When the State Fails

Studies on Intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War

Tunde Zack-Williams

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780745332208
• eBook ISBN: 9781849646215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Compared with Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, the recent western intervention in Sierra Leone has been largely forgotten. When the State Fails rectifies this, providing a comprehensive and critical analysis of the intervention. The civil war in Sierra Leone began in 1991 and was declared officially over in 2002 after UK, UN and regional African military intervention. Some claimed it as a case of successful humanitarian intervention. The authors in this collection provide an informed analysis of the impact of the intervention on democracy, development and society in Sierra Leone. The authors take a particularly critical view of the imposition of neoliberalism after the conflict. As NATO intervention in Libya shows the continued use of external force in internal conflicts, When the State Fails is a timely book for all students and scholars interested in Africa and the question of 'humanitarian intervention'.

 

Part I

Introduction: The Failure of a Democratic Experiment

Tunde Zack-Williams

At independence in 1961, Sierra Leone had all the legal trappings of a functioning state: a democratically elected parliament by universal franchise, a relatively independent judiciary, an executive consisting of elected members of parliament, and a relatively efficient civil service. However, this attempt at nation-state building was not rooted on firm foundations, as soon became clear six years after independence in 1967: following a closely fought general election, the ethnic schism that had threatened the constitutional talks in London reappeared when the army commander stepped in to prevent the opposition APC, which appeared to have won the elections, from succeeding the ruling SLPP. This event, which brought to an end the experiment in democracy (Collier 1970), had a far-reaching effect on the country’s political and economic trajectory: not only did the coup help to entrench violence into the body politic of the nation, but by the outbreak of the war, political violence and thuggery had become normal, to the extent that terms such as ‘party thugs’, ‘election by unopposed’ (forcing opposition candidates to withdraw through threat of, or actual, violence) had entered the political lexicon. This widespread violence weakened the zeal of the people to challenge rogue politicians, with many people exiting politics, thus paving the way for dictatorships to silence a large section of civil society and other counter-hegemonic forces. The whole political process under Stevens and his successor, Joseph Momoh, was punctuated by the constant declaration of states of emergency as a mechanism for taming the opposition through mass arrest and managing the crisis of the one-party state (Zack-Williams 1985). Not surprisingly, by the time war broke out in March 1991, Sierra Leone had become a failed state where vital social and political institutions had either collapsed or had ceased to function, and the economy had been bankrupted through neo-patrimonial politics and kleptocracy (see Chapter 1). However, the coup de grace for the Sierra Leone economy was the government’s excessive expenditure in hosting the annual conference of the OAU, a move that left the country chronically indebted. The above raises the question about the sustainability of a ‘fictive’ or ‘soft’ state like Sierra Leone, which is formatively functional but reproductively dysfunctional (Kandeh 1992). Furthermore, it was clear that Sierra Leone was in deep crises: the neo-patrimonial mode of accumulation was in tumult, as resources for its reproduction diminished. Experiencing a sense of hopelessness and inter-generational betrayal, the country’s youths were looking for the way out, but without a viable corpus of intellectuals to lead the struggle for national renewal, they turned to ‘lumpen leadership’, which turned their legitimate cry for change into an orgy of violence.

By contrast, the leadership of the imperialist centres saw the plight of Sierra Leoneans as simply a failure on the part of the governing class to develop and reinforce the institutions which were bequeathed at independence. In their view the raison d’être of post-conflict reconstruction is a return to the equilibrium of the Weberian state of rational-legal authority, with clear lines of authority and responsibility, above all a state where the market is supreme and the channel to this neo-liberal state is the liberal peace, a theme to which Kandeh returns.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The book is divided into two parts: Part I deals with the nature of multinational interventions, the various forms of international actors, such as the United Nations and ECOMOG, and looks critically at the liberal peace and attempt to recreate a Weberian state. Chapter 1 sets the context of the entire volume by considering the imperative for multilateral intervention as well as discussing and identifying some structural explanations of the conflict. The chapter starts with an explanation of why Charles Taylor tried to export the Liberian conflict to Sierra Leone by looking at the role of the Sierra Leone government as a peace broker in the civil war in Liberia. Though Taylor’s intervention was the spark which ignited the conflict, this was not a sufficient condition for conflict; there were other underlining historical factors which precipitated the war. In his discussion of the role of ECOMOG in peacekeeping in Liberia, Zack-Williams argues that Charles Taylor’s initial design on Sierra Leone was not the country’s diamonds, but the need to seek revenge because the Sierra Leonean president allowed ECOMOG aircraft to utilise his country’s airport in order to bomb Taylor’s front-line troops, thus denying them the capture of Monrovia, the Liberian capital. This explanation questions the much vaunted ‘greed not grievance’ thesis as a causation of the war, and as Gberie and others are at pains to point out, diamonds in exchange for arms came much later in the civil war. In short, diamonds may have prolonged the war, but they were not the cause of the conflict. Other interventions examined are the role of Sandline International, the Gurkhas, Executive Outcomes, the United Nations peacekeeping force (UNAMSIL) and the British paratroopers. However, not all the interventions in the war came from outside, there were also the military coups of ‘roving banditries’ (Moncur 1993) such as the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which forced the civilian president to flee to Guinea in both 1996 and 1999.

