Word: brutalized
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Writing off Sierra Leone's malaise as some sort of inevitable "Heart of Darkness" scenario that simply confirms the futility of intervening in Africa's conflicts may be a temptation, but it's also more than a little misleading. The tragedy unfolding now as an unfathomably brutal rebel army scoffs at peacekeeping efforts and fights its way toward the capital is not a product of some collective psychosis of the Sierra Leoneans. It is, instead, a sordid tale of ruthless pursuit of a buried treasure - diamonds - in the world's poorest country, and of political calculations, miscalculations and plain wishful...
...Foday Sankoh doesn't personally hack the hands off children or slaughter their parents in his drive for political power and control over Sierra Leone's diamond fields; for that he relies on an army of abducted teenagers, forced at gunpoint to rape or kill loved ones - a brutal measure designed to cut off the road home - before being dragged into the bush, where Sankoh's drug-addled legions become their only family. Now, his band of battle-hardened killers is on the march again, rounding up U.N. peacekeepers like so many hapless tourists and holding them hostage...
...behalf of a corrupt elite, seized power. But rather than fight on, the new regime of Captain Valentine Strasser hired a South African mercenary firm, Executive Outcomes, which was composed primarily of apartheid-era special forces officers who'd had plenty of experience in southern Africa's brutal wars of the '80s, to deal with the rebels. The mercenaries' price included a substantial share of the country's diamond mines. Although their 21-month sojourn in Sierra Leone cost the country $35 million, they got the job done. The rebels were smashed and confined to small pockets of the country...
...Strasser and then on the newly elected government of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah to terminate their contract, which they did early in 1997. And that gave the rebels an opening. The RUF had never accepted the election process or its result, and with the mercenaries' withdrawal they went on a brutal rampage across the countryside, systematically chopping off the hands of civilians in gruesome mockery of Kabbah's election slogan, "The future is in your hands...
...only by accompanying an ECOMOG patrol that was fighting its way back into downtown. It was too risky to move around alone. After a couple of days the Nigerian troops got their act together and began to retake the city, street by street, in one of the most brutal campaigns I've ever seen. The problem was that nobody knew who the rebels were. Many of them had sneaked into the city unarmed, by joining refugee columns. Then they'd collected weapons that had been stashed in Freetown and simply went berserk. At a certain point the ECOMOG forces appeared...