Death and diamonds: an African journalist-turned-academic tries to make sense of the chaos that enveloped Sierra Leone.

Death and diamonds: an African journalist-turned-academic tries to make sense of the chaos that enveloped Sierra Leone. A Dirty War in West Africa West AfricaA region of western Africa between the Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Guinea. It was largely controlled by colonial powers until the 20th century.West African adj. & n. : The RUF Noun 1. RUF - a terrorist group formed in the 1980s in Sierra Leone; seeks to overthrow the government and gain control of the diamond producing regions; responsible for attacks on civilians and children, widespread torture and murder and using children to commit and the Destruction of SierraLeone Sierra Leone(sēĕr`ə lēō`nē, lēōn`; sēr`ə lēōn), officially Republic of Sierra Leone, republic (2005 est. pop. 6,018,000), 27,699 sq mi (71,740 sq km), W Africa. Lansana Gberie Indiana University Press Indiana University Press, also known as IU Press, is a publishing house at Indiana University that engages in academic publishing, specializing in the humanities and social sciences. It was founded in 1950. Its headquarters are located in Bloomington, Indiana. 224 pages, softcover ISBN ISBNabbr.International Standard Book NumberISBNInternational Standard Book NumberISBNn abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m0253218551 From 1991 to 2002, the tiny West African nation of Sierra Leonesuffered a series of vicious internal conflicts--too chaotic to meritthe term civil war--that left at least 20,000 people dead. The worldpress paid only sporadic attention to the carnage and its ever-shiftingplayers. For most of us, one image persists: the Revoluntionary UnitedFront rebels and the children they abducted abductedDistal angulation of an extremity away from the midline of the body in a transverse plane and away from a sagittal plane passing through the proximal aspect of the foot or part, or away from some other specified reference point amputating the hands andarms of civilians, sometimes gleefully glee��ful?adj.Full of jubilant delight; joyful.gleeful��ly adv.glee asking their victims if theywanted a long-sleeve or a short-sleeve shirt. Here is the worst part: even today, after more than a decade ofextraordinary destruction, it is not at all clear what the war wasabout. A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of SierraLeone is a convincing attempt to figure out what happened, and why. Its author, Lansana Gberie, has exceptional qualifications for thetask. As a reporter, he had covered the war--or wars--and interviewedmany of the key players. Then, in Canada, he grappled with a moretheoretical approach in a thesis for "War and State Collapse: TheCase of Sierra Leone," his M.A. in history from Wilfrid LaurierUniversity Wilfrid Laurier University is a public university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It also has wing in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. It is named in honour of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the seventh Prime Minister of Canada. . In 2000, he was the co-author, with Ian Smillie and RalphHazelton, of a seminal report on the conflict for Partnership AfricaCanada, "The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and HumanSecurity." Few Canadians may know it, but we inhabit a most appropriatecountry for Sierra Leone scholarship. We have our own connections to thecountry and its war. Some of Sierra Leone's traditional elite, forinstance, still refer to themselves as Nova Scotians, because they aredescended from freed Loyalist slaves who petitioned successfully to bereturned to Africa from Halifax in 1792 (see James Walker's 1976The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia). Weplayed a little-known role in the actual conflict: one faction receivedmilitary advice and weapons from DiamondWorks, operated from Vancouverby Rakesh Saxena, who is currently in a Canadian jail fightingextradition to Thailand. Finally, our foreign minister at the time,Lloyd Axworthy--influenced in part by the "Heart of theMatter" report--was active in focusing international attention onthe war, while member of Parliament David Pratt performed invaluablework as Canada's Special Envoy. It is unlikely that most Canadians noticed much of this. SierraLeone never attracted the same concern and guilt as the ethnic violencein Rwanda. Canada sent no troops; there is no Romeo Dallaire to forcethe West to face its own failures. The numbers were always small inglobal terms. Sierra Leone, a country the size of New Brunswick, has atotal population of barely six million. But the very nature of Sierra Leone's war also limited itsimpact on our consciousness. It was too complex. Anyone could understandRwanda: one tribe was killing another, and the tribes' names arememorably simple. There is nothing simple about the tortured question ofwhat this war was about. A Dirty War does come up with an answer, andeven a central villain, but the reader must be prepared for someextraordinarily chaotic history to get there. Let me summarize only the most crucial events: In 1991, theRevolutionary United Front started its campaign against the AllPeople's Congress "All People's Congress" is also the name of a sister organization of the International Action Center in the United States.The All People's Congress is a political party in Sierra Leone. government of President