Word: rebel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sierra Leone's eight-year civil war has settled into an uneasy peace. But it has left a cruel legacy. At the height of the country's chaos this spring, rebel soldiers intensified an ugly ritual of amputations, seizing civilians and chopping off limbs. Human-rights groups estimate that thousands have been maimed in this fashion. Two of them told their stories to TIME's Malcolm Linton...
...walked back to the house. My aunt saw me and started to cry, but one of the rebels told her he would shoot her if she cried. That night I slept in an abandoned house, and the next day I went down to the main road. A rebel saw me waiting there and took me to the Summer Time clinic [a small clinic with a nurse but no doctor]. He gave me a bowl of rice. Then the other rebels came and took away the rice. They said they would kill anyone who said a word about what had happened...
Abdul Sankoh, 27, was a teacher until last December, when fighting between government and rebel forces closed his school. Now he is jobless and lives at the Murray Town amputee center in Freetown. On the morning of April 30, after hiding from the fighting for three days in the bush without food, he and another man went back to their village to look for mangoes to take to their friends...
They got everybody to the Congo peace table except the ones who really matter. After six weeks of haranguing over which rebel groups got to sign where, the document that is solemnly being called the "Lusaka Accord" bears all the big names: Congolese president Laurent Kabila and his backers in Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia, plus two rebel groups (and one splinter group) with their backers, Rwanda and Uganda, witnessing. But TIME chief of correspondents Marguerite Michaels doesn?t give peace much of a chance until all the soldiers lay their guns down. "I?m not optimistic," she says, "because there...
Holbrooke also met Sunday with leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, pressed his message against revenge attacks on Serbs and expressed confidence that the KLA would disarm by September 19. But it may take more than Holbrooke?s powers of persuasion to bring the KLA into line, since the rebel group knows that the last thing NATO wants is a confrontation. "The U.N. can?t succeed unless the peacekeeping force can ensure security, and that really depends on NATO," says TIME Central Europe bureau reporter Dejan Anastasijevic. "But if the whole Kosovo mission turns out to be a dramatic failure...