Securing Sierra Leone, 1997-2013

Defence, Diplomacy and Development in Action

Peter Albrecht, Paul Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317334453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Between 1991 and 2002, Sierra Leone was wracked by a devastating civil war and the complete collapse of state institutions. Since then, however, the UK's contribution to post-war reconstruction has been widely held up as an example of successful stabilisation and state-building – particularly of the country's security and justice institutions.

Securing Sierra Leone, 1997–2013 examines how the process of state-building through security-sector reform developed in Sierra Leone, and the impact of this experience on international conceptualisations of such reform as well as on international interventions more broadly. The study is the most detailed of its kind, based on a comprehensive analysis of UK engagement in Sierra Leone between 1997 and 2013, including a host of first-hand accounts from key local and international actors.

This monograph shows why the UK intervention in Sierra Leone has been a relative success. However, it also questions the sustainability of state-building efforts that are driven by concepts of the liberal state. In Sierra Leone, critical challenges remain, not least in the combination of a particular vision of what a state should look like and the unrealistic expectations of progress on the part of the international community.

III. 2007-10: A New Government, a New Beginning

2007 was a watershed year because of the victory of the All People's Congress (APC) over the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) in that year's general election. This was the first peaceful change of government in Sierra Leone since the war. Indeed, there was a general sense that 'people wanted peaceful elections', according to Garry Horlacher, UK adviser to the Office of National Security (ONS) during the election period.¹ Although this in turn meant that 'all we put in place wasn't really tested', it did also indicate a functioning security sector.²

The election may have been conducted in a professional manner, but the country also suffered severe financial difficulties throughout the course of the year. Salaries were paid to the armed forces and the police, but many other public-sector employees went unpaid for months. In the first quarter of 2007, the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Defence (MoT)) received less than 5 per cent (412 million Leones, approximately $184,000) of its indicative quarterly allocation. One of the consequences was that the distribution of rice and fuel to the armed forces stopped until the suppliers had been paid the almost 3 billion Leones (approximately $1.25 million) owed to them. Furthermore, as then-Commander of the International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT) Brigadier Iain Cholerton noted, 'resources [within Sierra Leone's MoD] continue to be allocated to areas that are perhaps not critical to the most important activities of the RSLAF'.³ For instance, despite having been allocated only 412 million Leones in total, 24 million Leones were spent on allowances for six RSLAF personnel attending a UK-funded military observer's course (this money could instead have been spent on moving almost 800 soldiers and their families into quarters donated by the Indian government that year).

The transition of government also signalled the beginning of a more assertive leadership under President Ernest Bai Koroma and the APC. This was compounded by a general change in perception both domestically and internationally that Sierra Leone was moving from a situation of state failure to one of fragility and long-term development. This Was matched by growing efforts to achieve consistency in terms of external support to government priorities. Looking back at the early stages of UK support while the war was ongoing, Emmanuel Coker (who headed up the Sierra Leone government's Governance Reform Secretariat)⁴ recalls that 'the reform that was going on in [the] MoD was dictated by the British - the entire reform process was. The government at the time wanted SSR [security-sector reform], and the British were willing to do it'.⁵ This was partly necessary, because during the life of the Sierra Leone Security Sector Reform Programme (SILSEP), 'the emphasis in terms of [the] public sector was to get the institutions up and running, restore peace and stability, reconstruction, rehabilitation - these were the priorities at the time'.⁶ In some cases, as with the re-establishment of the Sierra Leone Police (SLP), British involvement was critical. As Coker observes:⁷

There was no way that the police could be reformed if Keith Biddle [Sierra Leone's first post-war IGP - inspector-general of police], had not come in. When he came in, he was devoid of old school boy networks, connections and relations. He could take drastic steps to do certain things without being blamed. A Sierra Leonean IGP would have found it difficult, would have been pressured by his school, his tribe, his mosque. Keith Biddle was able to do what no one was able to do.

The UK had also promoted the MoD 'as the nucleus of wide-ranging reform':⁸

The MoD was supposed to be the model. Not that they were imposing it directly. I wouldn't say that we were instructed to go that way, but the vibes that we were getting - in a very subtle way we were trying to adapt ... We had a strategy for the entire public sector, but the MoD was being pursued separately from those broader reforms. Most of us did not like it, because primacy should have been given to the police, [and priority given to having] ... the ONS up and running.

The challenge in this regard was to align the specific reforms that were being proposed with the broader direction being pursued in rebuilding the civil service. This was also to an extent the case with the implementation of the DflD-led Justice Sector Development Programme (JSDP) - with its focus on the judiciary, prisons and other areas of the justice sector from 2005. Initially, reforms were taken forward that were not actively co-ordinated with the government and the country's general direction of reform. 'We had to bulldoze our way in', Coker recalls, specifically regarding the UK's efforts to reform the MoD prior to 2007, and 'we did it by making management and functional reviews. While we conducted these reviews, we were able to make reforms that were to be implemented in ministries that were covered by other projects [such as SILSEP and the JSDP]'.⁹ In sum, there was an acceptance of the fact that separate financing for discrete areas of reform might be necessary, but there was also a growing need for consistency in how external support was provided, especially following the accession of a new government in 2007.

