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/
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario