Word: rebel
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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...
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...
...witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch said he saw rebel soldiers tell a boy that he was too tall. A soldier then took a machete and cut off the boy's left foot. When the boy fell to the ground, the soldier calmly shot him in the chest three times. A woman who sold fish in a market was ordered to lie down on the ground. When she hesitated, a boy in the rebel army slashed her neck with a machete. When she fell, a soldier put her wrist on a rock and cut off her hand. "They left...
...resorting to just the sort of rigid timetables Rosemond advocates. Like Brazelton, psychologist and child-care expert Penelope Leach dismisses the notion that laid-back parenting has caused problems. She too believes kids who are forced to use the toilet before they're ready "are more likely to rebel and develop anal retention that can cause severe constipation or blockages...