In pre-colonial days, predatory African politics, especially in the drought-prone regions, ensured their legitimacy by leadership claims to making rain -- a fraud not very different from the modern politician's claim to be able to control inflation. But in the harsh, non-ritualistic, secular world of post-colonial politics, such a claim would be laughable. The basic institutions of the State have to be rebuilt, and this is a task that must necessarily go hand in hand with any peacekeeping mission confronting such complete State collapse. When my colleagues -- Ian Smillie and Ralph Hazleton -- and I met to plan the research, which resulted earlier this year in our now widely circulated The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security, we tried to confront the question of the RUF's persistence in the context of a collapsed State, as well as another more vexing question: what motivates the ragged collection of RUF teenagers and very young adults -- people who even with the most liberal interpretation cannot be said to be politically, never mind ideologically, conscious in any meaningful way, people who so determinedly commit atrocities so horrible and so bizarre that they must shock even the most blind nihilist?

I had struggled with this question before, in 1997, when I was writing an earlier reflective piece on the war. It was clear even then that, minus its leadership and its mercenary component, the RUF was dominated by young boys and girls -- some as young as 9 or 10 years -- who were violently inducted into the group by a process of de-institutionalization. Young captives are drugged and forced to commit atrocities on family members; that way, they cannot desert -- in any case, the RUF kills the deserters it captures, and pro-government forces have been known to summarily execute those it captures or who surrender. So there is, as British veteran Sierra Leone watcher Paul Richards argues, a "Darwinian process" at work through which these child soldiers become "human rights abusing products of human rights abuse": "Leading fighters -- many abducted -- fear civilian revenge and being placed on trial for human rights abuses. They depend on the violent solidarity of the movement."

My argument is this: the RUF undoubtedly emerged in the midst of a widespread national debate about scrapping the failed one-party State, re-instituting multiparty democracy and curbing corruption. But neither its leaders nor its backers were a part of this national debate, and they were wholly driven by mercenary interests. These interests revolve mainly around the rich diamond fields, which serve to underwrite the RUF's weapons purchases and act as the glue that holds together the otherwise ideologically bankrupt RUF.

It is important to note that a good number of RUF leaders who joined the group voluntarily, such as the notoriously blood-thirsty former commander Sam Bockarie, are ex-illicit diamond miners, and that any serious RUF military confrontations have been directed primarily at the diamond-rich districts of eastern Sierra Leone.

An adolescent boy weaves a basket in a vocational training workshop with other children at a centre run by the Christian Brothers, a local NGO that works with unaccompanied, abused and street children, as well as former child soldiers, in the southern town of Bo. UNICEF Photo/Giacomo Pirozzi.

We made this argument in The Heart of the Matter and drew this modest conclusion: "Only the economic opportunity presented by a breakdown in law and order could sustain violence at the levels that plagued Sierra Leone after 1991." We focused on the political economy of conflict now being made popular by scholars such as Paul Collier, David Keen and others. This approach is antithetical to that of Robert Kaplan and others who have depicted such conflicts as anarchic and driven by "ancient hatreds". It is views such as Kaplan's, one suspects, which influence some of the best assaults, like Traub's, on the concept of humanitarian intervention. For is it not Kaplan who, in the book that followed his widely read 1994 Atlantic Monthly article "The Coming Anarchy", casually proposes that the way to maintain world peace is for the United States Congress to authorize the assassination of troublesome leaders as a political instrument, and to understand that democracy is not suited for much of the Third World? And that the concept of humanitarian intervention is bogus because world peace would actually make war more likely? The subtext is, don't get involved, we have no interest there: leave it perhaps to the mercenaries. Traub views this last option favourably as well, taking issue with our report for lamenting that legitimate Governments, like President Kabbah's of Sierra Leone, should be forced by world abandonment into "Faustian bargains" with mercenaries like the South African Executive Outcomes. But since mercenaries fight for money, it should be obvious -- once that cat is out of the bag as a viable policy option -- that they would be available as well to rebels. No one can predict the outcome of such an approach, especially as there are so many small wars in so many places with the resources to sustain them.

The UN intervention in Sierra Leone has undoubtedly been good, although there have been a number of very serious errors. As Brian Urquhart noted in The New York Review of Books (15 June 2000), the major problem was the lack of a robust military presence, one that could send a clear message to any predator that there is a stronger force than them in the field.

Hawa Hinga was admitted with an ectopic pregnancy and has just undergone surgery. She is examined by a nurse in the maternity ward of a government hospital in Bo. UNICEF Photo/Giacomo Pirozzi.

Recently, after the Jordanian component of the UN force fired back and reportedly killed 10 RUF rebels, some commentators wondered whether the RUF might react with more attacks on the Jordanians. They misunderstand the basic character of the RUF: bandits fight only when they know they are not going to be killed, for their primary concern is to stay alive and enjoy the loot. This explains why the RUF has mainly targeted civilians rather than armed opponents. The big UN mistake occurred when a group of UNAMSIL soldiers meekly handed over their weapons to a group of teenage rebels. That surrender went beyond tactical defeat; it brought the whole UN mission into disrepute and contempt.

In the final analysis, however, episodic shows of strength will not curb the RUF terror, for over the years the rebels have shown a surprising resilience. And at the moment they have more than enough resources -- arms and ammunition -- to continue to embarrass the United Nations and to harass civilians. An all-out assault on them should not be ruled out. But even this must be supplemented by action on the economic front, since the war is all about making money through the illegal diamond trade. The recent UN Security Council embargo on Sierra Leonean diamonds which do not carry a government certificate is a good one, but it will not affect the RUF, whose diamonds are traded internationally as Liberian.

Unfortunately, the UN resolution mentioned Liberia only tangentially, placing an embargo on the victim rather than the perpetrator. Thus, Belgium quickly announced a ban on Sierra Leonean diamonds following the Security Council resolution, but made no mention of Liberia. Liberia's annual diamond production capacity is not much more than 100,000 carats. But in 1999, the Belgian Diamond High Council recorded imports from Liberia of more than 1.7 million carats -- a high proportion of these are Sierra Leonean diamonds.

The UN Charter and the most elementary concepts of human rights and humanitarian intervention imply, over and above anything else, that complicity of States in violence and terror against civilians should be addressed squarely -- this is not being done in the case of Sierra Leone, and this is the principal problem.

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