Sierra Leone: Revolutionary United Front: Blood Diamonds, Child Soldiers and Cannibalism, 1991–2002

By Al J. Venter

Sierra Leones eleven-year guerrilla war that left 200,000 people dead was brief, bloody and mindlessly brutal. It was also the second African war in which mercenaries were hired to counter some of the worst atrocities that Africa had on offer. By the time it ended in 2002, several groups of mercenaries including an air wing equipped with a pair of ageing Mi-24 helicopter gunships and backed by the British Army and the Royal Navy played significant roles in quelling the bush rebellion.It was an idiosyncratic war, which started with the Foday Sankohs Revolutionary United Front (RUF) chanting the slogan No more slaves, no more masters, power and wealth to the people and ended with a series of battles for control for Sierra Leones diamond mines in the interior. By then the Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor and Libyas Muammar Gadaffi were the prime movers for the rebel cause, one of the reasons why anyone deemed to be the enemy doctors, journalists, civil servants, missionaries, nuns and teachers was slaughtered.The war gradually deteriorated into some of the most barbaric violence seen in any African struggle and which sometimes included cannibalism, with an army of 11,000 child soldiers some as young as nine or ten high on drugs rounding up entire neighbourhoods to machine-gun them en masse or burn them alive in their homes. Amputations of limbs of women, the very young and the very old were commonplace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526728784

Al J. Venter

Al J. Venter is a specialist military writer and has had 50 books published. He started his career with Geneva’s Interavia Group, then owners of International Defence Review, to cover military developments in the Middle East and Africa. Venter has been writing on these and related issues such as guerrilla warfare, insurgency, the Middle East and conflict in general for half a century. He was involved with Jane’s Information Group for more than 30 years and was a stringer for the BBC, NBC News (New York) as well as London’s Daily Express and Sunday Express. He branched into television work in the early 1980s and produced more than 100 documentaries, many of which were internationally flighted. His one-hour film, 'Africa’s Killing Fields' (on the Ugandan civil war), was shown nationwide in the United States on the PBS network. Other films include an hour-long program on the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as well as 'AIDS: The African Connection', nominated for China’s Pink Magnolia Award. His last major book was 'Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa', nominated in 2013 for New York’s Arthur Goodzeit military history book award. It has gone into three editions, including translation into Portuguese.

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INTRODUCTION

The eleven-year civil war in Sierra Leone was not entirely unexpected. There had been rumblings for years after several military coups, a national defence force that lacked discipline and was incapable of conducting even the most basic army operations, coupled to graft, nepotism and corruption on an almost biblical scale. Indeed, it was nothing new since these issues have been endemic in most African countries, and in many instances, remain so. The real crunch came late March 1993 when a well-armed group of about a hundred men—the majority former university students, backed by some experienced Liberian rebel troops as well as a small contingent of mercenaries said to be have come from Burkina Faso at the behest of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi—crossed the frontier into Sierra Leone.

They came in at several points: the first section from the Republic of Guinea in the Kailahun District and, shortly thereafter, a larger force from Liberia that crossed the Mano river bridge linking the two countries.

The author with Cobus Claassens (right) of Executive Outcomes.

Alluvial diamond diggings in the interior, a rebel target from the start of the war.

The ‘invasion’, though at that stage, more of a dislocation, went off as planned. Army units in both areas did not try to stop them even though several soldiers were killed. The rest fled for their lives. The few soldiers that stayed put in both areas were given short shrift and most were executed, with a few released to carry news of these atrocities to their superiors in the nation’s capital. That calculated step had the required effect: Freetown immediately went into lockdown, at least for the first twenty-four hours. Had there been any kind of effective leadership, some kind of resistance might have been effective, as it later was, but the country was ruled by Joseph Momoh, a bumbling, alcoholic prevaricator who was more interested in skirt than in the security of his country.

Gradually details emerged about the invasion and exactly who was involved. Weeks after those first telling strikes a communiqué was released that announced that the rebellion was the work of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) headed by a former Sierra Leone army sergeant Foday Sankoh.

In one of its early reports the news brief Africa Confidential tells us that the RUF initially waged a war against farmers, villagers and alluvial miners, rather than against the central government in Freetown: The RUF espoused a crude ideology of rural resentment against exploitation; they used brutal tactics to terrorize civilians—often mutilating and amputating their limbs—in their efforts to exploit the inability of the Freetown government to protect its citizens. The rebellion worsened and civilian casualties mounted.*

Freetown, Sierra Leone, at the height of the civil war.

