In the wake of the arms to Sierra Leone affair, the ten year old civil war in that country has been getting considerably more coverage in the British media than hitherto. BOB WOOD looks at the underlying causes of the war. IN EARLY January, the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) occupied the centre of the capital Freetown and, we are told, terrorised the million or more inhabitants of the city.
If we are to believe the reports, then a desperate band of terrorists and drugtaking boy-soldiers somehow managed to over-run Freetown in defiance of a 15,000 strong Nigerian peace-keepine force.
The truth may be somewhat different. Atrocities have undoubtedly been committed by both sides in the conflict, but a rebel force could not possibly take a city the size of Freetown without some support from the civilian population.
The Nigerian army, together with much smaller contingents from other West African countries, are in Sierra Leone to offer support to the unstable government of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah.
The rationale for Nigerian intervention is that the Kabbah government is the legitimate democratic ruler of the country, under threat from a combination of undisciplined rebels and dissident armed forces.
Nigeria, notwithstanding the irony of a military regime acting as the defender of democracy, currently seems to have the West African franchise to act as the representative of American imperialism in the region, as it recently did in Liberia.
The democratic credentials of Kabbah are in any case open to dispute. When the general election was held in 1996, the northern half of the country was in rebel hands, and out of a population of about four million, only three-quarters of a million participated in the elections. Like the vast majority of African states, the borders of Sierra Leone are a legacy from the imperialist past, uniting a number of disparate peoples, with different languages, within a common boundary.
Since independence in 1961, politics in the country have been dominated by tension between the Temne in the north (the area now in rebel hands) and the Mende in the south.
Freetown has traditionally been under the sway of the descendents of freed slaves, the Krio, although the population of the city has been radically altered by migration from countryside.
Coupled with the underlying ethnic tension, two other factors are responsible for the current instability and war. Firstly, Sierra Leone is rich in mineral resources - diamonds, bauxite (for aluminium), rutile (for titanium) and iron ore, together with gold and platinum. Over the years since independence, these resources have been raped by foreign mining companies, devastating the countryside and bribing successive governments. Nearly all the wealth created by the mining activities has been siphoned off overseas, or used to line the pockets of a few individuals in Freetown - none of it 'Sierra Leone is has reached the rich in mineral ordinary people. resources including The trickle-down diamonds, bauxite, effect has been as notable for its gold and absence as it was platinum in Thatcher's Britain. Secondly, the civil war in neighbouring Liberia (which ended only recently) undoubtedly helped to undermine peace in Sierra Leane, not least by making arms more readily avallable. The Sierra Leone government has accused Liberia of aiding the rebels, an accusation strenuously denied by the Liberian government. A group of Sierra Leonean One-sided approach: Britain's Foreign Secretary Cook exiles in the UK, the Alliance for Peace and Democracy in Sierra Leone, has called on Britain and America to end their one-sided approach to the conflict and for dialogue between the Kabbah government and the rebels.
Perhaps part of the settle'ment will need to be recognition of the right to self-determination of the various peoples in the country. and a federal solution.