The causes for the civil war and the course of its events.
So, what were the causes of the civil war?
The direct causes were not tribal opposition, religious opposition, or the resistance by rebel forces to the dictatorship or repression by the government. Rather, they were none other than the monopoly of power and privileges, the two purposes of the rebel forces.
A third purpose was created when their leader, Sankoh, was arrested and put on death row, but as he was freed by the Peace Accord, the purposes were down to the initial two again.
The Japanese newspapers call the RUF "Anti-government" and "the Revolutionary United Front," but if they were truly revolutionary, they would hold some sort of ideology, which they don't. At the beginning of the civil war, they hailed democracy for and by the people, criticizing (attacking) the corruption of the APC regime that then was in power, and tribalism, but under that mask they were nothing more than seekers of power and wealth, killers lacking humanity. That is why when Jesse Jackson, the envoy of the President of the United States compared Sankoh to Mandela (of South Africa,) people could no longer stand it and chanted, "Jackson go home" in April of 2000.
Sankoh is not comparable to Mandela, so it is completely understandable that the people became angry. By the way, Jesse Jackson is one of the people who pushed to give preferential treatment to Sankoh, who deserved the death penalty, at the Lomé Peace Accord. And, Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia, is the one behind Sankoh, his objective being the acquisition of wealth and power. This is an open secret in Sierra Leone.
The sequence of events of the civil war is as follows. When ECOWAS did not let Taylor come into power and succeeded in bringing peace in Liberia by sending a peacekeeping force in 1990, Sierra Leone offered its military base for the attack. Taylor held a grudge against Sierra Leone for that, and began to assist in gathering rebels, which he calculated would serve as his revenge and would at the same time let him have access to diamonds. This was in 1991. Sankoh, the leader of the rebels, lived in Taylor's villa, and snuck into Sierra Leone from there. This was the beginning of the civil war. Thus, we can declare that Taylor is the one behind the scenes. Other than him, Burkina Faso and Libya also joined the clan and provided the rebels with arms.
On the contrary, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea and the UN have been supporting democracy in Sierra Leone. However, upon the 1998 presidential election, even Nigeria began to say that they could no longer finance their peacekeeping troops of 15,000. If a powerful country like Nigeria could not bear the burden, the question of why the rebels of Sierra Leone could get a hold of war expenditure and arms naturally comes up. The war began precisely because they had the diamonds and someone to pull the wire, and for this reason they were able to continue the war. Certainly, the president of Liberia was behind the rebels, sharing the profit made from diamonds with RUF officials and providing arms in return.
In Sierra Leone there were three coups d'état in 10 years, the fighting intensified, and with corruption added to the picture, the government continued to be run down. Seizing the opportunity, the rebels became stronger, and tried to seize power by the use of force and terror.
But a government should be elected, the release of an arrested leader should be acquired by fair trial, and wealth should be earned by lawful economic activities. They instead used any way possible to get to their goals, and were indifferent when committing the most inhumane actions.
