Word: sierra
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Remember Blood Diamond? Remember how all the bad guys died? In reality, most of them not only survived, they went free. As Sierra Leone's civil war wound down in 2002 after 11 years of fighting marked by some of the most brutal human-rights abuses in history, much of that fueled by competition over the country's diamond fields, the leaders of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and other militias, as well as their sponsor, Liberian President Charles Taylor, negotiated themselves an amnesty...
...Days before the conflict finished, though, the government of then President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah asked the U.N. to help set up a process to bring the worst offenders to justice. Out of that plea was formed the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a first of its kind: a collaboration between international and national justice and, unlike similar courts set up after wars in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, one established on the soil where the crimes took place. (See pictures of the fallout in Congo by James Nachtwey...
...been convicted. The court's last case is the trial of Taylor, who initially fled to Nigeria under his amnesty agreement but is now being held in the Hague. Taylor's trial was moved there for security reasons. After Wednesday's judgment, the prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Stephen Rapp, spoke to TIME's Africa bureau chief Alex Perry by phone from the court's offices in Freetown...
...What does it mean for Sierra Leone? This country suffered enormously during this conflict. Some of the most heinous and brutal acts in the history of human warfare were committed here. Tens of thousands were murdered. Tens to hundreds of thousands of women were raped or turned into bush wives and sex slaves. There was this incredibly bestial practice of cutting off limbs, chopping arms and hands. Children were made to commit acts that adults could not commit. It was a campaign of terror. And this was not a war fought as we think of it, but one exclusively targeted...
...anyone on the planet could convince men that breast-feeding moms can have a sex life, it would be Salma Hayek. The beautifully busty actress, on a trip to Sierra Leone to support a tetanus-vaccination project, nursed a starving baby she encountered while being filmed by ABC News. She did this, she told the camera crew, in part out of compassion for a suffering child, but also to help lift the stigma against breast-feeding in Africa, where men often think women can't have sex if they're still nursing. "So the husbands, of course, of these women...