Once again, the source of an African conflict can be traced back to unsustainable demarcations of territories arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers and the resulting civil war, argues Lansana Gberie in this week's Pambazuka News. Drawing on interviews as well as personal experience of the Guinea–Sierra Leone border dispute, Gberie focuses on issues such as how the discovery of diamonds escalated the border conflict and proposes a set of steps needed – mainly through the involvement of ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) – to see the dispute brought to an end.

As Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) moves to address the country's troubled past, Lansana Gberie is entirely confused by the commission's direction and intent. With some US$8 million plus spent on the TRC over a two-year period, considerably more would have been expected from the commission's report than mere woolly, dull assertions. The report's dismissal of the views informing its findings undermines its relevance, Gberie argues, and is only saved from complete insignificance by the sheer outrageousness of its recommendations.

cc Returning to DRC for the first time since 1996, Lansana Gberie finds that a little cash comes in handy for dealing with bureaucracy and that it is impossible to get anything done without a ‘fixer’. Considering the conflicts in the country’s history, Gberie notes that in Congo ‘money is always at the centre of the bigger drama of suffering’ and that justice – or the interests of victims of mass atrocities – has had to be subordinated to wider geopolitical interests. Leaving Kinshasa after just over a week, Gberie finds himself feeling that he is ‘in a place whose future has come and gone’.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/304/41428.jpgLansana Gberie reviews two books on child soldiers: Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourama and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which is now being sold in Starbucks coffee shops across America.

The most difficult ones to deal with, the earnest UN official told me, are the 'teenage ruffians'. I was talking to him in Monrovia, capital of Liberia in 2004.

A large UN force, 15,000 strong, was desperately trying to disarm the mostly deranged combatants who ravaged the place for over a decade. Many people had thought that the disarmament would be fairly easy because a large number of the Liberian militias have gone through such a process before, some of them twice.

There had been the incomplete process, supervised by ECOMOG (the West African intervention force) just before the shambolic 1997 elections. Some of the Liberian fighters had actually been disarmed as fighters in Sierra Leone during that country’s (earlier) UN-supervised disarmament process.

But the first attempted demobilisation turned chaotic after the militias, desperate for the small cash incentive to hand in their weapons before Christmas, stormed Monrovia. At least eight people were killed in the ensuing violence. In the event, the UN paid 12,000 soldiers but received only 8,000 weapons.

The UN official calmly told me about a two-hour long meeting he had had with '48 Generals'. 'Most of them were children, of course', he added. 'And the trouble is that these bush Generals are absolutely jealous of their ranks! It makes the word ‘feral’ meaningless.'

The official suggested that I go with him to Gbarnga to see for myself. With some reluctance I agreed. Gbarnga was once the headquarters of Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), which started Liberia’s war. It had become an immense ruin. The pathos of its decrepitude was that it had now edged itself, once again, towards the centre of Liberia’s woes: the militias encamped there had become frighteningly restive and violent.

By the time we got there, a long line of them had formed at the cantonment site to hand in old AK 47 rifles and collect their money. Things seemed to be going well when suddenly a scrawny teenage fighter with a bandana around his head jumped ahead of the queue, raised his old rifle and started shouting abuses at the UN officers. 'Mother fucker. Give us our money now or we’ll go to Sierra Leone, to Guinea, to Ivory Coast, and start fighting all over again.' I sneaked quietly away.

I was reminded of this chilly incident recently when I started reading Ahmadou Kourama’s haunting novel Allah is Not Obliged. Its obscenely loquacious central character, Birihima, an ex-child fighter who has seen service in the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, happily describes himself as 'rude as a goat’s beard', and given to swearing 'like a bastard'.

He continues: 'I don’t give two fucks about village custom any more, 'cos I’ve been in Liberia and killed lots of guys with an AK-47 (we called it a ‘kalash’) and got fucked-up on kanif [cannabis] and lots of hard drugs.' He is now, he says, stalked by 'the ghosts of many innocent people I killed'. This is not 'an edifying spectacle'.

The novel was first published in France in 2000. Its Ivorian author died three years later. It was a huge success in France, but its English edition, published by William Heinemann last year got a few respectable mentions and then was quickly forgotten.

The novel’s liberal and somewhat foolish use of the word ‘nigger’ was probably too off-putting. Doubtless it makes the story – a powerful psychological exploration of the terrible phenomenon of child soldiery – less exalted for a reader of the English translation than it actually is.

