLMF), Major General Mohammed S. Tarawallie said of the RUF offensive: “[W]e were really caught with our pants down. The strength of the army was small-a little above the colonial legacy-and arms and logistics were inadequate, all as a result of the economic difficulties the country had been going through over the years.” The ensuing civil war posed serious challenges to the regime’s capacity to govern the increasingly fractious state, and raised questions about its ability to implement the program of transition from the one-party to the multi-party democratic system of government. The civil war and the army’s inability to cope with it led to the overthrow of Momoh’s regime and the establishment of the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) military junta by Captain Valentine Strasser in April 1992.
That the leader of the RUF, Foday Sankoh, chose March 23, 1991 to launch Operation Liberate the Motherland with the backing of the NPFL was symbolic in and of itself. On the same day in 1971 army commander, Brigadier John A. Bangura, led an abortive coup d’etat against the then Prime Minister Siaka P. Stevens and his three-year old APC regime. A military court found Bangura and three other army officers guilty of treason and sentenced them to death by firing squad; the regime carried out the sentences on June 29, 1971. The same court found Sankoh, an army photographer and a Bangura associate, guilty of treason and sentenced him to seven years in prison with a dishonorable discharge from the army; the former corporal was released from prison in 1976. As Abdul K. Koroma noted in his book, Sierra Leone: The Agony of a Nation (1996), “Sankoh nursed an abiding hatred for Joseph Saidu Momoh, who succeeded John Bangura as Army Force Commander, and who Sankoh accused of having betrayed Bangura. With this was also his deep animosity towards the All People’s Congress (APC), the destruction of which became his consuming ambition.” In March 1991, the former corporal sought his revenge against the APC party and regime by invading Sierra Leone from Liberia.
Inside the RUF
According to the RUF’s internal documents, Sankoh established the RUF in 1982 to “rid Sierra Leone and the rest of Africa out of the evils of black neo-colonialism, Fascism, tyranny and dictatorship. ... to liberate, renovate and innovate mother Sierra Leone” without outside assistance. The RUF maintained that its membership ranged from student radicals of the late 1970s who found a safe haven in Liberia, to diamond miners in the Kono and Kailahun Districts. Although the RUF cast itself as “a traditional, independent, liberation, mass-revolutionary Movement whose Central theme is to build a New Sierra Leone,” the evidence points to Liberian, Libyan, and Burkinabe assistance in training and arming its combatants in the 1970s and 1980s.
The RUF cadres committed themselves to “personal renewal and the discovery of each person’s own potential” as essential elements to the realization of political, economic, and social progress. The RUF also expressed a desire to eradicate “black neo-colonialism, sectarianism, wholesale poverty, tyranny, oppression and dictatorship,” create new structures of powers, and establish a united, self-reliant, free, just, and democratic society. The leadership bristled at any suggestion that it was acting on behalf of Charles Taylor, or that it was a military force. It went on: “The Aim of this popular and progressive Operation [Liberate the Motherland] is not only to abolish tyranny, oppression and dictatorship rule, but also to set the pace for political freedom in Sierra Leone.” After nine years of brutal warfare, the RUF has failed to abide by the terms of two-peace agreement, let alone demonstrate its commitment to political freedom.
At the apex of the RUF structure was the War Council, the movement’s decision-making body. It was responsible for training and arming the fighters, as well as enforcing the rules, regulations, and standing orders relating to them. The War Council consisted of six “wings”-the provincial, district, chiefdom, town, section, and village command councils-that mirrored the existing national, provincial, and local government structure of Sierra Leone. The RUF had a public relations Office which directed the movement’s political programs, implemented its decisions, resolutions, and directives, and appointed members of the secretariat.
In addition to the War Council and its wings, ten committees carried out other responsibilities. Among them was the Administrative and Finance Committee, which supervised and coordinated the daily activities of the RUF. To guard against what it called “bad governance,” the RUF established the Revolutionary Education Committee to educate Sierra Leoneans about their history, development, rights and duties, and the dangers of black neo-colonialism. It also established the Mass Education Committee, the Mass Mobilization Committee, the Information and Publicity Committee, the Human Rights Committee, the Repatriation Committee, the Relief Service Committee, the Agriculture and Food Processing Committee, and the Women Concern Committee. These various committees remind one not so much of the kind of democracy the people had called for, but a mishmash of programs borrowed from pseudo-socialist states and groups.
To be continued.
