Sierra Leone: The path from pariah to peace

A few days after New Year's 1999, the rebel group Revolutionary United Front (RUF), together with gangs of former government soldiers, staged the most violent attack yet on the capital, Freetown. The mission was code-named "Spare No Living Thing." Thousands of civilians were killed, raped, and mutilated with machetes. The sky filled with circling vultures, drawn to the blood.

That was when Baimba Bompa-Turay fled into the jungle.

"The war met me in 1999," he says from his bed at the Kissy mental hospital outside Freetown. His father was arrested. His sister was shot. "After that, I ran for dear life."

But he couldn't run far enough. In March of that year, Mr. Bompa-Turay was captured by the RUF and forced to join their ranks.

In the months and years that followed, the killings – some 50,000 in all – contin- ued. In May 2000, 500 UN peacekeepers were taken hostage by the RUF. The rebels seemed unstoppable.

"There was an overall feeling right then that we were a failure," admits Margaret Novicky, spokeswoman for the United Nations mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). "We felt it was just a repeat of the UN failures in Rwanda and Somalia. In fact, some of us were ready to conclude that peacekeeping in general would always be a failure. Those were dark days."

Bompa-Turay spent those days doing "vicious things," he says. However, "I did not kill people." Then he reconsiders. "I killed enemies." How many? he is asked. "I lost count," he replies. Whole families burned inside houses while he and his friends shot at anyone who tried to escape. His commanders gave him drugs, cutting slits above his eyebrow or along his jaw line, rubbing in the cocaine. "We were invincible ... and we had no idea what we were doing," he says.

This was Sierra Leone just two years ago. For 10 years, rebels waged a scorched-earth campaign against corrupt leaders that they saw squandering the country's vast diamond wealth for their own benefit. Those same diamonds helped fund the rebels and fuel the war. Most international observers didn't see much hope for peace in this West African country.

But a mere two years after the last low point of May 2000, a peace agreement is in place, calm elections have been held, and the government has regained control of the country. Over 47,000 combatants have disarmed and begun rehabilitation programs, some 80,000 refugees have returned home, and tens of thousands more displaced people have been reunited with their families.

President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, elected in May, faces a tall order. The underlying causes for the civil war – unequal access to resources, abuse of power, and regional instability – continue to haunt Sierra Leone. Illegal diamond smuggling continues. Peace here is fragile.

Nonetheless, Sierra Leone is deemed a success story. Its transformation is a lesson in what can be accomplished with enough international attention, money, and goodwill.

"I did not get anything good from this war," says Bompa-Turay. "It was a just a waste of time. But I thought I would never escape it, and I did. We all did. I'm not sure how that happened, but I am thankful."

The lowest point for him personally, recalls Bompa-Turay, was when he was ordered to march into neighboring Guinea in September 2000. Ill-equipped and ill-prepared, the RUF sustained heavy casualties and was pushed out four months later.

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