Kandeh’s chapter on intervention and peacebuilding (Chapter 4) takes a critical view of the nature of the Sierra Leone state and in particular he questions the attempt to implement neo-liberal solutions by transplanting the best practices of Western societies to the alien environment of Sierra Leone. Drawing attention to the major differences between the Sierra Leone state and its Western Weberian orthodoxy, Kandeh points to the absence of a sizeable middle class, in addition to the preponderance of a politically marginalized peasantry and ‘the dominance of a political class whose mode of accumulation is incommensurate with both democracy and development’, all pointers to the possible hindrance to the neo-liberal project. He argues that perhaps it is too early to describe Sierra Leone’s post-conflict experience as a success, given the fact that Western investment in post-conflict development in Sierra Leone may serve as a yardstick for other post-conflict situations in Africa. Kandeh, like the other contributors, has drawn attention to the contributions made by the international community, and the government of the United Kingdom in particular, to the reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts in Sierra Leone.

Commenting on Collier’s (2007) work, Kandeh offers a caveat that whilst non-landlocked Sierra Leone fulfils two of Collier’s ‘traps’, these are only superficially relevant to understanding the impediments of social and institutional progress. He warns:

Bad governance explains, but is not explained by, conflicts and natural resources. Armed domestic conflicts over natural resources occur in a context of bad governance and, contrary to some erroneous narratives of the Sierra Leone conflict, including Collier’s, the country’s armed rebellion was not caused by diamonds but by a mode of governance that is antithetical to both the developmental aspirations of society and the global neo-liberal agenda. It is the persistence of a predatory governance logic that poses the greatest threat to post-conflict peacebuilding in Sierra Leone.

Kandeh points out that whilst two successful post-conflict elections have been conducted, these elections have not delivered significant changes in governance practice in Sierra Leone, and the socio-economic conditions of the mass of the Sierra Leonean people have not improved significantly. Furthermore, quoting Samuel Huntington, Kandeh observes that democracy can be safe in the hands of elites only if they believe that they have an interest in promoting it or a duty to achieve it. The question that Kandeh poses is whether or not such elites are to be found in Sierra Leone, since we know that they are absent in many parts of the world. In short, are the political classes in Sierra Leone (and Africa in general) committed to democracy and market reforms, which all tend to run contrary to their mode of accumulation? He warns that democracy and the free market demands functioning states that can perform basic tasks, and without such a set up peace and development are not achievable. The reality is that only a few African states could be said to have this capacity, thanks to the mode of accumulation and the effect of neo-liberal conditionality under the SAPs. Kandeh poses the paradox:

The cultural particularity of neo-liberalism and the centrality of welfare provisioning in state and peacebuilding raises the question of whether liberal-pluralist democracy and a self-regulating market economy are, in the short-run, best suited to sub-Saharan Africa.

Furthermore, he notes:

States do not become sustainable democracies as a result of external intervention and it is far better to embed institutions in the histories, cultures, needs and interests of mass publics than in the ‘best practices’ of the West because neither the socio-economic conditions prevalent in Africa nor the mode of accumulation characteristic of its governing elites are particularly conducive to the liberal governance promoted by Western countries and donor agencies.

For Kandeh, the way out for Africa is the social democratic alternative or the ‘developmental state’ with ‘embedded autonomy’, though he argues that their realization is even more distant and remote. He then traces the history of and functions of peacebuilding by the United Nations, initially under former Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali and his successor Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The main thrust of peacebuilding being to bring together the various relevant actors to mobilize resources for post-conflict recovery support institutions and sustainable development. In his conclusion, Kandeh observes that the failure of external intervention to lift Sierra Leone out of poverty can be attributed to the ‘gross mismanagement of donor resources by political incumbents, top bureaucrats and their associates’: plus de choses changent, plus ils restent le même.

