Libya and Liberia should pay reparations to Sierra Leone for backing rebels who waged one of the most savage wars in modern history, an independent truth and reconciliation commission said in a long-overdue report on Friday.
”Libya, which was found to have provided support to the insurgents, should make financial contributions to the War Victims Fund,” the commission said in a summary of the report presented this week to President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor and his army also played ”key roles in bringing the bloody conflict to Sierra Leone and should make symbolic reparations”, said the report, which was due out in October last year.
There is no accurate toll of the number of people killed in the war that lasted from 1991 to 2001 in the former British colony on west Africa’s Atlantic coast, though estimates range from between 50 000 to 200 000 people. Thousands more lost arms or legs, lips and noses to the roving bands of rebels.
Calling the onflict ”the most shameful years of Sierra Leone’s history”, the commission warned there has been little improvement in the circumstances that were catalysts for the war.
”Many of the dire conditions that gave rise to the conflict in 1991 remain in 2004. The legacies of dehumanisation, hatred and fear must be confronted.”
While declining to put an amount on the reparations Libya and Liberia should pay, the commission, created under a peace pact signed in 2002 to end the war, issued a series of recommendations for good governance and to battle corruption.
It promoted free health care for war victims and education for their children, recommended the creation of a national youth commission and urged greater involvement of women in national efforts to rebuild the country.
”Forgetting the past means we ignore its lessons,” wrote the commission, chaired by Sierra Leone Bishop Joseph Humper. ”With this understanding we vow to build a society that will be able to prevent such violations from recurring in the future.”
Sierra Leone occupies the last rung of the United Nations’ Human Development Index of 177 countries, with the vast majority of its five million people living in abject poverty without access to clean water, adequate sanitation or medical care.
One in four children dies before the age of five, a new report by the UN children’s agency Unicef has found, and those who survive beyond that age have a life expectancy of just 34 years.
Despite an embarrassment of mineral wealth that includes bauxite and rutile, a titanium ore used in paint pigment, not to mention the diamond mines that helped to fund the rebel war, most Sierra Leoneans survive on less than one dollar a day.
Sierra Leone has already exported $100-million in diamonds in 2004.
A massive humanitarian and peacekeeping effort that at one time numbered 17 500 UN troops has done little to improve life, due largely to rampant corruption that has infected every sector.
There is little visible evidence of the hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid that have poured into Sierra Leone since peacekeepers first landed in 1999 in the capital Freetown, where most residents live in shacks or shanties still pocked with bullet holes from the war.
Roads leading to the second city, Bo, in the south, north to Makeni or east to the diamond rich Tonga and Kenema regions are virtually impassable, and skyrocketing prices for petroleum products put such trips out of reach for most of the population. – Sapa-AFP