The narrator says at the outset in the novel that 'the full, final and completely complete title of my bullshit story is Allah is not obliged to be fair about all things he does on earth.' It is an insight of sort, capturing the kind of cynicism that has, until recently, surrounded the phenomenon of child soldiery.

The use of children in armed combat is probably as old as warfare itself. It has never been limited to irregular armies. Even Clauswitz, the great theoretician of conventional warfare, joined the Prussian army at age 13. There were hundreds of thousands of children in all the major armies that fought the two world wars.

After much foot-dragging, in 1989 193 countries signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which sets 15 years as the minimum age for recruitment into armed forces.

Incidentally the US (and Somalia, no doubt because it didn’t have a government) signed, but refused to ratify the convention. The convention was largely ignored even by those who signed it There was no legal instrument to enforce it.

In the 1980s Renamo, a uniquely brutal (and mercenary) rebel group in Mozambique, which anticipated Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in the use of amputations as a war tactic, had made widespread recruitment of children into its militia (also anticipating the RUF) a core part of its insurgency.

Other African rebel groups, also markedly mercenary, followed this pattern. The spectacle of drug-addled children armed with AK 47 rifles and gamely inflicting terror against defenceless civilians became a ubiquitous part of African warfare: a metaphor for the continent’s underdevelopment and mindless brutality.

After an intense campaign – led by Graca Machel, the Mozambican wife of Nelson Mandela, with the active support of then Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy – against this appalling new reality, the UN Security Council in 2000 passed the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which made no distinction between formal militaries and non-state militias, and which defined the recruitment of children under 18 (instead of 15) years of age as a war crime.

Since then, UN-sponsored war crimes trials, like the one in Sierra Leone, have included recruitment of children into armed groups as a crime against humanity.

As I write, however, it is estimated that 300,000 children are serving in various armies or militia groups around the world. During Sierra Leone’s war, the RUF would have its child recruits branded with red-hot bayonets: the figures R-U-F were literally carved on their body, making defection – because RUF fighters caught by government troops and sometimes by civilians were often summarily executed – almost impossible. These children – hysterical, flagellant, and immensely lethal – would then roam the countryside, destroying every living thing they encounter.

Shortly before the Optional Protocol was issued, I attended a conference about child soldiers, organised by Axworthy in the Canadian city of Winnipeg in 2000.

In one of the sessions, I attempted to make a distinction between children kidnapped and inducted into militias (like the RUF did) and those who, orphaned and left homeless by the terror campaigns of insurgents voluntarily join armies or pro-government forces, finding for themselves a home and some kind of security.

The Liberian activist/politician Conmany Wesseh, who was actively engaged with the problem in West Africa, took me aside and remarked: 'This issue does not admit of such a fine distinction. Recruitment of children into any armed group is bad, full stop. You provide a loophole for all kinds of opportunists by fudging: what moral and professional difference is there between some armies and all these rebel groups?' His point was unanswerable, and I kept quiet about the issue henceforth.

Ishmael Beah’s phenomenally successful A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007) makes this same point in another way. Though his pained but fluent account does not exactly resolve the central dilemma.

Beah served as a child soldier in the Sierra Leone army during the country’s decade-long war. His book, which recounts his traumatic experiences during the period, has been on the top of the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks now, and it is being offered by Starbucks in its thousands of coffee shops in North America. It has been a sensation.

While reading my copy on the plane during the short flight from Chicago to New York City recently, a handsome teenage girl leaned over my seat. Giggling, she asked me whether I found it interesting. 'I heard him [Beah] speak yesterday and I bought a copy there and then', she said. 'I am so excited about it!'

It was the most unalloyed compliment that can be made of a recently-released book, pure in its curiosity and innocence. It almost made me – someone who has also written about the war of which Beah’s memoir is concerned – green with envy. I found Beah’s astonishing story both unsettling and hugely satisfying: the author, who is now 27, emerges as a highly intelligent young man with remarkable literary flair. But his account has obvious flaws.

Beah was just ten when the war in Sierra Leone started. He was attending school in a village in southern Sierra Leone, which became one of the key theatres of the bloody conflict. At that age, he had already read Shakespeare. He could quote passages from Julius Caesar from memory. He had also become interested in American hip hop.

The book is a sustained study in such contrasts: high culture versus low, a Shakespeare-loving teenager committing barbarous atrocities, frightened civilians versus red-eyed murderers, a friendly people versus brutal politics, demented cruelty versus pure kindness, poverty-stricken Sierra Leone versus affluent New York.