From 2007, there was some cynicism within Sierra Leone both about what international support could achieve and about what the agenda of external partners actually was. As a Sierra Leonean official close to events during this period notes: let's face it, there is no free lunch. The donors come in, and in the process they create jobs for their own people'.¹⁰ However, unlike the SLPP, which had only a 'truncated plan' for rebuilding Sierra Leone, the new APC government proved to be in a better position to clearly articulate its own priorities, first establishing 'An Agenda for Change' (2008-12) and, later, 'The Agenda for Prosperity' (2013—18),¹¹ the second and third Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), respectively. Sierra Leone was moving beyond the immediate peace-building phase and the reactive management of crisis upon crisis. The approach of the new government reflected this.

This chapter explores the evolution of the security sector under a government which had not been directly involved in SSR efforts thus far. Moreover, given that the SLPP had initiated the SSR process in a context of war, it was inevitable that the APC would approach the security sector differently. The chapter goes on to analyse how institutions such as the ONS and the Central Intelligence and Security Unit (CISU) adjusted to the new political reality, before exploring the continued efforts to downsize the RSLAF and the emergence of a clear purpose in building the army's peacekeeping capacity. Finally, the chapter deals with the general implications of changing support to the justice sector and what holistic justice reform meant in practice, including in relation to the police.

Changing International Support to National Security

The biggest change in international support to the ONS and CISU was the termination of SILSEP on 31 March 2008 - a decision that had been made in mid-2007 following stable presidential elections, and due to the DfID country team receiving a smaller than expected allocation in the UK Comprehensive Spending Review.¹² Financial support from DfID to CISU through the ONS continued, but the role of the CISU adviser was picked up by the UK intelligence community for another year, before the position was cut in 2009- By 2007-08, DfID gave only limited programme-level direction for SILSEP, which throughout its life had 'clearly suffered from [the] lack of a coherent strategy and in particular lack of an exit strategy'.¹³ This was partly because of reduced engagement as well as DflD's broadly limited expertise, understanding and appreciation of matters relating to national security and intelligence.

Generally speaking, it is also the case that the SSR community in DfID always has been small and, as argued earlier in this Whitehall Paper, was stifled by the changing approach to international interventions that followed 9/11 and the emergence of the UK's Stabilisation Unit, which is run by DfID, the MoD and the Foreign Office together.¹⁴ Increasingly reluctant to engage robustly in security-sector matters, DfID instead sought to refocus on what were considered 'core areas such as growth and basic service delivery, which in the long term would be the only way to both prevent a return to conflict and allow progress towards achieving the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals]'.¹⁵

Peace-building and transformation of the security sector had defined DflD's approach since the late 1990s, and SILSEP was initiated to address this need. However, following changes to the local context, by 2007 SILSEP had become:¹⁶

[A] slush fund for SSR, there was no log frame. Originally, it was spot-on perfect, a way to put money into issues that had to be dealt with quickly; but Sierra Leone was moving from a conflict to a fragile context, and there had to be more accountability and transparency. SILSEP was brilliant, but time moves on.

Even so, no exit strategy was ever prepared for the SILSEP programme or for the wider UK engagement in SSR. Difficulties consequently arose in two areas. First, DfID played no part in defining a clear role and capacity for the RSLAF, which would have facilitated a stronger agreement with the Sierra Leone government about a sustainable size for the armed forces and an attendant reform programme. Second, although a joint DflD-IMATT work plan was developed in 2006 and was seen as the exit strategy for DfID, it was not taken up and implemented by the commander of IMATT in 2007 because it was an election year.¹⁷

This led to a situation in which DflD's 2008 decision to withdraw almost entirely from SSR in Sierra Leone was interpreted by the Foreign Office and the UK MoD as unilateral and unexpected. In reality, however, DfID continued to tackle development matters linked to the underlying causes of conflict through its poverty reduction-related work - an approach which ultimately fits well with the notion of upstream conflict prevention that is explored in detail in Chapter V. DfID also remained engaged specifically in SSR through its adviser to the ONS.

At this stage of the ongoing consolidation of the ONS, advisers were viewed as protectors of the political independence of both the ONS and CISU against external interference. Under the previous president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, tension had frequently built up between the executive and the ONS, resulting principally from the insistence of the first post-war national security co-ordinator, Kellie Conteh, on ONS political neutrality. Yet Conteh could rely, to some extent, on the protection of advisers from the UK, who not only strongly backed an independent ONS, but also benefited from good relations with President Kabbah. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, after the 2007 elections there was also a sense within CISU and the ONS that more could have been done by external advisers to ease the transition from the SLPP to the APC, in explaining the two organisations' relevance as professional national security bodies, and underscoring their political neutrality. In 2008, then-National Security Coordinator Kellie Conteh noted:¹⁸

We need to maintain the level of advisers, whether they are visiting or permanent. They are Still that protector. Perhaps after the next elections [we can do without advisers], because we are still transforming, we are Still reforming, and we need those check and balances.

Indeed, there was an increasing realisation - including amongst intern...