Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
It is gratifying to learn that Sierra Leone’s President Alhaji Tejan Kabbah is about to bring the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) into his government.
There is no doubt that the RUF and its leader, Foday Sankoh, are among the most sadistic murderers on the African continent. They’ve committed every crime in the book – they amputate the limbs of men, women and children; they use child soldiers; they burn down the dwellings of villagers who refuse to join them in their war against the government in Freetown. In the nine years of the war, 20 000 people have been killed. Since the population of Sierra Leone is only 4,5- million, that makes for a high proportion.
It would be nice to grind their own noses into the ground. But the question is, at what price? The RUF has demonstrated again and again that it can take on any army that is sent against it. It has made mincemeat of the Sierra Leone army for nine years, and even when the Sierra Leone government sought the services of the supposedly invincible mercenary organisation run by South Africans, Executive Outcomes, the RUF survived. And the involvement in the fray of the British version, Sandline, brought more trouble on the head of British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and his government than it hurt the RUF.
For all these reasons, it is in the enlightened self-interest of Kabbah to reach an accommodation with the RUF. The basis for this already exists, in the form of an agreement which Kabbah reached with the RUF three years ago. It was when Sankoh realised that Kabbah was getting cold feet about this agreement that Sankoh travelled to Nigeria to plead for the intervention of Nigeria’s late and unlamented General Sani Abacha. Nigeria was leading the Ecomog military force sent by Sierra Leone’s West African neighbours to try and save Kabbah’s government. Indeed, it was Nigeria that helped to broker the agreement between Kabbah and Sankoh.
But instead of asking Kabbah to meet his side of the agreement, Abacha arrested Sankoh. When Abacha died last year, his successor, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, was prevailed upon to send Sankoh back to Freetown. And, of course, Sankoh was promptly sentenced to death there.
What did this pyrrhic “diplomatic victory” of Kabbah’s achieve? More killing of innocent villagers by the RUF, which promptly launched new and even more ferocious military attacks that nearly ended in the RUF occupying the whole of Freetown. The well-armed Ecomog force was made to look like an incompetent armed rabble. Kabbah fled Freetown and cooped himself up at the airport at Lungi. He then “re-agreed” to “renegotiate” with Sankoh.
These talks were held in Lom, Togo, with the Togolese minister of foreign affairs as broker. United States and British diplomats were also involved, and the United Nations was represented by special representative Francis Okelo.
According to the Sierra Leone Minister of Information, Julius Spencer, a demand by the RUF that Sankoh should be made vice-president cannot be met because the current vice- president was elected, not appointed, and the president has no power to replace him. Spencer hinted that the RUF would, instead, be given three Cabinet posts. The assumption in Freetown is that Sankoh will have his death sentence lifted through a pardon and given one of these Cabinet posts.
The installation of a new civilian government in Nigeria has been the catalyst for the new agreement. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government is encountering severe pressure to provide amenities which the corruption, incompetence and callousness of Nigeria’s past military governments have left neglected. Even if he wanted to, Obasanjo would find it difficult to persuade his Parliament to approve funds – an estimated $1-million per day – for a continuation of the Ecomog campaign in a Sierra Leone whose government preferred fighting to negotiation – fighting with other people’s armies and money, that is.
But will a new agreement be signed, in fact? Sankor is insisting on the vice- presidency plus eight Cabinet posts. And he wants these in a four-year “transition government”, to be set up, obviously, after Kabbah’s present government has been dissolved. Even though he has little hope of getting what he wants, protest demos have already been organised in Freetown against it.
The fact is that Sierra Leone society is almost polarised between the “aristocratic” Creoles (mainly descendants of freed slaves) who inhabit the coast (especially the Freetown area) and those the coasters haughtily refer to as the “provincials” or rural folk.
It is the same sort of division that created the social resentments that brought the Samuel Doe regime to power in neighbouring Liberia, with the resulting mayhem that shocked the world.
Unless the “Creolocracy” within the Sierra Leone government and establishment is made to jettison its snobbish attitudes – cultivated in colonial times and fostered after independence – they cannot work with the RUF, and if they don’t, it will be back to war and anarchy.
Kabbah’s most influential adviser, Minister of Finance James Jonah, for instance, once asked a BBC interviewer: “How can we co- exist with people like Foday Sankoh?” The disdain for the social origins of the RUF leadership is easy to spot among people of his ilk and it bodes ill for the country’s future.
Personally, if I were to be asked to offer advice to Kabbah, I would urge him to appoint Sankoh as minister of social welfare and rehabilitation. Sankoh’s job would then be to look after all those poor people whose limbs have been amputated by the RUF, and whose huts and houses have been burnt down.
I would also put both an RUF man and a member of Kabbah’s own clique in charge of the diamond industry. Neither person should be able to sign any diamond contract without the other’s agreement. If the suspicion between the two sides doesn’t succeed in stamping out diamond smuggling, nothing will.
They should, of course, also come down together to South Africa, post haste, to put a word in the ear of De Beers.