Joseph Momoh. The nextyear, Momoh was ousted by a group of his own disaffected soldiers, whocalled themselves the National Provisional Ruling Council. At thebeginning of 1996, that group's figurehead figurehead,carved decoration usually representing a head or figure placed under the bowsprit of a ship. The art is of extreme antiquity. Ancient galleys and triremes carried rostrums, or beaks, on the bow to ram enemy vessels. leader, ValentineStrasser, was thrown out in a military coup led by his own defenceminister, Brigadier Julius Maada Bio Brigadier General Julius Maada Bio (born 1964 in Bo, Sierra Leone) led a coup in Sierra Leone on January 16 1996 ousting president Valentine Strasser. He was previously Strasser's deputy and was a participant in the April 1992 coup that ousted the All Peoples Congress (APC) . In February, the country actuallyheld elections, and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah Alhaji Ahmad Tejan Kabbah (born February 16, 1932) was the President of Sierra Leone from 1996 to 1997 and from 1998 to 2007. He worked for the United Nations Development Programme and returned to Sierra Leone in 1992. He was elected president in 1996. of the Sierra Leone People'sParty The Sierra Leone People's Party is a political party in Sierra Leone. Traditionally it is based amongst the Mende tribe in the southern parts of the country. HistoryFormation became president. He was deposed the next year in a military coup.In 1998, a coalition of West African states assembled an interventionforce, ECOMOG ECOMOG ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States)Monitoring GroupECOMOG Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group . In 2002, a UN force, UNAMSIL UNAMSIL United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone , waded in. And that is a barebones summary, omitting the roles played byBritain, by the private security companies Sandline and ExecutiveOutcomes, and by Charles Taylor of Liberia, Libya's Mu'ammerGaddafi and Burkina Faso's Blaise Compaore--not to mention thegovernment's loyalist Kamajor "battalion," and theconstant internecine in��ter��nec��ine?adj.1. Of or relating to struggle within a nation, organization, or group.2. Mutually destructive; ruinous or fatal to both sides.3. Characterized by bloodshed or carnage. battles within the RUF itself. Communications arealways a problem in Sierra Leone and there were times when no one knewwhat was happening across the full country. There are moments in A Dirty War when you realize that only anovelist of genius could do justice to the war's kaleidoscope ofsadism and surrealism. The Canadian journalist Ian Stewart survivedbeing shot in the head by a rebel wearing jeans, rubber flipflops and abowler, like one of the droogs droogsAlex’s rough and tough band of hooligans. [Br. Lit.: A Clockwork Orange]See : Ruffianism in A Clockwork Orange. As many as 6,000people died in the RUF offensive dubbed "No Living Thing" bythe dreaded commander Sam Bockarie--a one-time hairdresser. (Inconnection with that massacre, Gberie chooses to skirt one particularlyunpalatable fact: the country's minister of information, JuliusSpencer, continued to reassure the populace that Freetown was safe, evenas the government fled.) Finally, in the same year, after all the RUFkillings and abductions and amputations and arson and rape and looting,U.S. president Bill Clinton sent Jesse Jackson to broker a peaceagreement--and Jackson compared RUF leader Foday Sankoh to NelsonMandela. A Dirty War's great advantage is that Gberie is a journalistwho was on the ground at the time. He is able to weave together hisdiscussion of academic theories with his knowledge of the country, hisown experience of the war, and interviews with politicians, victims andother journalists. The result is lively history, and Gberie does not shyaway from Verb 1. shy away from - avoid having to deal with some unpleasant task; "I shy away from this task"avoid - stay clear from; keep away from; keep out of the way of someone or something; "Her former friends now avoid her" an unacademic sharpness of judgement and language,characterizing one text as "a pitiful book by a former APC (1) (American Power Conversion Corporation, West Kingston, RI, www.apcc.com) The leading manufacturer of UPS systems and surge suppressors, founded in 1981 by Rodger Dowdell, Neil Rasmussen and Emanual Landsman, three electronic power engineers who had worked at MIT. foreignminister" and referring to former president Joseph Momoh as "aservile ser��vile?adj.1. Abjectly submissive; slavish.2. a. Of or suitable to a slave or servant.b. Of or relating to servitude or forced labor. and mediocre officer." The great temptation for a scholar--you can see it in some of theacademic writing--is to jam the war into a tidy, distancing theory.Gberie is not an ideologue i��de��o��logue?n.An advocate of a particular ideology, especially an official exponent of that ideology.[French id��ologue, back-formation from id��ologie, ideology; see , which is fortunate, because this war doesnot fit comfortably into any ideological framework. While tribalidentity sometimes played a part in the conflict, that part wasdecidedly minor. The war was often presented as a rebellion against alegitimate elected government--but the country had been ruled fordecades by a staggeringly incompetent kleptocracy klep��toc��ra��cy?n. pl. klep��toc��ra��ciesA government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.