Martin Woollacott in Freetown
President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah’s ministers gathered on Tuesday at the presidential lodge to greet the head of state on his return from a meeting of regional heads in Nigeria. The mood at the Cabinet meeting was termed optimistic, but the truth is that Sierra Leone got less than it wanted in Nigeria and ministers know that the country’s security remains extremely fragile.
The government remains suspended between a policy of aiming to inflict a decisive military defeat on the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and one of restoring peace with the rebels still in possession of territory and other assets.
At one stage it was hoped that there could be a revival of the old regional intervention force, dominated by Nigerians, ready to wage war on the RUF. Instead, the new West African troops for Sierra Leone decided on at the meeting are to be deployed as part of the United Nations force in the country, seen as prevented by its mandate from taking tough enough action.
Failing a revival of the monitoring group, the government had wanted a Nigerian to replace the present UN force commander, an Indian general, but it also failed in that objective. As a result Kabbah does not yet have a clear assurance of strong military backing for the offensive against the RUF either from Nigeria and other West African states or from the British who are sticking to their timetable for a withdrawal within the next few weeks.
The obvious fear is that then the government offensive could falter and the RUF push back into positions from which it has been dislodged.
The contrasting hope, as Minister for Presidential Affairs Momodu Karoma puts it, is that the RUF ”will be forced to see sense … I think we can combine the two tracks of military pressure and reinstating the Lome peace agreement.”
The meeting in Nigeria of the members of the Economic Community of West African States set up a committee of six countries to pursue a peaceful settlement. However, the unspoken worry of the Sierra Leone government is that a settlement might be sought before the RUF is beaten, leading to a repetition of the situation which led to last month’s crisis, when rebels abducted hundreds of UN peacekeepers.
That is also why Sierra Leone is resisting the idea of ejecting captive RUF leader Foday Sankoh from the country, lest he be revived as an actor once abroad. The pressure for an early settlement could come from certain West African states or from the UN, unconvinced that a decisive victory against the RUF is possible and concerned that UN forces might be left in a dangerous situation after a failed offensive.
The contradictions are certainly considerable. One is that, as the offensive moves on, it casts the UN forces more and more in the role of garrison troops, a role for which they are not clearly mandated or fully prepared. Another is that it will sooner or later run into the interests of President Charles Taylor of Liberia, whose unofficial writ runs into the very diamond areas which are the final objective of the government forces.
The problem of combining neutral UN forces with units, like the Nigerians, ready to be far more combative, could be solved by assigning the West Africans a sector of their own, with an effectively autonomous commander, in an area where fighting is expected.
The Sierra Leone military took a confident line this week in recording its first advances into RUF core territory, which have brought it the town of Lunsar on the way to Makeni, the key to a further advance into the diamond country.
Colonel AC Nelson-Williams, the director of operations, told reporters that the army wanted ”to liberate the whole country. We have the capacity and we have the backing.” But the problem for the Sierra Leone government is that neither the capacity nor the backing is guaranteed.