On 24 December 1989 the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) under a new leadership, Charles McArthur Taylor, made a third comeback with 150-armed men to topple the tyrannical regime of Samuel Kanyon Doe.164 The NPFL crossed into
163
I focus the intervention section on all interventions that led to brokering the final peace agreements leaving discussions on post-conflict interventions aimed at state reconstruction to Chapter 6 and 7.
164
The National Patriotic Front of Liberia was established and headed by the late Thomas Quiwonkpa, who was the second top ranking officer of the 17 non-commission officers who toppled the Tolbert regime. With increasing tensions between him and President Samuel Kanyon Doe, Quiwonkpa was dismissed as Commanding General of the Armed Forces of Liberia and appointed as Secretary General of the People Redemption Council. He escaped and went into voluntary exile, where supported by some prominent Liberians, he established the NPFL. As
Liberia through Cote d’Ivoire, into the Gio and Mano towns of Butuo and Karnplay in Nimba County. Already agitated by Doe’s repressive policy against them, the Gio and Mano overwhelmingly welcomed the NPFL. In less than six months, a groundswell of popular support engorged the rank of the NPFL—expanding the small band of fighters into an army of over 20,000 (Sawyer, 1992).165 As discussed later in the chapter, in August 1990 under the name—ECOWAS Peace Monitoring Group (ECOMOG)—ECOWAS leaders dispatched 4,000 strong peacekeeping troops to Liberia. This marked the beginning of ECOWAS’s long and treacherous journey in peacekeeping and the launch of a new ‘peace and security’ chapter in sub regional economic cooperation (I return to this subject later in the chapter).166 Seven years into ECOWAS’s intervention in Liberia, general and presidential elections were held in 1997. Charles Taylor, the biggest of the warlords, emerged victorious. However, elections, the popular response of the international community to internal conflict, did not win the peace. Disgruntled warlords returned to the bush just about two years into Taylor’s leadership. The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL)—with apparent support from the governments of Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire—mounted sustained military pressures on the Taylor Government. Already reeling under a range of economic and military sanctions the Taylor government capitulated and Taylor himself accepted to go into exile July 2003. In August of the same year the
discussed further in the chapter, the NPFL had made two attempts to topple the Doe regime but failed with catastrophic consequences, particularly for the Gio/Mano ethnic groups of its leader, Thomas Quiwonkpa.
165
Like wild fire, the NPFL extended its control to every corner of Liberia, confining President Doe and his ethnic- based Armed Forces to the Executive Palace and its adjoining military Barclay Training Centre.
166
Amidst fierce combat against NPFL, ECOMOG landed and established itself in Monrovia with support from the breakaway Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) and the Krahn-dominated Armed Forces of Liberia (Sawyer, 1992). The alliance with factional troops soon became a liability to the regional peacekeepers, when, barely a month into ECOMOG’s arrival in the country, President Samuel Doe was captured by the INPFL in the offices of the ECOMOG commander while visiting the latter’s Burshrod Island base, and dragged away as the apparently bewildered regional troops looked on. Nigeria unilaterally dismissed Quainoo, flew him home and replaced him with a Nigerian commander (ibid). Nigeria maintained the leadership of ECOMOG throughout their intervention in Liberia after the woeful failure of the Ghanaian leadership.
ECOWAS with support from the international community brokered a peace deal known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The United Nations backed the CPA with a robust 15,000-strong Peacekeeping Mission, which contributed to some political stability and facilitated post-settlement elections. They continue to consolidate stability and the state in Liberia.
Similarly, although Sierra Leone’s own political, economic and social decay had reached breaking point, it took the spillover effects of conflict in Liberia to ignite another cataclysmic flame of violence in Sierra Leone. It was March 23, 1991 when about 100 fighters calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) crossed over from territories held by the NPFL in Liberia, into the Kailahun District in eastern Sierra Leone.167 Like its counterpart in Liberia, the RUF positioned itself as the redeemer who would pull Sierra Leone out of the socio-economic abyss in which APC kleptocracy had plunged the country (Kandeh, 1999). It promised to return proceeds from the abundant wealth extracted from rural communities back to the communities in a communist style (Reno, 1995). This rhetoric was initially appealing, particularly to the youth from the rural areas and urban slums that swelled the ranks of the RUF.168 ECOMOG, also at the behest of Nigeria, intervened in the conflict in 1994 and succeeded in brokering a peace deal in 1996. But while the peace deal was being negotiated, Sierra Leone held general and presidential elections— disregarding protests from RUF. Barely a year after the elections, disgruntled
167
The RUF, having co-trained with leaders of NPFL in Libya, joined ranks with the NPFL to first launch what became a regional onslaught in Liberia. From the NPFL bases, the RUF launched their insurgency against the deeply entrenched one-party rule of the All People’s Congress (APC).
168
Unlike in Liberia, where the war spread to the capital in six months, it took four years before the RUF incursion was felt throughout Sierra Leone, particularly in the populated capital city The war was contained along the eastern fringes of Sierra Leone for a long time partly because RUF and its Liberian and Burkina Faso troops abandoned their earlier “millenarian appeal” for banditry, murder, torture, mutilation and rape as a way of subduing the local population. They also gravitated towards the diamond fields and abandoned further offensives against the SLA. RUF used its stolen wealth to equip itself and launch a renewed and sustained offensive against the SLA and its allied forces. By 1994 the RUF had spread across the country.
elements from the Sierra Leone Army—the self-styled Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC)— joined ranks with the RUF to depose the government. It took another bloody intervention of ECOMOG, backed by a range of government forces, traditional hunters from the Poro and other sodality groups and mercenaries to reverse the coup and restore the elected government. The war persisted until 1999 when ECOMOG, backed by the international community, brokered a peace deal known as the Lome Peace Agreement (LPA). ECOMOG, as in Liberia, stayed the course until 2000 when the UN approved over 17,000 troops to keep the peace and support post- conflict recovery. The war officially ended in 2002. Sierra Leone has since been on the path to recovery, having had two peaceful presidential elections since the end of the civil war.
Much has been written about the chronology of events in the bloody and protracted civil wars.169 I have no intention to recount the tragic accounts. This brief account is intended to lay the basis for the detail analysis I embark upon in subsequent sections. For now it is worth keeping in mind that even though leaders of the sub region intervened in the early stages of the conflict, both conflicts persisted until the international community through the United Nations acted concertedly to intervene. Secondly, although the conflicts began with single actors who challenged the state, during the course of the conflict a range of actors—including 10 warring factions in Liberia and dozens of civil militias and mercenary outfits in Sierra Leone—populated the war theatres in both countries. The death toll in Liberia was a colossal 300,000 (more than 10% of the population), while in Sierra Leone it was estimated at 50,000 (Human Rights Watch 1997 and 2002, respectively). Physical scars of the wars are
169For more chronological accounts of the civil wars, please see Sawyer (1992) The Emergence of Autocracy in
Liberia-Tragedy and Challenge, Institute for Contemporary Studies Press: San Francisco; and Keen (2005) Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone, James Currey: Oxford.
also overwhelming, with nearly 35,000 civilian and over 5,000 ex-combatants with serious physical disabilities. What caused the wars and such massive destruction is the subject of the next section.
4.3 CAUSAL THEORIES ON LIBERIA AND SIERRA LEONE CIVIL