Forbidding terrain: Sierra Leonean jungle.

Emmanuel Momoh, a pastor, found this 706-carat alluvial diamond in the village of Yakadu (Photo S. L. Gover)

A Hind gunship prepares for operations.

President Momoh called on the British government for help, pointing to ties with the UK that had always been strong. Indeed, so strong that Freetown port had been used as an important staging post during the Falklands War. Whitehall turned down Momoh’s request.

Within months there were clear signs that the security situation in Sierra Leone had deteriorated sharply, accentuated by rebel attacks on the Kono diamond fields in the interior, which the RUF overran. More serious, some military units were openly collaborating with Sankoh’s people, obviously desperate to save their own skins. Clearly, the RUF terror campaign had had the required effect and the country’s military’s was on the verge of collapse.

Counterinsurgency operations in the Sierra Leonean jungle.

The final crunch came on 29 April 1992 when a group of junior officers led by twenty six-year-old Captain Valentine Strasser staged a military putsch. Momoh fled to Conakry with suitcases full of uncut diamonds and the new leader became the youngest head of state in the world. President Strasser was obviously faced with some serious problems, but by November 1992 he was able to rally his troops in a concerted effort to drive the rebels out of the diamond fields, the country’s main source of revenue. The counter attack was successful enough to drive the main body of RUF fighters across the border into Liberia.

A short impasse followed, but by now Strasser, desperately short of men to fight his war, started a recruitment drive, often signing up poorly-educated youths from the city streets, including twelve year-old orphans and abandoned children. The government army grew from 5,000 in 1991 to 12,000 men in early 1994, but by then hostilities were again in full swing.

A year later the youthful leader—by now started showing distinct signs of opiate addiction—turned to the final option. He approached a British private security company and in February 1995 Colonel Bob MacKenzie, a former Vietnam veteran and mercenary commander who had distinguished himself in the Rhodesian War arrived in Freetown with a core-group of Gurkha professional soldiers.*

The war began and ended at Kailahun: handing in weaponry at the end of it. (Photo Jan Dago Alexia Foundation)

MacKenzie was killed in action a month later and his men left the country shortly afterward, to be followed three months later by the first contingent of Executive Outcomes mercenaries.

Within a year this crack unit, mostly South African and Rhodesian military veterans, had turned the war on its head.

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*Africa Confidential , April 1998: Chronology of Sierra Leone; ‘How Diamonds Fuelled the Conflict’.

*MacKenzie served with distinction in Special Air Service in Rhodesia’s war and did many mercenary stints thereafter in the Congo, the Balkans, El Salvador’s civil war and elsewhere. He is prominently featured in several of the author’s books including War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars , Casemate, 2006, as well as El Salvador: Dance of the Death Squads , Pen & Sword, UK, 2017.

1. GUNSHIP FOR HIRE

Newsman Mark Corcoran, a television producer for Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has covered a lifetime of wars, coups, insurrections, revolts, uprisings and the rest. In August 2000 he ran the West African gauntlet and made his way to Sierra Leone, a country then caught up in the kind of civil war that had not only morphed into a grotesque human-rights issue that had international implications but threatened to rip the former British colony apart.

Nobody in the country was left unaffected; just about everybody knew somebody who had been killed, wounded, abducted, abused or had themselves been brutalized. It had been that was for almost a decade: a cruel, bloody rebellion led by a disgraced former Sierra Leonean army NCO who made the murder of innocents and the cutting off of arms and legs of the young and old one of his several signature traits. Another was arriving at a village in the middle of the night and abducting all the young men whom he believed might serve his purpose. Either that or he slaughtered them. His instrument of torture was an army of child soldiers whom he kept permanently drugged or doped. It did not take long for his Revolutionary United Front—more commonly, the RUF—to drive fear into the hearts of the entire nation.

Neall Ellis in the cockpit of his Hind.

