Word: rebel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sierra Leone's descent into chaos began on May 25, 1997, when a group of rebel soldiers from the Sierra Leone Army staged a coup d'etat, replaced democratically elected President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah with Major Johnny Paul Koroma, and soon allied themselves with R.U.F., the rebel movement that had waged a civil war earlier in the 1990s. Koroma was quickly isolated by some of Sierra Leone's West African neighbors, such as Nigeria and Guinea, which wanted to see Kabbah restored. Last February an ECOMOG military force pushed the junta from power, driving the rebels out of the capital...
Instead, ousted from the capital, the rebels rearmed and, village by village, began terrorizing the countryside. For the better part of a year, ECOMOG has struggled to stamp out the fiercely violent brushfires. Nigerian Alpha jets have streaked through the skies of Sierra Leone bombing rebel hideouts. Tens of thousands of village-based militia--traditional hunters called kamajors--have stalked the jungles battling R.U.F. forces. But the Nigerians have discovered that the rebel fire seems to be nearly inextinguishable. Hopes for negotiations have been blocked by rebel demands for the release of Corporal Foday Sankoh, an R.U.F. leader...
...better part of two weeks, since the rebel forces of the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.) swept into Freetown from Sierra Leone's thick jungles, the capital city has been a killing zone. Last week the troops of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), a peacekeeping force led by Nigeria, struggled to throw the rebels out. It was bloody, street-by-street fighting. Aid agencies evacuated most of their personnel during the week. The only way in and out of the city was by Nigerian military helicopter. One Lebanese businessman who had stayed behind to protect...
Into Saturday night, ECOMOG fought to maintain control. Since most of the R.U.F. leaders had been killed in the previous few weeks of fighting, most rebel positions in the city were held by 15- and 16-year-old boys, who looted and burned huge swaths of downtown. ECOMOG forces patrolling Freetown's main streets were continually harassed by Kalashnikov-wielding teenagers who slipped from dark alleys, machine-gunned them for 15 or 30 seconds and then slipped away again. After sunset the teenagers, many of them high on local hallucinogens, set houses on fire--night candles, they called them...
Ever since the rebels were driven into the countryside, they have used brutalization as a kind of strategic device, hoping the horror of war would lead Kabbah to sue for peace. In Freetown's Connaught hospital, doctors began reporting last April that they were seeing an enormous number of mutilations, as well as women who had had foreign objects inserted in their vagina. Aid workers say pregnant women, normally highly respected and well treated in Africa, had had fetuses cut from the womb while they were still alive. Rebel soldiers slashed one woman's ankles so she could...