"In failing to uncover the primary cause of SL’s vicious civil war, the TRC made it more — rather than less — likely that future governments of SL would unwittingly stumble into actions that would replicate those that actually led to the last civil war in SL. Accordingly, probably unbeknown to the government of SL, the current violent civil unrest in neighboring Guinea poses precisely such danger."
By Mohamed A. Jalloh,Maryland, USA.
The recent declaration of martial law in neighboring Guinea amidst the escalating murderous confrontation between the Guinean government and a large number of ordinary Guineans constitutes the latest potential tinderbox in the Mano Union countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Ominously, it poses a hidden, mortal danger to millions of Sierra Leoneans that should be all too familiar to those who remember how SL’s own "civil war" started in 1991.
Ironically, the lurking lethal danger to Sierra Leoneans from Guinea’s escalating crisis has been unwittingly masked by the action of an unlikely culprit — SL’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC had been actually set up by the government at the end of SL’s decade-long civil war in order to uncover the lessons from the war. The hope thereby was to help prevent another civil war. However, the TRC missed an opportunity to accurately identify the root cause of the so-called civil war in SL — by concluding in its final report that the war resulted from Sierra Leoneans’ increasing conviction that "the structures of governance could only be changed through violence."
In failing to uncover the primary cause of SL’s vicious civil war, the TRC made it more — rather than less — likely that future governments of SL would unwittingly stumble into actions that would replicate those that actually led to the last civil war in SL. Accordingly, probably unbeknown to the government of SL, the current violent civil unrest in neighboring Guinea poses precisely such danger.
In order to assess that danger, in particular, and that posed to SL, in general, as a result of uninformed action by the SL government in the wake of civil conflict in a neighboring country, it is necessary to examine how such action by the APC government of President Joseph Momoh unwittingly facilitated the Revolutionary United Front’s invasion of SL from neighboring Liberia in 1991. It was that invasion that started SL’s own civil war in 1991.
Back then, it was Sierra Leone’s neighbor to the south, Liberia, which was embroiled in its own escalating, vicious civil confrontation involving several armed Liberian groups opposed to the government of Liberian President Samuel Doe. Among those groups was one led by an escaped fugitive from an American jail. His name was Charles Taylor, a Liberian who had been detained by authorities in the state of Massachusetts on allegations of embezzlement made by the Liberian government in which he had been a procurement official.
The fugitive, Taylor, eventually surfaced in Liberia in 1989 to launch a vengeful invasion of his own country from neighboring Ivory Coast. His stated goal was to overthrow the government of President Doe. The latter had facilitated Taylor’s involuntary residence in an American jail by requesting Taylor’s extradition from the U.S. to Liberia to face charges for alleged embezzlement of nearly a million dollars of Liberian government money. Taylor’s invasion of Liberia in 1989 from a conspiring neighboring Ivory Coast started a civil war in Liberia that would last for fourteen years, despite Taylor’s election as president of Liberia in 1997.
It was the same, similarly vengeful Taylor who, in the early days of the Liberian civil war, provided crucial territorial, logistics and other support to his fellow Libyan terrorist training camp alumnus, Foday Sankoh, that enabled the latter’s RUF armed thugs to invade SL in 1991. As was the case with Taylor’s invasion of his own country two years earlier, Sankoh’s stated goal was to overthrow his own country’s government, then headed by Sankoh’s own nemesis, President Joseph Momoh of the APC. Significantly, both Sankoh and Taylor were implacably united in an identical goal — revenging themselves on the APC government of President Momoh.
Therefore, the primary motivation for the RUF invasion in 1991 — and the resulting "civil war" that lasted until 2002 — was the concerted quest of its key leaders, Taylor and Sankoh, for revenge against SL’s President Momoh. Their quest benefited from the similar quest for revenge by their common benefactor, Libya’s leader, Muamar Ghadaffi.
For Sankoh, it was revenge for the APC government’s imprisonment of himself during the 1970s for his alleged role in a coup d’etat against Momoh’s predecessor, President Siaka Stevens of the APC. In the case of Taylor, he was bent on revenging himself on Momoh’s APC government for providing a base for the West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, that had thwarted his initial bid to violently take over Liberia’s capital in 1990, and thereby overthrow the government of his nemesis, President Doe. For his part, the Libyan leader, Ghadaffi, sought revenge against his former protege, then Liberian President Samuel Doe. He had been betrayed by Doe at the insistence of America, despite the fact that Libya was initially the first — and for some time, the sole — country to recognize then-Sgt. Doe’s regime following his overthrow and execution of Liberian President William Tolbert.