Michael Kargbo’s chapter (Chapter 3) is a case study of the United Kingdom’s effort at peacebuilding and strengthening of democracy in Sierra Leone. Britain as the former colonial power had strong historical ties with Sierra Leone going back to the American War of Independence, when slaves who fought on the side of the British were promised freedom. At the end of the war, some were taken initially to Nova Scotia in Canada where they were promised land, others sailed across the Atlantic heading for London. Following the campaign by philanthropists such as William Wilberforce, Fowell Buxton and Granville Sharp, these Black Poor, as they were known in Elizabethan England, were settled in the Province of Freedom, Sierra Leone in 1787. In 1791, the settlement was taken over by the Sierra Leone Company and in 1808 Sierra Leone became a Crown Colony. However, there were two further developments which helped to focus attention on Britain’s relationship with Sierra Leone during the conflict. First, New Labour under Prime Minister Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had just launched a new ‘ethical foreign policy’ and the Sierra Leone theatre of war was one of the early places to test its merit. Second, Prime Minister Blair’s father had taught at the local university, which engendered special affinity for this little corner of Africa. Finally, New Labour came to power with a promise to address development issues in the less developed countries and set up a special department within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development (DFID), with a Secretary of State and a seat in the Cabinet. It is through DFID that much of Britain’s efforts were channelled.

As Kargbo argues, the interest shown by New Labour was in marked contrast to the preceding period under the Tories when, in line with the politics of neo-liberalism, Africa was treated with benign neglect. Indeed, the debacle in Somalia which resulted in the death of US service personnel and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu had signalled the end of intervention by Western forces based on peace enforcement. According to General Sir David Richards, the man who led British forces into Sierra Leone in 2000 to rid the country of the remnants of the AFRC and the West Side Boys, he asked Prime Minister Blair and Foreign Secretary Cook if he could return to Sierra Leone to finish the job off, thus bringing the war to a speedy end.

The intervention did not win universal approval in Britain, as Kargbo reminds us, with the Left accusing New Labour of ‘being stock in the mire of the Whiteman’s burden’, though it was an attempt by the government to match foreign policy pronouncements with actions, and to make amends for the Sandline fiasco, when the government was accused of breaching UN embargo on the sale of arms to Sierra Leone. There were two important consequences of the British Intervention. First, militarily, British intervention was decisive in bringing the war to an end. Whilst the troops of ECOMOG fought valiantly against the rebels, they lacked the organization, superior weaponry and air power which guided British intervention. Second, British intervention and its success boosted the morale of the large contingent of UN troops (UNAMSIL), who had assembled in the country, some of whom had been abducted by Sankoh’s fighters. The speed, with which the rebels were routed enabled the disarmament process to resume. British intervention was not confined to the military arena, it also involved security sector reforms, including the police, training of a new national army, and the fire and prison services. There was also British support for the health service, justice sector reform, building the capacity of the National Electoral Commission and the fight against corruption with the setting up of the Anti-Corruption Commission.

In Part II, Sylvia Macauley (Chapter 6) looks at the relationship between gender, conflict and the role of women in nation rebuilding. She points out that by establishing a link between gender, conflict and the role of women in nation rebuilding one should be able to identify the significance of ‘gender for a more informed analysis of conflict and peacebuilding, in general, while emphasizing the need for such a transformative approach to alter the balance of power in gender relations’. Gender balance had not been addressed by successive post-colonial regimes, as women continue to be over-represented among the illiterate population, the poor, and victims of abuse, including state sanctioned genital mutilation. The phenomenon of powerful women in public life (such as Mrs Constance Cummings-John, Madam Ella Koblo Gulama, and Madam Honoria Bailor-Caulker), so characteristic of the late colonial period, seems to have disappeared in the post-colonial period.

War inevitably tends to place extreme stress on social relations, including gender relations, and women’s subordinate status may be worsened by the failure to match increased economic responsibilities with ‘increased power in decision making and resource allocation’ (El Bujra and Piza-Lopez 1994: 181). Women and children as weaker members of society tend to be victims of a disproportionate level of violence, including gender-related crimes in the case of women (ibid.). Among other factors, the impact of war on a woman will also be determined by her socio-economic status and her ability to buy her escape out of the war zone. Thus poor rural women in Sierra Leone were some of the worst victims of the war: victims of sexual attack, their houses and possessions burnt by rebels, they could not easily escape the war zone as refugees to neighbouring countries or abroad. Sylvia Macauley warns that in order to restore the dignity of women the state has to be more pro-women if the nation is to avoid a repeat of a conflict characterized by gender-based violence with all the humiliating consequences for women.