It is soon clear that the book is aimed, first and last, at an American readership. No problem with that: for Beah tells us early on that he intends to address the curiosity of his former schoolmates who had always suspected that he was not telling them all about his past.

This past, therefore, comes to include his memory of some 'nice summer days' in Sierra Leone – the torrential rains in the country, which should surely form one of the most vivid of experiences for a barefoot straggler in the bush there, is barely mentioned (and when mentioned only perfunctorily).

Hip Hop is evoked throughout – and why not? It can be readily associated with gun violence and drugs in America, core aspects of Beah’s experience as a boy soldier. One should not quibble too much here, even when Beah calls Yele 'a big village with more than ten houses' – it is actually a small town with over a hundred houses.

The area that Beah lived in, somewhere in Moyamba District in southern Sierra Leone, was largely unaffected by the war in its early stages. But then rebels – aided by rogue government troops – attacked the Sierra Leone Rutile Mines, where Beah’s father worked, in 1994.

They killed some of the people, apparently including Beah’s parents, and kidnapped some European ex-patriate workers and Sierra Leonean senior staff.

Beah was then living in a village not far away, and soon his village was also attacked. He fled with a few friends. Then he began a traumatic trek through the bush to virtually nowhere.

Beah devotes a lot of space to this depressing bush trek – the night spent in the forest living bare, grim encounters with the rebels in some places, the death and destruction they encountered along the way, the occasional kindness he and his friends got along the way, the more general fear that people they met had for child stragglers who could well have been rebels, the debilitating hunger and near-collapse into insanity – about three times more space, in fact, than for his actual experience as a child fighter.

The intention is plain. Without this background, without knowledge of the hopelessness of Beah’s situation, one would be far less prepared for this:

'My face, my hands, my shirt and gun were covered with blood. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man. Suddenly, as if someone was shooting them inside my brain, all the massacres I had seen since the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change magazines and saw my two young lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved, until we were ordered to retreat because we needed another strategy.'

Beah is describing his first real battle with the rebels after his recruitment into a contingent of Sierra Leone Army by an officer who, like Beah, would quote Shakespeare for fun. The recruitment, unlike those into the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), was not coerced. But it was not voluntary either.

It was also ad hoc: the new recruits were not registered as government soldiers, and were not paid. They accounted only to the officer, acting on his own whim, who had recruited them.

After the months trekking in the bush, the starving young boys having completely run down to seeds, Beah and his friends really had no choice when, after spending some days in the village where the army had occupied in some comfort, they along with everyone else in the village were asked to help defend the village from the rebels who had started mounting attacks against it. Two of Beah’s very young friends were killed at the first encounter with the rebels. A line had been crossed. Beah becomes a killing machine. He tells us:

'I grabbed [a] man’s head and slit his throat in one fluid motion. His Adam’s apple made way for the sharp knife, and I turned the bayonet on its zigzag edge as I brought it out.'

All this may be true, but what one remembers about one’s past is always a choice – a choice partly conditioned by what one feels one’s audience expects. It is hard not to feel, on reading this, that Beah is keen on playing to all those voyeurs after adolescent terror and mindless African violence.

This may be a curious judgment, but one thinks that Beah is perhaps guilty of a chilling excess of candour. Killing people becomes a way of life, an obligation: in war you have to kill to remain alive. The lieutenant who recruited Beah tells him: 'Visualise the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you.'

He would add: '...[the rebels] have lost everything that makes them human. They do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill every single one of them…It is the highest service you can perform for your country.'

Beah takes the message to heart – so much so in fact that he is made an officer, having command over his own troop of child fighters. W.H Auden’s famous poem, 'September 1, 1939', about that 'low dishonest decade' of 'darkened lands of the earth' comes readily to mind:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return

It was terribly traumatic for Beah, all the same. For months after his rescue from this murderous life by the UN and an NGO dedicated to rehabilitating ex-child soldiers, he suffered from nightmares and frequent bouts of migraine (the side effects of the heavy drugs they fed on daily).

The rehabilitation turns out to be far more difficult than his induction into the army, and there were moments of extreme violence – fights broke out between child soldiers who had served with the Sierra Leone and those who had fought with the RUF, leading to loss of lives.

On arriving at the camp, Beah encounters another ex-child soldier who looked to him like a RUF rebel. Beah, who had hidden a grenade in his pocket, took it, and the boy pulled out a bayonet. Beah asked who the boy was. 'We are from Kono district', the boy replied. 'Ah, the diamond district!', Alhaji, Beah’s friend, responds.

