Word: ebbing
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...EB: Broken bodies everywhere. At first people would try and throw the corpses in the water, but eventually there were too many and they simply started piling them up. You'd walk down the street and see these piles and piles of bodies, bearing the marks of unspeakable brutalities. People whose hands had been tied behind their backs and had then been shot at close range with a grenade launcher, leaving only a torso. The stench of the bodies, and the sight of bodies, and parts of bodies littering the streets, and the smell of fear on the troops. Those...
...EB: Remember, the Nigerians went in because they were in a difficult situation domestically. They wanted to be seen to be doing a good job and make themselves indispensable to the international community partly as a way of deflecting criticism of their military dictatorship. Once they held free elections, they moved pretty quickly to get their troops out of there. What I remember is that the Nigerian military commanders in Freetown were extremely angry at the West, because they lacked the equipment they needed to do the job the West wanted them to do. They needed helicopter gunships...
...EB: Unable to defend itself against the rebels initially, the elected government had hired mercenaries to fight the rebels, and, in particular, to protect the diamond fields. Part of the mercenaries' price was that they wanted a slice of the diamond industry themselves as part of their payment. And that's something the West found objectionable. So part of the condition for foreign assistance through the U.N. and the World Bank was that the government had to get rid of the mercenaries. The problem is that once the mercenaries withdrew, the rebels quickly overran the diamond fields and that changed...
...EB: It was a doomed peace agreement from the outset. Everybody knew that bringing Foday Sankoh and other rebel leaders into the government was a recipe for disaster. But even though Sankoh and his men had committed horrendous crimes, people in Sierra Leone were so traumatized by war that they were prepared to give up justice in order to secure peace. They'd have accepted the deal, if it was workable. The reason it wasn't, though, was because of the diamonds. This is not a civil war in the true sense. Sankoh doesn't represent the poor, or have...
...EB: Oh, there was no comparison. Sierra Leone was far, far worse than Kosovo by any measure of human suffering. It was the most dangerous, bloodthirsty killing zone I've ever been...