Global Policy Forum

By Derek Brown

He is an improbable politician, let alone national leader. But even Foday Sankoh's enemies acknowledge that the leader of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) has rabble-rousing charisma.

A former army corporal and television cameraman, Sankoh was a student leader in the 1970s. Briefly imprisoned for his firebrand politicking, he later joined a group of exiles in Libya, where Muamar Gadafy was eagerly spreading his crackpot revolutionary ideas among West African dissidents.

Sankoh's stepping stone back to Sierra Leone was the neighbouring republic of Liberia, where he formed a close alliance with ruthless rebel chief Charles Taylor, who seized the presidency in 1998 after an appalling eight-year campaign of terror.

Sponsored by Taylor, Sankoh set up his RUF and launched his own insurrection in 1991. Initially fuelled by violent rhetoric against the corruption of the Freetown elite, revolutionary fervour soon degenerated into bloodlust and greed for control of the nation's only significant source of wealth: the diamond mines in the east.

The RUF imposed its will in the interior of the impoverished country with systematic barbarity. Its ragtag forces, including a high proportion of press-ganged and brutalised children, became notorious for abduction, gang rape and summary execution. Its speciality was hacking off the limbs of children. In a land with chronic food shortages, the RUF is also said to have practised cannibalism.

Sankoh's response to criticism has always taken two forms. He blandly denies atrocities and, when possible, puts to death his critics. Two of his early Libyan-trained comrades, Abu Kanu and Rashid Mansaray, were summarily executed after they tried to moderate the excesses of the RUF.

As the welter of blood spread, events in the capital, Freetown, added to the misery of Sierra Leone. In 1992, a young army captain, Valentine Strasser, seized power and clung to it with the aid of a motley group of white mercenaries, who were promised a generous share of the country's diamond wealth in return for restoring order.

Charles Taylor, the Liberian warlord, had other ideas. He gave liberal aid to the RUF to keep Sierra Leone in turmoil, while Liberia's own diamond exports - under Taylor's control - steadily mounted.

A ray of hope shone when Ahmed Tejan Kabbah was democratically elected president, with the backing of Nigeria and other West African allies, which formed a regional peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG. But Kabbah was deposed in 1997 in another military coup led by Colonel Johnny Paul Koroma.

The following year ECOMOG forces reinstalled President Kabbah. The civil war went on, with the West African force lined alongside Sierra Leone's pathetic army and the even weirder militia known as the Kamajors, against the ousted Koroma military junta and the RUF.

Last year brought a fragile truce. Sankoh, reported to have found a new faith in God, had been captured and sentenced to death. Instead, he was offered a place in a coalition government - with control of the diamond mines. The United Nations assembled a new peacekeeping force, and the RUF fighters, along with the other disparate groups of militia brigands, were supposed to integrate with the national army.

That pipedream has now evaporated with the RUF's capture of several hundred UN soldiers and the savage new eruption of fighting in the interior. Most of the warriors scrabbling in the wreckage of Sierra Leone are untrained, undisciplined and unhinged by drugs and drink.

Sankoh's capture is unlikely, in the short term, to affect the dire situation of a country which has, in any meaningful sense of the word, ceased to exist. At least 50,000 Sierra Leoneans have died since the RUF launched its bloody campaign. Up to a quarter of a million are believed to have fled into exile. The death rate from starvation is around 100 a day, and for the survivors, life is filled with terror and misery.

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