Word: ruffing
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...Charles Taylor, who went on to litter his own road to his country's presidency with many a crushed skull and dismembered body. Rural poverty and resentment of Sierra Leone's corrupt one-party government attracted large numbers of young men, but despite its high-minded rhetoric, the RUF was almost from the outset a haven for desperate men looking to snag whatever riches an assault rifle could in a sea of poverty...
...group of army officers, tired of fighting the RUF on 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...
...Western powers found the mercenaries' role distasteful, and put pressure first on 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...
...Without the mercenaries organizing the government's defenses, the RUF wrought havoc in the countryside, and then a coup by former Strasser loyalists led by Colonel Johnny Paul Koroma overthrew Kabbah and invited the RUF into the capital for an orgy of bloodletting and looting. The West urged Nigeria to take charge, and in February 1998 the ECOMOG intervention force seized Freetown, restored Kabbah to power and arrested Foday Sankoh, who was later sentenced to death. But a year later, the RUF overwhelmed ECOMOG and recaptured the capital, freeing Sankoh and savaging the civilian population. Government control was only restored...
...control over the diamond fields gave them a long-term source of funding that made them both a more formidable force and a more intractable foe. And the long-suffering people of Sierra Leone simply wanted peace, even if the price was sacrificing justice for the criminals of the RUF. Thus was born the Lome peace agreement, which set the scene for the current debacle...