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afrol News, 12 April - The international community should stop negotiating with Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) except to achieve the complete disarmament and demobilisation of the rebel group, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said yesterday, upon releasing a new report; "Sierra Leone: Time for a New Military and Political Strategy". The International Crisis Group, a private, multinational organisation, states it has come to "the stark but unavoidable conclusion" that the international community must help Sierra Leone take decisive military action to defeat the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). "The RUF has broken a string of peace agreements, continues to obstruct UN peacekeeping operations, still occupies half the country including most of the diamond mining areas that have fuelled a decade of war, and is committing heinous crimes against the population," the group concludes. A new report by ICG, "Sierra Leone: Time for a New Military and Political Strategy" argues that the RUF has no popular following and has consistently used negotiations and cease-fires to rearm and mobilise. The jailing of RUF leader Foday Sankoh has not changed this. Instead the rebels’ main backer, Liberian President Charles Taylor, is believed to have assumed greater control, and is using the RUF to further his own political ambitions. Taylor is widely assumed to be behind the spread of fighting into Guinea and he and his business associates should be subjected to targeted sanctions. Without intervention an arc of violence may soon stretch from Senegal to the Ivory Coast. This regional conflict has already created the biggest current refugee crisis in the world. United Nations peacekeeping operations, now authorised up to 17,500 troops, do not have an adequate mandate to enforce the terms of the Lomé peace accord of 1999. In fact Lomé died in May last year when the RUF took 500 peacekeepers hostage, prompting British military intervention. It is now the 800 British troops who are training the Sierra Leone army that are the main guarantee of security, not the UN presence. The Abuja cease-fire agreement signed in November 2000 was stillborn. ICG Board member William Shawcross, who has visited Sierra Leone and contributed to the report, said "returning to the Lomé agreement is senseless and immoral. The UN Security Council should demand the rebels surrender. If the RUF refuses, Britain, with UN backing, should support Sierra Leone’s army to defeat it." According to the ICG, West African leaders are understandably uncomfortable about the prospect of a former colonial power returning to Sierra Leone in a military capacity, and it is therefore crucial that two vital conditions are met before any military plan is implemented. ICG maintains that, first, Britain’s approach of rearming and training the Sierra Leone Army for a serious assault on the RUF must be harmonised with the UN mission (UNAMSIL) which is still trying to implement the provisions of Lomé. Much diplomacy will be needed to secure West African support, especially from Nigeria, the most important actor, which is keen to reduce its military commitments in Sierra Leone. Secondly, a coherent political strategy must be agreed to by all the key international actors and of course the Sierra Leone government. This should involve a UN-endorsed commitment to an international nation-building effort that will probably last at least five years. William Shawcross said "defeat of the RUF would be pointless without substantial international commitment. If a power-vacuum is created it will quickly be filled by new rebels, predatory neighbours or even official security forces that may turn to banditry. The use of military force should always be a last resort, but the crisis is so grave that this option must be seriously pursued."
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