[Greek kleptein, to steal + -cracy. . Yet the Revolutionary United Front, despite its name, cannot bedistorted into a peasant and worker revolt against an autocratic state,because it had no alternative system of government in mind, and becauseits victims were almost wholly the peasants and workers it claimed torepresent. Some politicians and academics have tried to see the RUF as agenuine grassroots revolutionary movement, but nothing in its conductcould justify that vision, and Gberie makes short work of the argument.Toward the end of the book, he suggests that RUF members could be betterdescribed as bandits than rebels, which will strike the reader at thatstage as a valid judgement. Gberie has slightly more sympathy for a more anthropologicalvision, one that links the conflict to dwindling dwin��dle?v. dwin��dled, dwin��dling, dwin��dlesv.intr.To become gradually less until little remains.v.tr.To cause to dwindle. See Synonyms at decrease. ecological resources.But he has no patience with the romantic dream--occasionally exploitedby the RUF--that portrayed the rebels as would-be environmentalsaviours. It is quite clear from the wars' progression that RUFcombatants were not in the forest because they loved it and wanted toprotect it, but because they had nowhere else to go. Given theirdruthers druth��ers?pl.n. InformalA choice or preference: "Given their druthers, these hell-for-leather free marketeers might sell the post office"George F. Will. , like almost every other fighting force the country saw, therebels opted every time for the diamond fields. Gberie reserves his deepest rage for the "New Barbarism bar��ba��rism?n.1. An act, trait, or custom characterized by ignorance or crudity.2. a. The use of words, forms, or expressions considered incorrect or unacceptable.b. "thesis propounded by American journalist Robert Kaplan. Kaplan, who hashad considerable influence on some U.S. foreign policy, sees a comingcollapse of civilization in the world's poorest regions--a returnto some atavistic at��a��vism?n.1. The reappearance of a characteristic in an organism after several generations of absence, usually caused by the chance recombination of genes.2. An individual or a part that exhibits atavism. state of predation predationForm of food getting in which one animal, the predator, eats an animal of another species, the prey, immediately after killing it or, in some cases, while it is still alive. Most predators are generalists; they eat a variety of prey species. and anarchy. For him, the longconflicts in Sierra Leone and its neighbours and the breakdown of theireconomies and infrastructure are simply the opening round. Tellingly, inan Atlantic article in 1994, Kaplan chose the image of the developedworld as an air-conditioned limousine, driving through the teeming teem?1?v. teemed, teem��ing, teemsv.intr.1. To be full of things; abound or swarm: A drop of water teems with microorganisms.2. andmenacing slums of West Africa's coast. Gberie's resentment springs in part from the implication inKaplan's theory that Africans are somehow particularly vulnerableto a descent into savagery--that they are inherently less civilized thanthe populations of more prosperous and fortunate lands. I think it is ashame that anyone still needs to argue the point, given the West'sless-than-stellar historical record. But Gberie is of course driven bythe horror of what his country-men have done. He himself likens theRUF's reign of terror Reign of Terror,1793–94, period of the French Revolution characterized by a wave of executions of presumed enemies of the state. Directed by the Committee of Public Safety, the Revolutionary government's Terror was essentially a war dictatorship, instituted to to the vision in Joseph Conrad's Heartof Darkness Heart of Darknessadventure tale of journey into heart of the Belgian Congo and into depths of man’s heart. [Br. Lit.: Heart of Darkness, Magill III, 447–449]See : Journey . The comparison is apt because Conrad was writing about the gruesomeabuses of Belgium's rapacious rule in the Congo, and Gberie seesthe same dehumanizing and brutal greed in the RUF--and at times in itsopponents. It is as if the glitter of Sierra Leone's diamonds turnshuman beings to ice and stone. He concludes that the RUF was an outbreakof rage, fuelled and warped by drugs, crucially supported by thewould-be despot Charles Taylor in neighbouring Liberia and sustained bySierra Leone's curse--its diamonds. The RUF's strategies wereso vicious precisely because the group stood for nothing; it was aragtag rag��tag?adj.1. Shaggy or unkempt; ragged.2. Diverse and disorderly in appearance or composition: "They're a small ragtag army of racketeers, bandits, and murderers" group of mercenaries snatching what they could. They needed thedrugs and the gin and the sex slaves and the violence because theirvision did not extend as far as winning and governing the country. Andthe government troops battling them were not much better: this is thewar that created the term "sobels"--soldiers by day, rebels bynight. The "Heart of the Matter" report had of course alreadyidentified diamonds as the crux of the war. But Gberie is able to add amuch more complete map of the nihilistic ni��hil��ism?n.1. Philosophya. An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence.b. A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.2. progress of the RUF and theabortive abortive/abor��tive/ (ah-bor��tiv)1. incompletely developed.2. abortifacient (1).3. cutting short the course of a disease.a��bor��tiveadj.1. efforts to combat it. Moreover, he establishes a series ofabsolutely damning links to Charles Taylor, the brutal and criminalruler of neighbouring Liberia. Readers of this book should feel aparticularly strong interest in Taylor's trial for his crimes,which is now a certainty. From an international perspective, perhaps the most interestingaddition is Gberie's strong suggestion of links between the RUF andal Qaeda. This will come as no shock to historians and politicalscientists, because of the long-recognized role of Sierra Leone'sdiamonds in financing competing factions in Lebanon's civil war.Until Joseph Momoh forced him into exile (and invited Israeli diamonddealers to replace him), the kingpin of the country's illicitdiamond trade was the Lebanese merchant Jamil Sahid, who was widelybelieved to be funnelling money to Hezbollah. Certainly some of thecountry's Lebanese diamond brokers supported radical Islamicmovements--although any benefits during the civil war were somewhatundercut by others who were funding the Christian Falangist movement. Meanwhile, whatever their role on the international scene, diamondsare unquestionably un��ques��tion��a��ble?adj.Beyond question or doubt. See Synonyms at authentic.un��question��a��bil the force that fed the war, and then prolonged it bycorrupting the armies sent to end it. Diamonds have been SierraLeone's curse for decades. The areas where they are mined, legallyand illegally, are like landscapes on the moon--the constant digging hasdestroyed, in the RUF's ghastly phrase, every living thing.Diamonds--easily hidden, easily portable, still easily sold--constitutea resource that has never benefited the country as a whole, even as theydistract successive governments from other minerals, agriculture andother industries. They have corrupted every government the country has known sincetheir discovery. (Gberie describes the late prime minister Siaka Stevensas "utterly corrupt and destructive," which I find overlycharitable.) In one detail that Gberie does not include--it precedes theperiod he is dealing with--Sierra Leone's diamonds financed a lotof arms purchases for at least two factions in Lebanon's civil war.Whatever they may be for a girl, diamonds are not a country's bestfriend. I think they are probably the best answer anyone can come up withfor the nature of this conflict. We may never understand why people ofany nation can be capable of such frenzied, pointless violence, butGberie is right to emphasize that there is nothing peculiarly Africanabout nihilistic cruelty. What is peculiar to some of Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular,is the collapse of any governing structure that could have ended theconflict. Over and over again in this story, troops lost control of thediamond areas because they were too busy panning for stones to keepwatch. (For variety, the RUF won one battle because so many governmenttroops were in the capital watching regional soccer matches.) Formilitary historians, the war must be a gold mine: force after forceprovided case studies of what not to do. The country's own army,the ECOMOG coalition troops, the first UN contingent--all of them weredisasters. The war really only ended when Britain made it clear (in partthrough technically illegal assistance) that it was prepared to gettough. Today, the fractured nation is trying to rebuild itself, with somecontributions from Canada's government and nongovernmentalorganizations. This book's very existence suggests one way we coulddo more--by welcoming other combat-weary journalists to spend timereflecting on their countries' tragedies in relative tranquility. And we might also pause occasionally to ponder the sources of thattranquility. We are lucky: we have healthy institutions, rooted incenturies of tradition, to sustain law, to limit corruption and abuse,to protect the powerless. But one of the prime lessons of this book iscorruption's withering effect on order. Anyone reading this book isgoing to grow uneasy about Robert Kaplan's image of thatair-conditioned limousine bowling through the slums, because a limo isultimately a fragile shield. Three decades ago, Sierra Leone's middle class felt secure--Iknow, because I lived there. It was the expatriate academics and aidworkers who wondered how there could be so little violence in a countrythat treated most of its citizens so badly. One man thought he had theanswer: a Lebanese butcher, taciturn tac��i��turn?adj.Habitually untalkative. See Synonyms at silent.[French taciturne, from Old French, from Latin taciturnus, from tacitus, silent; see tacit. and aloof. When he finally unbentenough to chat, I asked him if he were never afraid of the dispossessedAfricans who surrounded him. He answered: "Madame, a dog barks whenhe is hungry. But if, every time he barks, you beat him and beat him, hewill learn to keep silent, and will lie down in the road and die ofhunger without making a sound. And in this country, Madame, the peopleare like the dogs." He was wrong, and he well may be dead because of it. A Dirty Warreinforces a sense we need to cultivate: the world outside the limo iscloser than we think. Suanne Kelman is the associate chair of the School of Journalism atRyerson University. She taught English and African literature at theUniversity of Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay campus in Freetown from1974 to 1975.