Finally the boy says: 'I fought for the army. The rebels burned my village and killed my parents, and you look like one of them'. A deadly fight was averted. It is a telling moment, but quickly Beah relates another encounter which seems to make another, more profound point. He and his other friend, Mambu, accost another ex-child soldier who looks different in appearance. 'What kind of army person wears civilian clothes?' Mambu asks of the boy. The boy responds: 'We fought for the RUF; the army is the enemy. We fought for freedom, and the army killed my family and destroyed my village.' A nasty fight breaks out immediately, and several people are killed.

It does not really matter, in other words, on what side one fought during the war: all sides had reasonable claims to have been wronged: all the armed groups in the country committed atrocities, and all should be held to account on the same level. There is no difference, this incident seems to suggest, in the methodology of recruitment and induction into the various fighting forces. The problem is that this is not true, and it is clear from Beah’s account overall that this point is absurd: it looks like a sop to the campaigners against child soldiery.

It is a noble campaign, but as I said at the Winnipeg conference, there was a marked difference in how the RUF recruited its child fighters and how the army and the Civil Defence Force (CDF) did. The end result may have been pretty much the same, but I doubt whether any official – UN or NGO – could have ventured in a RUF camp (as they did to many army and CDF camps, including Beah’s) to take away child soldiers for rehabilitation camps. The RUF fighters in the rehabilitation camps were, before the war ended, very few, and they certainly were not handed over by their commanders.

Beah’s book does not provide a history of the war or the background to the conflict. Its singular value is that it gives an insight into the thinking of the child soldiers, and it shows – in the subsequent career of Beah – that rehabilitation is eminently possible.

Beah left Sierra Leone after a bloody in 1997 coup. He had earlier acted as a spokesman at a UN conference in New York on child soldiery. He returned to New York and was adopted by an American woman he had met during his first visit. There he attends college, earns a degree, and has now provided us this valuable memoir. For this reason alone, the book deserves the recognition it has been accorded.

* Lansana Gberie is a writer and journalist from Sierra Leone. He is the author of A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone (Indiana University Press 2006).

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration programme started in Sierra Leone in 1998. Among others, its objectives were to collect, register, disable and destroy all conventional weapons and munitions retrieved from combatants. But Lansana Gberie argues that DDR processes are “expensive, time-consuming, and often irritating. It challenges one’s sensibilities, for example, to come to terms with the idea that fighters who have been guilty of gross atrocities will be compensated and helped to resettle and reintegrate into society, while the millions of their victims, whose lives had been battered by the combatants, will remain derelict. “

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fighter was probably no more than sixteen, but he was already well-practiced in the front’s affecting sententiousness. “What we want,” he said, his voice sounding like some old recording, “is peace that does not leave us in pieces.” I was talking to him in the diamond-rich district of Kono, eastern Sierra Leone, in 2001. The disarmament process, thrown into chaos after the RUF abducted 500 peacekeepers in May 2000, had picked up again, and a large contingent of heavily-armed Pakistani troops were camped a couple of miles to the other side of the ravaged district. Many of the RUF fighters, some still with weapons, were digging for diamonds. Fatorma – for that was the RUF fighter’s name – said that his gun, an old AK 47, was all that he had in the world. It was a life and death matter for him. Without it he feared he would be killed. “This is what makes me a man,” he said. “Why should they ask me to give it up? It will be end of our Revolution.”

Fatorma was right. The RUF, which was almost entirely without political support, surviving only because it was armed, would cease to exist once its weapons were taken away. The UN, which was funding the process, did not seem very aware of this. They had also put in place an elaborate political programme which would allow the rebels to participate in elections that were to be held the following year, 2002. The psychology of the armed in an atmosphere of lawlessness has been commented on by many, but to face someone like Fatorma – very young, rootless, without any other skills, in an environment degraded by warfare in which he was a prime participant – is to add a new, totally frightening, meaning to the phenomenon. With their weapons – small, cheap, easy-to-hide guns – they have a feeling of real power and a stake in what goes on around them; and they can be highly destructive, especially when drugged (as is often the case). Without them they feel alienated and hopeless, but far less dangerous to overall society. It is the reason why the UN has made disarming of militias and their encampment and reintegration into the wider society a cardinal part of any process of transition from war to peace in every war-affected country that the organization has been involved with.