Prelude to Civil War in Sierra Leone
Posted Saturday, June 17, 2000 by SJK
By Peter A. Dumbuya
Since independence from Britain in 1961, military regimes, authoritarian single-party regimes, nepotism, and internal conflicts have marred Sierra Leone’s experiment in democracy. Elections became sham exercises in the name of democracy and a means to build networks of political patronage that exploited the state’s resources.
Inevitably the institutions of the state and civil society collapsed under the weight of massive corruption, mismanagement, socio-economic decline, human rights violations, predatory rule, and civil war. Re-creating the state and civil society, in addition to establishing the essentials of good governance, are some of the challenges facing the current embattled government, established after the February-March 1996 presidential and parliamentary elections.
After the death of Sierra Leone’s first Prime Minister, Sir Milton Margai, on 28 April 1964, the politics of ethnicity crept into the professional ranks of the civil service and the armed forces. The trend continued under President Siaka P. Stevens (1968-1985) and his handpicked successor Major General Joseph S. Momoh (1985-1992). For personal political gain, Sierra Leone’s political and military leaders cast aside the legal and constitutional constraints embedded in the 1961 Independence Constitution. In its place, they fashioned various constitutions that merely enhanced the power of the incumbent. In 1985, for instance, President Stevens went so far as to secure the amendment of the existing constitution to pave the way for Major General Momoh to succeed him as state president.
Initially, Momoh’s accession to the presidency raised high hopes and expectations among many Sierra Leoneans who had identified his predecessor, President Stevens, with the country’s socio-economic decline and political repression. But what many people did not pay attention to at the time was the fact that Momoh was the product of Stevens’ All People’s Congress (APC) regime and the officer most responsible for the decline of the army’s esprit de corps.
Furthermore, Momoh’s tenure as commander of the Sierra Leone army is remembered as the worst in the institution’s history. In addition to the politicization of officers and the rank-and-file, the army labored under gross mismanagement, rampant corruption, nepotism, incompetence, and political intimidation.
True to form, Momoh’s tenure as president was characterized by an ailing economy and a groundswell of opposition to the continuation of one-party rule. On 29 April 1992, a year after Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched its war; soldiers from the war front overthrew Momoh and suspended the constitution. As the leader of the coup d’etat, Captain Valentine Strasser, indicated in a radio broadcast on the day of the coup: “Our people are suffering, our children cannot go to school, our roads are in a deplorable condition.”
It is not often in Africa that disaffected soldiers overthrow an unpopular regime for its inability to prosecute a war. In the case of Sierra Leone, young disaffected soldiers ousted a president who, as commander of the army between 1971-1985, had presided over the steady erosion of the army’s fighting capability through lack of training and equipment, corruption, mismanagement, and nepotism. Even though the soldiers could well have acted on behalf of the people whose standards of living had declined precipitously in the era of the APC regime (1968-1992), the coup d’etat itself represented an overall effort by the rank and file of the army to protect the “narrow corporate interests of the military.”
Overnight populism gave way to the status quo ante. Instead of instituting long-term “revolutionary” reforms, as the rhetoric promised, soldiers embarked upon regime maintenance. While the NPRC established commissions of inquiry to determine the extent of official corruption under the Momoh regime and announced a timetable for a return to civilian rule by January 1996, more intractable problems such as the expanding RUF war in the eastern and southern districts and the resettlement of displaced persons and refugees remained.
In an article entitled “Revolution in Crisis?,” West Africa magazine catalogued some of the shortcomings of the NPRC: “Six months after the NPRC seized power, its members are already realising that making promises with the help of the gun is easier than fulfilling them.” Among other abuses, the magazine cited “the arrogant misuse of power and staggering display of wealth and opulence,” the purchase of new and expensive automobiles, frequent travels by junta members at first class rates, personality clashes between Captain Strasser and his deputy Captain Solomon Musa, low morale among the front line troops, and curbs on the press. The editors of the magazine wondered aloud: “For a regime which regards itself as revolutionary and models itself on the Jerry Rawlings phenomenon, such waste and extravagance is questionable” especially in a country with a per capita income of less than $325 and tethering on the brink of collapse. Sankoh and the RUF made much capital out of the NPRC’s shortcomings, thus prolonging the civil war in Sierra Leone.
Peter A. Dumbuya is an attorney at law in Montgomery, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Akron in Ohio and studied law at Jones School of Law, Faulkner University, in Montgomery. Prior to his admission to the Alabama State Bar in 1999, the author taught history at Tuskegee University from 1992-1999. He is the author of Tanganyika Under International Mandate, 1919-1946, published by University Press of America in 1995.