Not only did women participate in the war as fighters, but thousands of young women and girls were abducted by rebel leaders and many were transformed into sex slaves as wives of commanders. By the end of the war, many of them had become teenage mothers and were stigmatized as ‘rebel wives’, facing rejection by their parents, their communities and headteachers, who would not have them back in their schools for fear of the corrosive effects on their girls. Large numbers of women lost limbs, became refugees in neighbouring countries and were separated from their families, but women were also more than victims of the war. Women were proactive in forcing the regimes of Captain Strasser and Major Maada Bio to give in to democratic demands for elections before a peace treaty was signed with RUF leader Foday Sankoh. This move was led by Women for a Morally Engaged Nation (WOMEN) and donors who held that a speedy return to democratic pluralism was a sine qua non for peace in the country.

Poor governance ranks high on the list of causal factors. Others include ‘greed not grievance’, conflict over natural resources (Collier 2000; Kaplan 1994), crisis of youth (Abdullah 2005; Richards 1996; Peters 2006), and the crisis of patrimonial rule and economic decline (Zack-Williams 1999). One important aim of external intervention was to quickly return Sierra Leone back to democracy whilst building sustainable peace through structural reforms and institutional capacity building. It is this issue of peacebuilding democratic consolidation that Marcella Macauley addresses in her contribution (Chapter 2). She points out that the making of the Sierra Leone debacle started well before the war; furthermore, the country’s leaders had long lost their legitimacy in the eyes of their people due to bad governance. She draws attention to the fact that in international circles there is a widespread belief that financial support can help strengthen democracy in former non-democratic state like Sierra Leone, resulting in the establishment of a global policy network ready and able to deliver democracy across the globe. In Sierra Leone these agencies adopted a pincer approach: democracy promotion and peacebuilding within a framework of post-conflict reconstruction. In this task, they were aided by some 60 non-governmental organizations as well as global civil society, such as the UNDP, the UNHCR, the UNO, UNESCO, and the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission. She poses an important question about ownership of democracy: is it the people’s prerogative or is it that of the international civil society and their allies in the NGO community?

That security sector (in the broad sense to include the judiciary and parliament) reform has been top of the reform agenda is not surprising, given the fact that the sector had been bastardized by successive administrations, including Albert Margai, who introduced ethnicity within the armed forces and the civil service, and Siaka Stevens, who was contemptuous of democracy and downgraded the army, whilst boosting the ‘palace guards’ – the ISU/SSD. Similarly, Momoh’s reliance on the Ekutay was also at the expense of parliament and the cabinet. The coup of 1992, like all such previous interventions, was an attack on democracy, which also destroyed the command structure of the armed forces. In his analysis of the security sector, Osman Gbla (Chapter 5) undertakes a critical examination of the role of external actors, especially the British and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) initiatives in security sector reform programmes. Gbla argues that the role of these external actors could only ensure national ownership and sustainability if they took into consideration the socio-cultural, economic and political realities of Sierra Leone. Furthermore, he contends that security sector reform/reconstruction programmes for countries in transition from war to peace and democracy should also endeavour to factor in their conceptualization of those aspects of external actors’ contributions that may add to insecurity. He also discusses the theoretical and conceptual issues bordering on postwar reconstruction, including security sector reform as well as the background to Sierra Leone’s sec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Map of Sierra Leone
• PART I
• Introduction: Background to War and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
• 1. Multilateral Intervention in Sierra Leone’s Civil War: Some Structural Explanations: Tunde Zack-Williams
• 2. International Actors and Democracy Promotion in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Time for Stock-Taking: Marcella Macauley
• 3. International Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: The Case of the United Kingdom: Michael Kargbo
• 4. Intervention and Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: A Critical Perspective: Jimmy D. Kandeh
• PART II
• 5. The Role of External Actors in Sierra Leone’s Security Reform: Osman Gbla
• 6. Gender, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Africa: The Sierra Leone Experience: Sylvia Macauley
• 7. Youth Marginalization in Post-War Sierra Leone: Mapping out the Challenges for Peace: J. D. Ekundayo-Thompson
• 8. Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: The Role of the Sierra Leone Diasporas: Zubairu Wai
• 9. Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Historical Outline: The Making and Unmaking of Sierra Leone
• Appendix 2 Minerals and the Mining Industry in Sierra Leone
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index