Word: sierras
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...center of the orgy of killing, maiming and torture that has gripped Sierra Leone for the past decade is a portly, ebullient former army corporal and wedding photographer. But Foday Sankoh doesn't personally hack the hands off children or slaughter their parents in his drive for political power and control over Sierra Leone's diamond fields; for that he relies on an army of abducted teenagers, forced at gunpoint to rape or kill loved ones - a brutal measure designed to cut off the road home - before being dragged into the bush, where Sankoh's drug-addled legions become their...
...another unlikely escape, and like his previous one - in which he'd gone in less than a year from death row to the vice presidency - it symbolized the ineptitude of international efforts to stop the war in Sierra Leone. Sankoh may well have been tempted to pinch himself last summer when he received a phone call from President Clinton urging him to accept a peace deal that Reverend Jesse Jackson had spent days cajoling him to sign. And it was a pretty sweet deal for a man who'd been bound for the firing squad a few short months earlier...
...measure, the Lome peace deal was a remarkable achievement for a corporal cashiered by Sierra Leone's British colonial army in the early '60s and sent to Scotland to be trained as a TV cameraman. Insurgents are prone to self-mythologizing, and the snippets of biography Mr. Sankoh has released are often contradictory. He is reported variously to have worked as a wedding and portrait photographer and as a cameraman for the state TV service, spending time in jail for anti-government activities before finding himself, in 1991, a guest of regional mischief-maker Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi. The Libyan leader...
...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 were smashed and confined to small pockets of the country, the diamond fields secured and Foday Sankoh forced to the negotiating table to discuss allowing free elections. (By contrast, the projected six-month cost of the shambolic...
...ending a military dictatorship that had sought to stay in the West's good books by playing sheriff in West Africa. And the West was offering nothing by way of finance, weapons or logistical support to maintain the mission. Britain and the U.S., embroiled in Kosovo, simply wanted the Sierra Leone problem to go away. But the rebels' 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...