Sierra Leone Civil War

On December 24th, 1989, the government of Liberia was attacked by a rebel group known as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). The leader, Charles Taylor, had worked for Liberia’s current president Samuel Doe previously and was seeking revenge. After more than a year of fighting, a failed peace-keeping military intervention, hundreds of thousands injured or killed, and the displacement of more than half of Liberia’s people, the conflict spilled over into neighboring country Sierra Leone. On March 23rd, 1991, Foday Saybana Sankoh, leader of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone teamed up with the NPFL of Liberia and launched a military attack against Sierra Leone’s All People’s Congress (APC) under Joseph Momoh in hopes of gaining access and control of the resource-rich area of Kailahun. Many civilians of Sierra Leone were suspicious of the conquest due to its violent and vicious nature. They progressively grew more suspicious as the RUF continued to campaign and recruit after a coup in April of 1992. During this coup the APC was replaced by a military government known as the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC). This was unsettling for the general population seeing as they were under the impression that the RUF was fighting this war to take over the APC and gain access to Kailahun, which they had already achieved. By 1994 the conflict had taken a turn for the worse...the RUF had launched attacks in almost all parts of the country, now affecting more than just mineral-rich Kailahun. Many of these attacks were carried out by “sobels” or soldier-rebels belonging to the state army who targeted civilians. After the elections in 1996, power was shifted to the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) under Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. The SLPP created yet another group known as the Civilian Defense Forces or CDF. The CDF was composed of Liberian conflict experts and hunters. The goal of the CDF was to protect civilians and take down the rebel forces, though after the rebel forces found out about the CDF’s successes, there was a staged coup which joined the RUF with the military government. This alliance between the AFRC and the RUF lasted until 1998 when the CDF and West African peacekeepers reinstated Kabbah and his government forces. The official ending of the war was in January 2002 with the completion of the disarmament phase of a U.N.-supervised campaign to demobilize combatants of every group involved -- the AFRC, CDF, and the RUF. The Sierra Leone Civil War lasted for eleven years, and though it may have “ended,” the aftermath of the war had an everlasting effect on its society and the road to peace is an ongoing struggle.

Works Cited

Gershoni, Yekutiel. “War without End and an End to a War: The Prolonged Wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.” African Studies Review, vol. 40, no. 3, 1997, pp. 55–76.

Hoffman, Danny. “Disagreement: Dissent Politics and the War in Sierra Leone.” AfricaToday, vol. 52, no. 3, 2006, pp. 3–22.