CONFLICT IN THE BORDER OF SIERRA LEONE AND LIBERIA

Sierra Leone and Liberia are both members of ECOWAS. They both lived a civil war that lasted almost for 15 years. In the following post you will find a description of the events of both wars and a short video showing the geopolitical context of the conflicts.

LIBERIAN CIVIL WAR

Liberia entered in conflict in 1989 when the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) sent forth an incursion from Côte d’Ivoire into Nimba Country, in the North of Liberia. The leader Charles Taylor and his troops, supported by the leaders of Côte d'Ivoire and composed basically by Gio and Mano ethnic groups, wanted to bring down the president of Liberia Samuel Doe. While the war went on, a breakaway group of NPFL captured and executed the president. As a result, ECOWAS tried to lead the process of peace by sending peacekeeping forces, but none of the leaders got involved in the process.

By 1992, Liberia was completely divided and different armed groups kept emerging during the following years. There was an attempt to make an agreement, called the Cotonou Accord, but it was unsuccessful due to the disputes over the transnational government, the emergence of these new armed groups, and the limited resources of peacekeeping forces.

In 1996 there was a remarkable fight in Monrovia after ECOWAS tried to make an agreement and form a transnational government. This incident left hundreds of deads and undermined the credibility of the agreement.

In July 1997, presidential elections were held. Taylor and his party, now called National Patriotic Party, won the election by a large majority. UN official Ellen-Johnson Sirleaf finished second. A year later, fights broke out  between supporters  of Roosevelt Johnson, head of the ULIMO-J, and government forces.

In 1999 the second civil war began when the rebel group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) launched attacks in Lofa County, north-west Liberia. Three years later, President Taylor announced the implementation of the state of emergency as a consequence of the approach of LURD fighters to the capital Monrovia. In 2003, another rebel group called Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) opened a second front in the south-east. The same year it was the end of the Taylor government thanks to the Accra Peace Agreement, which also allowed UN peacekeeping forces to secure the Liberian state relatively quickly. The incidence of conflict events between 2003 and 2004 dropped dramatically.

Since the official cessation of violence in 2003, violence has continued but at lower levels.

SIERRA LEONE CIVIL WAR

Sierra Leone entered into a civil war on March the 23rd 1991. When the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), supported with the special forces of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), intervened in Sierra Leone trying to overthrow the Joseph Momoh government. The resulting civil war lasted 11 years, caused a huge chaos and 50.000 deaths.

During the first year of the war, the RUF took control of large territories in eastern and southern Sierra Leone, which were rich in diamonds. The government's inefficient reaction against the RUF, and the disruption in government diamond production caused a military coup d'état in April 1992, done by the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC).

During late 1993, the Sierra Leone Army had succeeded in confronting the RUF rebels back to the Liberian border, but the RUF pushed back and recovered, thus the fighting continued. In March 1995, Executive Outcomes, a South Africa-based private military company, was hired to fight the RUF. Simultaneously Sierra Leone installed an elected civilian government in March 1996, and the RUF decided to sign the Abidjan Peace Accord. The UN pressured the government to terminate the contract with the private army before the accord was implemented, and once the government had done that, the fights recommenced.

In May 1997 a group of SLA officers staged a coup and established the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council as the new government of Sierra Leone. The RUF joined with the AFRC to capture Freetown easily. The new government, led by Johnny Paul Koroma, declared the war over. A wave of civil chaos followed the announcement. ECOMOG forces intervened and retook Freetown on behalf of the government, but they found the outlying regions more difficult to pacify.

In January 1999, world leaders intervened aiming to promote negotiations between the RUF and the government. Consequently, the Lome Peace Accord, signed on 27 March 1999, took place. A high character of the RUF received the vice presidency and control of Sierra Leone's diamond mines in return for an ending of the fighting and the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to organize the disarmament process. RUF commitment to the process was non-existent and by May 2000, the rebels were advancing again upon Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital.

When the UN mission began to fail the United Kingdom declared its intention to intervene in the former colony and Commonwealth member in an attempt to support the weak government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. With help from a UN mandate and Guinean air support, the British Operation Palliser finally defeated the RUF, taking control of Freetown. On 18 January 2002, President Kabbah declared the Sierra Leone Civil War over.

All the images are extracted from the webpage http://www.c-r.org/

LOCAL IMPLICATIONS

ABOUT REFUGEES

• SIERRA LEONE REFUGEES

As we have already said the Sierra Leonean Civil War was very chaotic and violent, implied a lot of deaths and tortures to the innocent civilians this is the reason that nearly 400,000 Sierra Leoneans were refugees and asylum seekers at the close of 2000.

The biggest part of them fled from rural areas (during 1997-98) as a consequence of the widespread violence. The majority, more or less 300.000, lived in some refugee camps in GuineA which were really unsafe. Others stayed in Liberia and a few went to various West African States or Europe.

About 13,000 new Sierra Leonean refugees went to Guinea during 2000, as a consequence of clashes in RUF rebel areas. Frightened by the rebel infiltration, Guinean government officials briefly attempted to turn back young Sierra Leonean men at the border and limit entry to women, the elderly, and children under age ten.

As many as 40,000 refugees returned home, to Sierra Leone, during the year. The majority returned to Freetown, the capital, and western Sierra Leone because of armed conflict in Guinea and violence against refugees there.

In the last 4 months of the year, 28,000 Sierra Leoneans returned to Freetown by boat. As the UN estimates, an 80% came from camps in Guinea, and 20% were supposed to be Sierra Leoneans who lived in the Guinean capital but were not registered as refugees.

Ending the year, a huge amount of Sierra Leonean refugees had returned without assistance to eastern Sierra Leone from both Liberia and Guinea, according to UN estimates. They mostly settled in Sierra Leone's Kenema area.

The majority of Sierra Leonean refugees who returned could not return safely to their homes in rebel-held areas. Many sought shelter in already overcrowded camps for internally displaced persons. Others lived in villages, hosted by the local community. A small number chose to return to rebel-held areas on their own.

• LIBERIAN REFUGEES
• 
  

The civil war in Liberia caused 1.28 milion of displaced people, half of the population of the country.

The first refugees were from the ethincal group Mano and Gio, since these were the main Taylor’s guerrilla support and they were being torturated and executed. Only a week after the conflict had broken out, 13000 refugees flight to Guinea. By the beginning of 1990, as the war intensified in Nimba and surrounding areas, some 120,000 refugees had fled to Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea. What first had started as a rebellion, now was becoming an ethic massacre. The war increased the differences among ethnic groups, which fought with each other to get revenge. Therefore, there was a drastic raise in diplaced people and refugees, which reached the million, also due to the fact that the war was not only among combatants but a continuous attack to civilian people.

When the war approached to Monrovia, thousands of city residents scape through the Sierra Leonean border, and others escaped to the inland of Liberia. With a few possessions, many of the refugees began the walk to Sierra Leone, which can last for over a month. About 100.000 civilians fled from the surrounding areas of Monrovia into the capital, where the rebels had been pushed out. Many of the displaced moved in with relatives and friends and some resided in camps for displaced people. As a result, the population of Monrovia has more than doubled stemming from the surge of displaced persons looking for security.

Before the end of 1990, the war had left, homes and buildings looted and destroyed, and offices and businesses shut down. Monrovia had no electricity or water services, jobs, or money. Monrovia's residents starved for months as fighting intensified in and around the capital. People couldn’t get treatment because hospitals and clinics remained closed. By November 1990, the number of Liberian internal displaced people and refugees accounted for nearly one-third of the country's population.

Although Liberian civilians needed urgent help, international response and assistance was slow in coming and inadequate. However, emergency food aid finally arrived in the capital beginning in the last quarter of 1990. Thanks to the United Nations World Food Program, the population in Monrovia finally received food items that were distributed by a local organization. 

While the aid arrived, Liberian refugees were welcomed by local people in neighboring states who provided them with food, shelter and other basic needs. Rather than live in camps, most of the refugees cohabited with host families who shared their limited resources with the newcomers, even though most of the African families were poor and lacked of resources to support their own families. Also, the host governments adopted asylum policies to take in all these displaced people. 

The refugees within Liberia were continually massacred by both sides. For example, 600 people who sought refuge at St Peter’s Lutheran Church and 9,000 uprooted Liberians sheltered in the Baptist-run Ricks Institute were killed, as well as hundreds of displaced refugees in a church serving as a Red Cross shelter. Refugee camps, as it also happens nowadays, were not safe. Liberian displaced persons and refugees in shelters were vulnerable to physical abuse, and were often tortured and massacred. 

The table above shows the number of refugees during some periods of the Liberian Civil War. By then, Liberia was one of the countries with more refugees in the world.

ABOUT ENVIROMENT

• Liberia

The civil war also had enviromental effects on the country. We are going to focus on wetlands in Liberia, on the basis of the Ramsar Convention, a intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. 

According to the Report on the impact of the Liberian civil crisis on wetlands, the relationship between wetlands and Africa’s inhabitants has always been complicated, given the fact that they see wetlands as a waste land. In rural areas, these swamp lands provided the basic subsistence for its residents. They depended on wetlands because they obtained energy supplies, food, shelter, water, medicine and other ecological services from it. They used pit latrines to dispose their wastes. Even so, they had their own laws regarding wetlands environment management.

When the civil conflict broke out in 1990, a very large number of displaced people moved to the capital city of Monrovia. The capital's population increased from 250,000 people to over a million. Therefore, the city could not hold all these displaced people and therefore they remained in wetland areas in the surroundings. However, these wetlands were not prepared to provide such materials and means of living to that great amount of people. Due to the length of the conflict, most of the displaced tried to carry out business activities there. This caused the use of the wetlands as a dumping site, provoking the contamination of the swamp land.

The main ecological implications of this problem was that sewage disposal was very deficient and could not meet the demands resulted to the growth of the population.

Also due to the proportion of metals contained by the waste materials thrown to the wetlands, rivers had become an unsafe place for swimming and fishing.

