# Sierra Leone Civil War March 1991 to January 2002. Between 50,000 and 70,000 dead, roughly 2.5 million displaced out of a pre-war population of about 4.5 million, and the war that put the phrase "blood diamond" into the English language. ## The war It began on **23 March 1991** with an RUF incursion from Liberia, using fighters, a rear base and a supply line provided by [[Charles Taylor]]'s NPFL. [[Foday Sankoh]] had met Taylor training in [[Libya]] in the early 1980s. The RUF's signature was the **amputation campaign** — hands and arms severed as a terror method, most notoriously in Operation No Living Thing during the January 1999 assault on Freetown. It also made systematic use of **child soldiers**, forced marriage and sexual slavery. The alluvial diamond fields of **Kono** and **Tongo** were the object of repeated capture, and the revenue ran out through Liberia. The arithmetic there is the most-cited evidence in the entire blood-diamond literature: **Liberia's own mining capacity was 100,000–150,000 carats a year, while Antwerp's Diamond High Council recorded over 31 million carats imported from Liberia between 1994 and 1998.** Private military companies entered early — **Executive Outcomes**, then **Sandline International** — establishing the template of security services paid partly in mineral concessions. **ECOMOG** intervened regionally. The 1999 **Lomé Peace Accord** made Sankoh chairman of the commission overseeing strategic mineral resources, with the rank of vice-president: a rebel leader formally handed the mineral portfolio as a term of peace. It collapsed. In **May 2000** the RUF detained around 500 UN personnel; Britain deployed troops under Operation Palliser, and **Operation Barras** in September freed hostages held by the West Side Boys. President Kabbah declared the war over on **18 January 2002**, with more than 70,000 ex-combatants processed through disarmament. ## The tribunal The **Special Court for Sierra Leone**, approved in January 2002, was a hybrid tribunal that produced two legal firsts: the first international convictions for the **recruitment and use of child soldiers**, and the first prosecution of **forced marriage** as a crime against humanity. Thirteen were indicted; the court cost around $212 million and was chronically underfunded. [[Charles Taylor]] was convicted on **26 April 2012** and sentenced to **50 years** — the first head of state convicted by an international tribunal since Nuremberg. The precise basis matters and is routinely misreported: he was convicted of **planning and of aiding and abetting**, and **acquitted on the joint criminal enterprise and command-responsibility theories**. He was not found to have ordered or commanded the RUF. ## The correction that matters most > [!quote] Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Final Report, Vol. 2 Ch. 2, para. 36 > "the exploitation of diamonds did not cause the conflict in Sierra Leone." The Commission instead found that "the central cause of the war was **endemic greed, corruption and nepotism** that deprived the nation of its dignity"; that "successive political elites plundered the nation's assets, including its mineral riches"; that "government accountability was non-existent"; and that "many Sierra Leoneans, particularly the youth, lost all sense of hope in the future" and "became easy prey for unscrupulous forces who exploited their disenchantment." The TRC's position is that diamonds were a **sustaining and target-selecting factor, not a causal one**. Factions fought over the diamond districts to *finance* a war whose origins lay in governance collapse and youth exclusion. This is the greed-versus-grievance debate in miniature, and it matters far beyond Sierra Leone, because the international response — the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] and everything descended from it — was built on the causal reading the country's own truth commission rejected. Secondary summaries routinely soften paragraph 36 into "diamond wealth concentration fuelled inequality," which is a different and much weaker claim. Quote the paragraph directly. ## See also [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Charles Taylor]] · [[Foday Sankoh]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[Conflict Resources Atlas]]