“A successful DDR/RRR process,” concludes the National Programme for Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reinsertion, a 2004 document produced jointly by the Ivorian government and the UN mission in the country, ONUCI, “makes the difference between peace and a return to war.” Put so starkly, the question whether DDR (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration) is a requirement for peace looks like a no-brainer. Can there be any question about the need for disarming combatants and having them completely demobilized and reintegrated, as civilians or into the professional military, in any transition from civil war to peace programme? In fact, DDR programmes have been such a core aspect of peace missions in the recent past that peace operations have become almost unthinkable without them.

It has not always been like that, however. The problem of dealing with unwanted combatants, or ex-combatants, is as old as warfare itself. The current policy of DDR is a distinctively UN strategy; its humanitarian provenance cannot be doubted. This, as we have noted, has not always been the case. As Marx noted, when Julius Caesar, the great Roman general, wanted to demobilize some unwanted Gallic soldiers who had, at various times, caused him serious problems, he had the right hand of hundreds of them cut off. This was not recreational cruelty in the manner of some of the neurotic indulgences of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF); it was deadly rational business. The soldiers, if not put out of business, could have posed a grave danger to Caesar’s emerging dominion, and Caesar had no time for a protracted programme of a more humane nature – these were cruel and turbulent times. Napoleon, the French revolutionary leader and a child of the Enlightenment, would have found Caesar’s tactic too barbaric. So, as soon as he was sure of his own imperial ambitions, he had thousands of his own soldiers, suspected of Republicanism, shipped to Haiti, there to be killed by the revolutionary forces of Toussaint L’Overture and the plague.

The UN-monitored programmes of disarming and demobilising West African civil war combatants have involved essentially the same logic: most combatants in such wars were hastily recruited, sometimes forcefully, and although they always get coarsened by warfare, normal life for many of them can really only be found outside of the armed forces. Conventional militaries in any case cannot absorb many of the ex-combatants, who, increasingly, are children anyway.

Sierra Leone’s war began in March 1991 when a former army corporal and photographer, Foday Saybanah Sankoh, invaded the country from Liberia with a small band of Sierra Leonean dissidents and mercenaries from Liberia and Burkina Faso. In a very short time, the war engulfed the country with a destructive force. The war led to a complete normative collapse. It directly triggered three military coups - one in 1992, the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) coup led by Captain Valentine Strasser; another in 1996, a palace coup that led to Strasser's replacement by his deputy Brigadier Maada Bio; and the most destructive, in 1997, a bloody putsch that temporarily terminated the democratically elected government of Tejan Kabbah. By the end of 1996, upwards of 15,000 people had been killed and almost two-thirds of the country's population of 4.5 million displaced.

The economy collapsed, with a negative annual growth rate of minus 6.24 per cent between 1991 and 1995. By March 1996, an estimated 75 per cent of school-aged children were out of school, and 70 per cent of the country's educational facilities, already troubled by the time war started, were destroyed. Only 16 per cent of the country's health facilities were functioning by March 1996, and almost all of these were in the as yet untouched capital (untouched by war, that is). By the end of 1999, the casualty figure had risen, by most estimates, to upwards of 70,000, and Freetown had itself been partly destroyed in a devastating attack by the rebels and rogue government soldiers in January 1999. Thousands of civilians, including young babies, had their hands crudely amputated by the rebels in a campaign of insane terror.

Understanding why disarmament is so important in such a situation requires a mere examination of how difficult the whole process was. In May 2000, months into the process, the UN announced that it had disarmed 24,042 militia combatants, but that these combatants had turned in only 10,840 weapons. That same month, a RUF commander invaded one of the disarmament camps on grounds that the UN had disarmed some RUF combatants without first clearing it with him. He had some UN soldiers and military observers tied up, beaten and detained. That RUF commander is now in the custody of the UN-Sierra Leone Special Court, charged with crimes against humanity. It was a week after this incident that the RUF captured the 500 UN troops (of the Zambian contingent), precipitating one of the biggest crises in the UN’s peacekeeping history.

At the end of Sierra Leone’s disarmament process, about 70,000 combatants were disarmed and demobilized. They were mainly Revolutionary United Front guerrillas and their main nemesis, members of the Civil Defence Force (CDF). An interesting report on the aftermaths of the DDR process, entitled What the Fighters Say: A Survey of Ex-Combatants in Sierra Leone June-August 2003, makes a number of important comments on the motivations of the combatants in the two groups. The survey took place over a year after the disarmament process, and since it relies on the expressed views of the ex-combatants to draw its conclusions, these comments should be regarded with healthy skepticism. The report argues that “Overall, the data support the view that the fighters in the conflict were largely underprivileged individuals who had been failed by the Sierra Leonean state.” It states:

Over one-quarter of fighters came from households in which the father had passed away before the war; fully one third had lost at least one parent by the time the war started; and almost 10% had lost both parents at the start of the fighting…

Moreover, nearly 60% had been displaced from their homes before they joined a faction. These figures are much higher for the CDF – where more than three-quarters of the combatants had been forced from their homes [by RUF attacks] before they decided to join. Particularly for the CDF, the uprooting of their lives caused by the war was an important part of their story of participation.

The report argues that:

Across factions, both political and material motivations mattered for the recruitment of fighters. RUF combatants claimed that they fought to express dissatisfaction, to root out corruption, and to bring down the existing regime. CDF fighters argued that they aimed to defend their communities from the violence brought by the war. Political motivations notwithstanding, there were strong material incentives as well. RUF combatants were promised jobs, money, and women; during the war, they received women, drugs, and sometimes more valuable goods. [My emphasis] The CDF helped to meet the basic needs of the members and provided increased security for their families.

The issue of political motivation with respect to the RUF – that business of fighting to “root out corruption” – is seriously undermined by the fact that, as the report notes, “87% of RUF combatants reported being abducted [and forcefully inducted] into the faction and only 9% suggest they joined because they supported the group’s political goals.” On the other hand, the CDF, which was aggressively pro-government, had “62% of [its] combatants [reporting that they joined] because they supported the group’s political goals,” with only 2% suggesting they were “forcibly recruited.” The rest said they participated because they were “scared of what would happen if they did not join or to take revenge on the RUF.” There are other interesting set of statistics. With respect to corruption and governance, “more than half” of the ex-combatants “believe things are about the same or worse than before the war.” But “while members of different factions have found distinct ways of reintegrating, they tend to share a largely positive assessment of the progress made by the government in addressing fundamental economic and political challenges in the country,” with fully “83% of the respondents” [the survey interviewed 1000 ex-combatants] believing that “access to education is better now than it was before the war,” and 65 % believing that “access to medical care has substantially improved.”

How can one make sense of the apparent cognitive dissonance in these views? It probably reflects a profound issue at the heart of the war: most of the combatants, particularly those in the RUF, can hardly be expected to have a good idea of conditions before the war, because they were mainly children when they were recruited to fight. Now a good number of them are grown-up and are now facing the usual challenges of eking out a legitimate living in an impoverished country with few opportunities. What to do?

Francis Kai-Kai, who managed Sierra Leone’s DDR programme, recently told me that his National Committee on the DDR got the ex-combatants quickly through the Disarmament and Demobilisation phase – which included some technical training and a little cash support – and then had them integrated within the general ambience of poverty. “We didn’t want them to feel privileged for a long time,” he said, “that would pose problems in the future.” Now the Sierra Leone government is working on a Poverty Alleviation Scheme, with World Bank support, and with Kai-Kai as one of the key players. The success of this scheme would lead to a more general improvement in the living standards in the country, from which the ex-combatants will presumably benefit. It remains to be seen how this will play out. The reintegration aspect, in other words, is ongoing.

DDR processes are expensive, time-consuming, and often irritating. It challenges one’s sensibilities, for example, to come to terms with the idea that fighters who have been guilty of gross atrocities will be compensated and helped to resettle and reintegrate into society, while millions of their victims, whose lives have been battered by the combatants, will remain derelict. Patient work, however, can pay off. One of the more creative steps taken by the UN and the Sierra Leone government was the Community Arms collection initiative. Officials decided to go beyond the combatants and ex-combatants, and target various communities in Sierra Leone in an effort to induce ordinary people to give up deadly weapons. The initiative was so successful that since the war ended there have been fewer incidents of violent crime in Sierra Leone than even before the war started – which is to say, crime is very low in the country.

At the end of the disarmament process in Sierra Leone, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a statement welcoming the development. The statement noted that it was time for “the extension of State authority throughout the country, the restoration of ex-combatants, the restoration of the Government’s control over natural resources, and the resettlement of returning refugees and internally displaced persons, as well as forging national reconciliation, remain crucial tasks for the peace process which also requires generous support from the international community.” The very difficult and less dramatic task of governance and economic development, in other words, would now start. That task, like the reintegration process, is still ongoing; Sierra Leone’s future stability will depend on it. The jury is out on the whole process.

• Lansana Gberie, the author of “A Dirty War in West Africa”, is a Sierra Leonean researcher and journalist.
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org