A seasoned war correspondent with solid experience in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Corcoran was determined to cover this conflict and in the process befriended Neall Ellis, a South African mercenary helicopter pilot who, single-handed, flew Sierra Leone’s only operational Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The result was a fairly graphic report, rather prosaically headlined ‘Gunship for Hire’. Corcoran’s kicks off with a no-holds-barred: If we ever catch you, we’ll cut out your heart and eat it! That was a very real threat made by some of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front who, everybody was aware, literally devoured the hearts of their adversaries whom they regarded as bold or intrepid. They had done exactly that with former American Vietnam veteran and mercenary freebooter Colonel Bob MacKenzie. He had barely been appointed head of one of the Sierra Leonean army units tasked with countering a specifically active rebel unit in the Malal Hills, a few hours’ drive out of Freetown, the capital. In his very first action against the RUF he was wounded, captured, tortured until he died and his heart cut out, sliced up and eaten raw by his killers. We know this because there were several captured Roman Catholic nuns in the village where all this happened, underscored later by the boasts of some of the rebels at local bars in days after the attack. They admitted to those prepared to listen that they only did this to those whom they regarded as unusually brave and Bob MacKenzie apparently fitted the bill.

Ellis at the controls of his Hind, over Freeetown.

Then, not long afterward, several RUF commanders again made the threat. This time, the intended victim was the mercenary aviator Neall Ellis. The message was graphic: If we catch you white man, you will die and we will eat your heart.

By the time that Mark Corcoran met Neall Ellis for the first time, the pilot had been living with the threat of what the rebels would do to him if they could lay hands on him for roughly five years. As the newsman said the first time they made contact, He did didn’t look too worried as we met for a beer in Paddy’s Bar, in Freetown. He went on to explain that Paddy’s was the watering hole of choice for mercenaries, spooks, peacekeepers and aid workers, all the usual suspects who seemingly materialize at every Third World conflict, now spilling out of this noisy, sweaty, open-sided shed, perched above the appropriately named Pirate Bay on Freetown harbour.

Corcoran takes up the story: It is a typical Paddy’s night, reverberating to dance music, war stories and bar girls on the make … all the clichés of airport fiction, straight from the pages of the Fredrick Forsyth’s novel, The Dogs of War. Except here, it is all very real, and the patrons of Paddy’s are doing their best to intoxicate themselves against the horrifying reality that lies outside.

This port city was founded in the eighteenth century by freed slaves from America. The mood and look of the streets seem more Caribbean than African.

Nursing a large beer, Ellis explains that his opponents in this latest dirty war are best described as Africa’s Khmer Rouge—without the ideology. The RUF’s only clear objective seems to be controlling the country’s fabulously rich diamond fields.

Even by the brutal standards of African civil wars, this conflict is terrifying. The RUF’s trademark punishment is mindless violence. Out in the darkness that night, just beyond the bright lights of Paddy’s Bar, are the camps and slums, home to thousands of men, women and children who’ve had arms, legs and even lips and ears hacked off by teenage rebels.

Ellis talks about it all in a dispassionate tone—much the same way he reflects on the country’s unpredictable tropical weather—which can be just as deadly to a helicopter pilot.

This bespectacled, fifty-something South African is totally unassuming. He displays none of the ‘hard-man’ qualities that make him a legend in mercenary circles. Short and heavy set, he has, like so many South African mercenaries, the air of a social rugby player on tour, perhaps a Johannesburg dentist, cutting loose for a couple of weeks away with the boys.

But his reality is quite different. Ellis is a former South African colonel. One of the world’s most experienced combat helicopter pilots, he fought in apartheid South Africa’s toughest and dirtiest battles, flying gunship missions in support of a variety of feared Special Forces units at the forefront of Pretoria’s secret war against Black Africa’s frontline states, which included 32 Battalion, the police anti-terror force Koevoet, the Parabats as well as South Africa’s crack long-range-penetration Recce Commandos.

In Angola, reputedly, he was the only helicopter pilot to survive being targeted, simultaneously, by three surface to air missiles—fired by Cubans—and who lived to fly another day. Thereafter, he single-handedly at the controls of the Mi-24 gunship, forced major rebel concentrations away from the gates of Freetown. Twice!

When apartheid ended, most of

Reviews for Sierra Leone

[justin castro · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Remarkable book which gives a thorough analysis on the Sierra Leone Civil War, and it truly makes you think about the role of private military contractors in conflicts that take place in Third World countries.