Kabbah had been in office just fourteen months on May 25, 1997, when he was faced with a coup, this time by a group of Sierra Leone Army noncommissioned officers calling themselves the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). They forced Kabbah’s government to flee to neighboring Guinea. The AFRC then freed and armed six hundred prisoners from Pademba Road Prison, among whom was former corporal Johnny Paul Koroma, who was being held on treason charges, and whom they immediately set up as chairman. Inviting the RUF to rule jointly with the AFRC, Koroma appointed RUF leader Foday Sankoh as his deputy chair. Sankoh was unable to accept as he was by then in detention in Nigeria, but he gave his blessing to the new regime and urged his men to come out of the bush and join the new government.
The coup ushered in a period of wanton looting dubbed “Operation Pay Yourself,” in which thousands of people were raped, killed, or mutilated by AFRC/RUF forces. Public buildings, churches, and mosques were razed. CDF fighters retaliated against AFRC/RUF forces and their supporters and, in the words of one witness at the TRC, “became worse oppressors than the RUF rebels.” The Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), a peacekeeping force led by Nigeria, intervened and was able to take control of Freetown, allowing Kabbah to return from exile in Guinea in March 1998.
The war continued nonetheless. Freetown was sacked on January 6, 1999, in the most intensive and concentrated period of human rights abuses committed during the war. In just two weeks, some ten thousand people were killed (including cabinet members, journalists, and lawyers, who were specifically targeted), two thousand women were raped, countless businesses were looted, and some five thousand homes were destroyed. Abductions reached their highest level during this period because AFRC/RUF fighters sought “numerical bulk,” so that they might use bodies as human shields. Fighting alongside the CDF, ECOMOG was able to push back the AFRC/ RUF forces, but in so doing they indiscriminately killed anyone suspected of being an AFRC/RUF sympathizer. Nigeria, which was under its own domestic pressure to pull out its troops, and other international partners, including the United States, pressured Kabbah to open a dialogue with the RUF.
On July 7, 1999, another peace accord was signed, this one in Lome, Togo. The Lome Peace Accord guaranteed complete immunity from prosecution to Sankoh and the RUF fighters, and offered Sankoh a place in government as head of the new Mineral Resources Commission with the rank of vice president (later on, Johnny Paul Koroma of the AFRC was offered the position of minister of the Commission for the Consolidation of Peace by President Kabbah). Sankoh apologized “for any inconvenience my revolution may have caused.”
The new peace was short-lived. In early May 2000, RUF rebels captured and held hostage 550 UN peacekeepers who had been part of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) to oversee the disarmament and demobilization of combatants authorized under the Lome Accord. Thousands of demonstrators marched to Sankoh’s Freetown home to oppose the RUF abductions and to insist that Sankoh adhere to the Accord’s stipulation to disarm. When they broke through the UNAMSIL barricade, Sankoh’s bodyguards shot into the crowd and killed at least ten civilians. In response, armed CDF and West Side Boys (a splinter group of the AFRC), who were among the demonstrators, fired into the compound. Sankoh was able to escape, but several young children within the compound were gunned down in cold blood by Kamajors, West Side Boys, and government forces responding to Johnny Paul Koroma’s call earlier in the week for a “Peace Task Force” to remove all RUF leaders. Sankoh was arrested and removed from his government position. With the Lome Accord now discredited and in tatters, Britain sent its own troops under its own command to restore order to Freetown. The final Accord was signed in Abuja, Nigeria, later that year, and President Kabbah declared the war officially over on January 18, 2002. The final toll: some seventy-five thousand civilians killed, two million people displaced, and twenty thousand civilians mutilated.
excerpted from chapter 1
