By Lansana Fofana
FREETOWN, Feb 10 1997 (IPS)

While some Sierra Leoneans have welcomed the departure from their nation of mercenaries hired by a South African outfit, people in areas where the soldiers of fortune had been deployed are now worried about their safety.

The mercenaries, contracted in mid-1995 by the Executive Outcomes company to help the Sierra Leonean army against Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, left here on Feb. 3.

In areas like the diamond-rich eastern district of Kono, many people are not happy to see them go since they attribute the relative calm there in the past two and a half years to the presence of the mercenaries.

“Never did rebels attack Kono district in all the years that Executive Outcomes were here,” says Kai Bockarie, a 43-year-old miner. “We know the RUF had always eyed Kono because of the wealth of the region and the government should exercise caution about troop withdrawal.”

Komba Mani, a civil servant in Kono, which had been twice overrun by the RUF before the mercenaries were sent there, fears that the rebels may seize the area again to exploit its minerals so as to buy weapons despite a November peace agreement.

“I don’t see the exit of the South African soldiers as realistic,” comments Mani. “We hear often about fresh rebel attacks in Kailahun district (in the northeast), in the east and parts of the north. Who knows when they will attack Kono?”

Executive Outcomes was hired around May 1995 by the then ruling military junta, the National Provisional Ruling Council, to replace Nepalese Gurkhas whose performance against the rebels had been viewed as less than satisfactory. Many here feel that it was only the mercenaries hired by the South African outfit who prevented the rebels from capturing Freetown, in mid-1995 when they reached within 30 kms of the capital.

The mercenaries’ departure was in compliance with a November peace deal signed in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, by RUF leader Foday Sankoh and Sierra Leonean President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, elected in March 1996.

The rebels originally made the mercenaries’ withdrawal a pre- condition for talks with the government, shelved that demand at the request of foreign mediators, and then brought it up again after the November accord.

That agreement ended, at least officially, a civil war that killed an estimated 10,000 people and displaced up to a quarter of the roughly 4.5 million Sierra Leoneans since it broke out in 1991.

“As far as we are concerned, Executive Outcomes did a very brilliant job by augmenting the morale of the Sierra Leone army, which was undoubtably sinking low,” admits a senior military officer.

Refusing to confirm whether each of the mercenaries was really paid a rumoured 100,000 U.S. dollars a month, a senior adviser of Kabbah told IPS: “I am not aware of how much the government owes them and how that has been settled. We inherited the mercenary element in the war. And we are only happy that they are gone.”

But others are not, especially since there have been rebel attacks on more than 10 villages in the southeast and north of the country since the November accord, whose provisions include a disarmament process due to start soon.

‘Unity Now’, a weekly newspaper, reported this week that Portuguese mercenaries were spotted in the south-eastern district of Kailahun, the scene of recent skirmishes.

“The Portuguese have been training RUF and Guinean dissidents near the Sierra Leone-Guinea border … to enable the RUF to retake the main areas which they lost to the combined Kamajor (militias) and military operations late last year,” the paper reported, quoting a survivor of one of the clashes.

Moreover, with disarmament underway in neighbouring Liberia, speculation is rife in Sierra Leone that Liberian ex-rebels may be selling weapons to RUF dissidents across the south-eastern border.

Mani fears that, “with the disarmament process (in Sierra Leone) not too far away, the RUF may … want to grab as many territories as possible, so that they may assert control, whether or not the disarmament takes place.”

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