The call for tough arms controls

Voices from Sierra Leone

This case study has been produced by Oxfam GB for the Control Arms Campaign in the United Kingdom. It is part of a series of reports produced by Amnesty International, Oxfam, and IANSA during the Campaign.

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The call for tough arms controls: Democratic Republic of Congo ¦ Haiti

Summary

The recent Hollywood film Lord of War depicted an arms broker who did not care who bought his guns, as long as somebody was buying. He procured weapons and ammunition in Eastern Europe and sold them in conflict zones in Africa, including Sierra Leone and Liberia. He used false documents, and exploited every available loophole in the law.

For once, the screenwriters were not making it up. The character might have been fictional, but his activities and methods mirrored those of the real arms dealers who supplied the rebels in Sierra Leone throughout the brutal war that ended in 2002. What the film showed little of was the human cost of those arms deals.

Fighting began in Sierra Leone in March 1991, when a small number of rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) crossed the border from Liberia and began attacking civilians. By the time the war was declared over, tens of thousands had been killed out of a population of five million, thousands had been mutilated or raped, and an estimated 10,000 children had been abducted to be child soldiers. Up to two-thirds of the population had been displaced from their homes, and another 600,000 had fled the country.

With these kinds of numbers, it is impossible to comprehend the magnitude of people’s losses. This report tells the stories of just four survivors. The arms trade impacts on real people; here are the stories that Hollywood will not show you.

In 2006, beginning in January, a series of debates on disarmament are due to take place at the United Nations. There will be technical arguments and diplomatic negotiations. The purpose of this report is to add to these discussions the voices of at least some of the people who bear the cost of the world’s continuing failure to control the arms trade.

The deep roots of Sierra Leone’s 11 years of war went back decades, involving corrupt governments that alienated the country’s youth and all but destroyed basic institutions, including parliament, the police, and the civil service. This dissatisfaction led to support for the rebels in the early years of the war. Inadequate government control of the armed forces permitted coups and allowed government soldiers to switch from one side to the other. Another major source of fuel for the conflict was the support that the RUF rebels received from Charles Taylor, then president of Liberia, who had wider ambitions for power in West Africa.

However, there was one factor that underpinned all of the others in sustaining the violence, and that was the continued supply of weapons, many of them paid for by the illegal sale of diamonds. Sierra Leone does not manufacture weapons. The outside world had to be prepared to supply them, and supply them it did.

War crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international humanitarian and human rights law were committed by all sides: the RUF rebels, who were responsible for violations throughout the war; the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which took power when army officers overthrew the elected government in a military coup in 1997; government troops; and the pro-government Civil Defence Force civilian militias, which were based on local tribal hunting societies.

In addition, Nigerian (ECOMOG) soldiers who restored President Kabbah to power in 1998, before UN peacekeepers arrived, were reported not to have taken enough measures to minimise the risk to civilians.

During all these years, both the countries that provided the weapons, and the countries through which they were shipped, failed to stop the flow of arms and ammunition to the rebels in Sierra Leone. The even wider failure is that of the international community at large which, even after these atrocities and others elsewhere, has failed to take the necessary measures to control the international arms trade. The rest of the world must take responsibility for the arms it supplies. To do that, governments should agree a new international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).

Date of original publication: January 2006