Sierra Leone, which recently captured the world's attention with pictures of crudely amputated babies and young people -- the handiwork of a bewildering and murderous group of "rebels" calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) -- is now being analyzed primarily as the United Nations most recent and perhaps final failure, the place where bold post-cold-war idealism about putting ordinary people above realpolitik was finally defeated by mindless terror. Writing in the prestigious New York Review of Books (29 June 2000), James Traub, an American journalist, was unambigious. Sierra Leone, he wrote, "has a chance to be remembered not simply for brutal warfare, but as the graveyard of UN peacekeeping -- or at least of the doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention' for which UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has become the chief spokesman". It is clear from his tone that Traub disapproves of the concept of humanitarian intervention in the first place, that what is happening to the United Nations in Sierra Leone was easily predictable, if not fitting. I will return to this point, for it is important in understanding why so laudable a venture as the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone should now be concerned about its basic justification. But first, it is important to understand the character of the Sierra Leone crisis, to inquire into its apparently intractable nature, the reasons for its terrors, coups and counter-coups, and its brutal and prolonged war.

UNICEF Photo/Giacomo Pirozzi

Sierra Leone is a small former British colony, created at the turn of the eighteenth century as a result of a sustained intellectual and moral debate about humanitarianism and realpolitik -- the abolition of the slave trade and European colonization of Africa. So it is almost fitting over 200 years later, in the midst of another sustained debate about humanitarianism and realpolitik following the end of the cold war, that Sierra Leone would again become the focus of international attention. The British abolitionists who helped found the State intended it "for the happy establishment of blacks and people of colour, to be shipped as freed men ... under the protection of the British Government". They were to enjoy "both civil and religious liberty as in Britain".

Sierra Leone was arguably the first modern State in sub-Saharan Africa, possessing its first western-style university, its first significant class of highly educated elite, its first press, lawyers, doctors, engineers and academics. For nearly two centuries, it was known as the "Athens of West Africa", sending out educators and Christian missionaries to spread "the lights of western civilization" to other parts of Africa and even beyond. At the time of its independence in 1961, in addition to its highly qualified and experienced civil service, its prestigious university and growing literacy, the nation of about 2.5 million (now 4.5 million) possessed an abundance of natural resources, ranging from some of the world's highest quality diamonds to iron, manganese, titanium, gold and valuable agricultural produce such as cocoa and coffee. A recent World Bank study -- Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implications for Policy (15 June 2000) -- informs us that an abundance of such primary and "lootable" commodities can only be a recipe for civil wars, but this is surely retrospective and the question must be asked: why is it that such a good beginning should end in such an incomparable disaster? It is a question that must also be asked of many other African countries that find themselves in similar but less dramatic predicaments.

Some scholars of Africa approach the problem merely from the vantage point of politics: they analyze it in terms of the continent's drift from western-style democracy after independence to single party dictatorship -- with all its terrors and corruption -- and then its collapse, almost as a deterministic process following the dictates of the continent's peculiar history and nature.

In the case of Sierra Leone, the "precursors" of the current troubles are deemed to have been President Siaka Stevens' brutal and corrupt regime (1968-1985), the imposition of the one-party State in 1978, the brutality of the security forces, the banning and exile of opponents, the undemocratic change of leadership bringing in President (formerly Major-General) Joseph Saidu Momoh and his markedly inept governance.

This approach is seductive; it fits in very neatly within the prevalent neo-liberal intellectual conceit. But it is important to remember that if one sets out to find precursors to contemporaneous problems, one is bound to find precursors to problems, and nothing but precursors to problems. And the conclusions will be wrong. Dictatorship and corruption do not necessarily lead to war; neither does poverty. It is easy to forget, given Sierra Leone's abysmal and violent state, that before the current troubles started in 1991, there were fewer incidents of violent crime -- armed robbery, rape and murder -- in the whole of this very poor country than in Toronto (Canada), one of the safest large cities in North America.

This war, as I will argue, is to a large extent the result of foreign invasion. The RUF was created outside of Sierra Leone by a Liberian rebel leader and, apart from its mercurial, corrupt commander Foday Sankoh and a handful of others, its core membership was initially made up of Liberian and Burkinabe mercenaries. This war is about greed not political grievance, about loot not politics, about diamonds not human rights or poverty alleviation, or good governance or civil society.

A civilian shows his identification papers to a boy soldier, a member of the government-allied Kamajor militia, at a checkpoint in Bo. UNICEF Photo/Giacomo Pirozzi.

So questions about the collapse and near-total destruction of the Sierra Leonean State must be modified. The crucial questions should be: why is it that a wholly self-interested and criminal organization like the RUF can recruit, support and inflict such violence and terror on the population?

And why are the State and its agents so ineffective in meeting the challenge? These questions go beyond viewing the RUF in the context of its random, millenarian violence, criminality and predation, to inquiring into the weaknesses of the State and its basic ineptitude. For if you take away the foreign component, the RUF problem would be little more than an issue for the police in a well-run State. But years of single-party misrule helped to erode the institutional fabric and legitimacy of the State: collecting taxes, for example, a problem even during the colonial days, became essentially a matter for informal, criminal networks.

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