Word: sierras
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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...
Such extreme violence is not characteristic of Sierra Leone. Jim Stearns, an emergency-relief-operations specialist for care, says that when he first started going to Sierra Leone in 1989, nearly all the violence was across the border in Liberia, which was then in the midst of a civil war. Freetown, which sits amid lush rice paddies and rolling green hills, was established in 1787 as a home for freed slaves. The British cut off the slaves' shackles on a block in front of a cottonwood tree that still stands today. But the country is no paradise: the U.N. ranked...
...most of his career Barnes has specialized in getting incredible stories out of impossible places. While covering the 1991 Persian Gulf War for LIFE magazine, he was so close to the front lines that four Iraqi Republican Guards surrendered to him. Last week when fighting heated up in Sierra Leone, Barnes didn't hesitate. He jetted from New York City to Paris on Tuesday, then traveled through the Ivory Coast and Mali to Guinea, where he caught a Nigerian helicopter into Freetown on Saturday morning. Battle-hardened though he is, Barnes found the scene harrowing. "The situation is totally chaotic...
DIED. MYLES TIERNEY, 34, enterprising Nairobi-based television producer for the Associated Press; after being shot by a Sierra Leone rebel while covering West Africa's civil wars; in Freetown, Sierra Leone...