Moreover, there was a serious health problem. Agriculture activities carried out near the wetlands contained a big amount of chemicals- some of them banned- and underground waters became infected as a result of the filtration of these substances. In rivers, displaced used dynamite and poison baits to kill fishes, contributing to the pollution of the wetlands.

All theses processes have affected the biodiversity of species, making livelihood music difficult for community dwellers. For example, fishermen in some areas find it difficult to make good catches of fish, which complicates their economic benefits.

What has the government been doing to resolve wetland problems?

In orange, the five Ramsar Sites

Liberia accessed and ratificated in 2003 the Ramsar convention on Wetlands. That meant that the county had access to grants to conduct Post-Conflict Wetland Assessment. Thanks to that, there was the establishment of four wetland areas as Ramsar site.

There was also the creation of a Wetland Committee, which created a subcommittee that had to take care of the achivement of the following policies: 

1. Seek relevant legislations for legislative enactment of the proposed policy. The policy after enactment becomes the tool for addressing the issues of wetland problems in Liberia.
2. Establish full manegament authority over all Ramsar sites, involving local authorities and expertise in the project.
3. Integrate wetland issues in national planning process
4. Seek national mobilization process through national awareness program that aims behavioural change towards wetlands.
5. Seek international cooperation with neighbours of shared water resouces.

Refugees from Sierra Leone in Guinea 1999- Extracted from United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)

UN tank in Liberia- Extracted from ramsar.org

Polluted Mesurado river in Monrovia 2004- extracted from ramsar.org

Street vendors on the bridge over the Mesurado River, riverside pollution in the background- extracted from ramsar.org

GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

The main issue concerning the global scape concerning both Liberia and Sierra Leone was the refugees' crisis and the extraction of diamonds.

The civil war caused thousands of people to forcefully move out from their homes. The neighbour countries were not prepared for that massive amount of displaced, who were mainly concentrated in refugees camps, not in good conditions.

However, the real problem appeared when these people wanted to go back to their homes. In the case of Liberia, the land had been changing hands and occupied during the absence of its owners. Even if they could have it back, there was no guarantee that someone else would reclaim it. 

In order to incentive mediation, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) started a project in Liberia. The council only works if both parties are interested in discussing the issue. The mediators in NRC are all Liberian so that there are no cultural misunderstandings.

The UN Refugee Agency had also a relevant role with the refugees in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In both countries, they provided basic humanitarian help to the refugees in camps. The UNHCR programme tried to help the victims of violence and provide a safe environment away from the conflicted border for all the people who had left their country. One of their objectives was also to make the return of the refugees easy and to help them reintegrate.

Furthermore, two institutions promoted the achievement and maintenance of peace. The first one was the UN Peacebuilding Commission. This institution keeps an eye on the security sector, ensuring that police are well trained and tries to make the courts functioning. 

The second institution is WANEP (West African Network for Peacebuilding). Their organized roundtable consultations that promoted social cohesion, since they talked about the issues that concerned the most to their participants. Depending on the country, they focus on issues such as peacebuilding, women or education.

The second global issue is the economic one. Sierra Leone but also Liberia are great mines of diamonds. During the war, these diamonds were extracted illegally and sold at a lower price in order to finance the war. In fact, Charles Taylor was declared guilty of financing the war with these diamonds in 2010. 

Taking advantage of the unstable situation of the area, private companies bought these diamonds. The foreign governments, which knew the consequences of buying the mineral to the West African country, did not undertake any measure to stop it and actually these diamonds were sold for a really long period of time.

SUMMARY

The border issue we have treated was caused by indirect reasons, it was caused because of two civil wars which happened at the same time in countries that are located one next to the other, obviously, the civil wars were more or less interconnected and both influenced each other. And the conflict raised when the citizens of a country that was in a civil war decided to find a shelter outside their country, and as citizens of the both countries thought the same a conflict was created, since one of the countries they tried to migrate to was in a civil war too.

After this research we are going to define some concepts taking into account the aforementioned landscape:

Region: A large area of a surface, space, or body.

In this case we could say that the region is not really limited by borders or anything, since the conflict occurs in the West African zone, because, even though the issue we have treated happened in the Liberian-Sierra Leonean border the whole zone was influenced.

Border: The line that separates one country, province, etc., from another.

In this case the border we have considered as subject of our work is the Liberian-Sierra Leonean border but during the conflict it becomes a really blurry border because of all the migrations and movements from one country to the other.

Sovereignty: the quality or state of being sovereign.

Sovereign: Having supreme power or authority.

This issue is much more complex to analyze, since both civil wars initialized because of a lack of recognition of the supposed sovereign power. During the period of the conflict different organizations considered themselves as the sovereign actor, this is why the conflict existed.

So, in our framework the sovereignty laid on different actors which measured with each other through violence and terror.

Diplomacy: The conduct by government officials of relations between nations.

As we have said in the last definition they proved to each other with violence, so there were no “official relations” between the organizations. During the period the issue happened there were two organizations that took the responsibility of the diplomacy in that situation, the UN and ECOWAS, these two institutions were used as mediators to arrive to an agreement in both countries.

Definitions extracted from http://www.wordreference.com

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