The result of Taylor’s and Sankoh’s concerted quest for revenge against the APC government, with the varied support of assorted foreign governments (Libya, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso), was SL’s ten year long civil war that unleashed unprecedented barbarity against millions of innocent Sierra Leoneans at the hands of mostly Sankoh’s RUF bandits.
Significantly, the opportunity to easily seize and exploit SL’s diamond fields for their personal aggrandizement, including the financing of the RUF’s atrocities and those of Taylor’s own rebel gang, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), was a bonus for both marauders after the launch of their invasion of SL. However, it was not likely to have been the overriding factor in their vengeance-driven attack against the APC government of their common enemy, President Momoh. Sierra Leoneans have only recently emerged from that most bestial period in our country’s history, which ended in 2002.
If, sadly, the current spiraling violence in Guinea does end up in a civil war, as some commentators predict, then it would be eminently accurate to place the cause of any such civil war as rooted in the Guinean people’s increasing conviction that "the structures of governance could only be changed through violence." This is because the preeminent demand of the trade unions leading the nationwide protests that sparked the current violent crisis in Guinea has been the replacement of President Lansana Conte as head of state of Guinea.
A careful comparison of the Guinean situation with that in SL just prior to the start of the "civil war" in 1991 shows a stark contrast between the two in one key aspect. Unlike any civil war that may unfortunately result from Guinea’s current unrest, the "civil war" in SL that started with the invasion of SL’s eastern province by so-called RUF rebels was not initiated by a frustrated, explicit national demand by the people of SL for the replacement of then President Joseph Momoh.
On the contrary, the RUF incursion into SL in 1991 was solely the result of purely selfish designs by Foday Sankoh and a relatively few others, as noted above. Their bloody invasion of their own homeland and campaign of terror against their own people were sponsored by a veritable cabal of international pariahs. (For details about the identities of the members of the cabal, please see my 2005 article, "The Truth that the TRC Failed to Uncover in Sierra Leone." http://news.sl/drwebsite/publish/article_2005782.shtml
As noted earlier, a key member of the foreign sponsors of the more than ten-year long atrocities in SL was the then Liberian fugitive from U.S. justice (and current indicted war criminal), Charles Taylor. It bears reiterating that neither Sankoh nor the foreigner, Taylor, was acting on behalf of the people of SL when they initiated their decade-long criminal assault on innocent Sierra Leoneans in 1991. Therefore, it is patently false to state, as the SL Truth and Reconciliation Commission surprisingly stated in its final report, that the decade-long atrocities that resulted from the foreign-sponsored RUF criminal assault on the people of SL was the result of their increasing conviction that "the structures of governance could only be changed through violence."
In 2005, that key misjudgment by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was identified as a fatal flaw in its otherwise excellent findings contained in its final report. Cf. "The Truth that the TRC Failed to Uncover in Sierra Leone." http://news.sl/drwebsite/publish/article_2005782.shtml
As the current explosive situation in neighboring Guinea shows, that published disagreement with the crucial conclusion of the TRC is not merely academic. Particularly significant are reports that the SLPP government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah is providing material support, using SL’s resources, to the embattled government of Guinean President Lansana Conteh in its murderous repression of popular protests against his continued tenure. If those reports are true, then President Kabbah would have replicated a situation similar to that which had been created by his predecessor, President Momoh, less than one year before the "civil war" in SL started in 1991. For, it was in 1990 that President Momoh provided SL’s Lungi airport as a staging ground for the West African force named ECOMOG. It used it in its successful push back against Taylor’s own push to violently overthrow then President Samuel Doe.
Clearly, Liberia’s demonstrably vengeful Charles Taylor’s revenge against SL’s President Momoh was entirely predictable. Slightly less predictable (on account of a lack of a prior history) was the unprecedented barbaric RUF invasion which Taylor used as the means of exacting his revenge against Momoh. Taylor’s revenge did not merely bring the RUF marauding into SL in 1991. It also brought, through the widespread atrocities indiscriminately committed by the RUF for more than a decade, untold grief to millions of Sierra Leoneans in the form of murder, mutilation, torture, rape, arson, and mass displacement.
It is a lesson that President Momoh’s successor in the current SL government, President Tejan Kabbah of the SLPP, ignores at the grave peril of the recently traumatized people of SL, who have already paid an untenably high price for another, earlier mistake by another SL president.
© 2007 Mohamed A. Jalloh
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