RIGHTS-SIERRA LEONE: UN Asked to Counter Former Junta’s Campaign

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 29 1998 (IPS) - The United Nations must act to prevent Sierra Leone’s ousted military alliance from continuing a gruesome campaign to kill and maim opponents in a bid to return to power, say leading human rights organisations.

On the eve of a new round of U.N. meetings to consider Sierra Leone’s lingering fighting, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International Wednesday called on the world body – and concerned nations – to help end the killings.

Although elected President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah was restored to power by a Nigerian-led regional military alliance, called ECOMOG, in February, the former ruling junta and its supporters from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) killed thousands of Sierra Leoneans in recent months, according to the two groups.

An HRW report released Wednesday, titled ‘Sierra Leone: Sowing Terror’, accused the former ruling Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (ARFC) and RUF of “committing widespread and egregious atrocities against unarmed civilians in an attempt to regain power.”

In one ARFC-RUF campaign, ‘Operation No Living Thing’, hundreds of people have reported being maimed and tortured and witnessing killings of even women and children.

“They captured me and said, ‘Lie on the floor’,” one fish seller, Helen C., told the HRW researchers. “I was cut by a small boy. Then they put my hand on a stone and cut me. They told me to go to Kabbah and tell him what happened.”

“I saw people with cutlasses and guns. So I started to run; they caught me and cut off both my hands,” said Franklin M., a farmer. “They said I was a supporter of Tejan Kabbah.”

“There are no words to condemn this sort of practise,” said Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, who visited Sierra Leone last month. Vieira de Mello said the ARFC-RUF campaign against civilians was the most brutal he had seen in 29 years of humanitarian work.

“What’s happening in Sierra Leone is so gruesome that it defies imagination,” argued Peter Takirambudde, executive director for HRW/Africa. “Civilians are bearing the brunt of these horrific abuses.”

Other practises, followed by all sides, have also drawn international outrage. The ousted junta continues to recruit child soldiers and to kidnap girls and women into sexual slavery – crimes which have repeatedly been condemned by the United Nations and other parties.

Tejan Kabbah’s restored government, however, also recruited soldiers under the age of 18 despite promises not to do so, the HRW report said. Government supporters, including the ethnic Kamajor warriors who have formed their own civilian paramilitaries, also have been accused of atrocities against the AFRC-RUF alliance.

“They (Kamajors) decapitated one surrendered soldier, and I saw them eat his raw liver and heart,” one Catholic priest told HRW.

Earlier this month, the UN Security Council approved the creation of a UN Observer Mission to Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL), which is entrusted with helping ECOMOG to disarm and demobilise soldiers and with monitoring the security and human rights situation in the country.

The HRW report contends that the mission should now also monitor arms traffic, particularly following its own findings that the ousted junta forces are continuing to receive weapons from abroad.

“In order to monitor and deter military support to the AFRC- RUF, a strong presence of UNOMSIL will be necessary to monitor arms trafficking, in particular along the porous border with Liberia,” the report says. “The monitoring of the Liberian border should be performed in conjunction with ECOMOG forces in Liberia.”

“It is important that there are adequate resources for UNOMSIL human rights monitors to be deployed in those areas of the country, in particular Eastern and Northern Provinces, where human rights abuses are being perpetrated,” says Amnesty International in its own recent report on the crisis.

There are some hopeful signs in Sierra Leone’s conflict, including a plea Wednesday by RUF leader Foday Sankoh – who was transferred this week from house arrest in Nigeria to detention in Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital – for the rebels to cease fighting.

“The Nigerian authorities have sent Foday Sankoh back…and he appealed to his supporters to stop the killing, to stop maiming people,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday. Now, the secretary-general added, the question is whether the RUF would go along with their leader’s pleas.

Annan added that he hoped this week’s UN meeting on Sierra Leone would “go beyond the reconstruction stage” and deal with the nation’s long-term problems. The UN session is intended to generate financial support for UNOMSIL’s demobilisation activities, as well as for assistance for child soldiers and other combatants.