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Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front and its Violence: Liberia’s Charles Taylor, Colonial Legacies, and Oppressive Rule

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by Edit Kruk

“The Slaughterhouse” where rebel civil war victims were butchered. Kailahun, eastern Sierra Leone, pictured on 23 April 2012 (Image credit: Reuters/Finbarr O’Reilly)

Proxy warfare and warlord politics in the African region, symptomatic of longstanding colonial legacies, play out in states that are on the brink of collapse and where the state leader, desperate to preserve a grasp on power, will privatise security in exchange for natural resources whilst neglecting other essential functions of the state. This article will argue that under the conditions of proxy warfare and warlord patronage, the Civil War that raged in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002 can be linked to the figure of Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord financed by the trade of illicit blood diamonds.

In March of 1991, a group of rebels known as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) crossed the Liberian border and entered the Kailahun District in neighbouring Sierra Leone. This action initiated a civil war that lasted over a decade, displacing two million people. Its body count of 75,000 and another 20,000 mutilated renders it one of the most violent conflicts in history. As a force, the RUF specialised in the hacking of limbs and tongues, rape, and the wide use of child soldiers (with estimates of recruited children under the age of 14 being around 10,000). The faction was organised by Foday Sankoh, who met Taylor at an insurgency training camp in Libya. Both warlords shared a keen interest in Pan-Africanism—a movement that promoted a politically unified Africa and criticised the neo-colonial regime—which formed the backbone of the RUF’s ideology.

During the Sierra Leone Civil War, Sankoh received resources, arms and troops from Taylor in return for a physical extension to the Liberian Civil War (1989-96). Even though Charles Taylor was most commonly known for initiating the first Liberian Civil War in an attempt to liberate the state from the fraudulent and corrupt government of Samuel Doe, the connection between Taylor and the Sierra Leone Civil War was indisputable. The warlord’s interest in the region was as early as the 1980s as indicated by his request to Joseph Momoh (President of Sierra Leone during 1985-1992) to use Sierra Leone as a launchpad for his rebellion, but Momoh refused. Taylor’s warlordism solidified as a result of Momoh harbouring Nigerian forces (ECOMOG) that intervened in Liberia in 1990 and in so doing posed a direct challenge to Taylor’s control of the region. Therefore, through the provision of leadership and weapons to the RUF, Taylor crafted the neighbouring state’s instability to his advantage, effectively making it his proxy.

These signposts of Taylor’s influence with the RUF are due an analysis, paying special attention to the ways it shaped strategical decisions and terror tactics. Whilst Taylor was never in effective command of the RUF he was found guilty for the sponsorship of the faction and by default the abetting of the rebellion. However, between 1992-96, the RUF was forced to retreat into the bush and turn to guerrilla warfare, thereby increasing their use of terror to compensate for their lack of adequate equipment. The decline of the faction’s military sophistication came as a result of Taylor no longer sending sufficient resources, a result of a revolt in Liberia which blocked the RUF’s main feeding line. Whilst there was a sufficient link between Taylor and the RUF during the conflict, a deeper structural crisis was already harbouring further violence. This article will study this development through the analysis of the socio-political environment as a product of colonialism and an oppressive regime.

Colonial Legacies

The violent behaviour of Sierra Leone’s rebels becomes less reprehensible when perceived as a means of rebellion against years of colonial rule, rather than a tool of proxy warfare. In 1787, Sierra Leone was established as a settlement for freed slaves and by 1896 it was proclaimed a British protectorate. Creole people, upon their arrival, dominated the civil service employment sector which forced the indigenous population to the periphery of the state, creating the blueprint for a two-class society. The colonial suzerainty of the state can be criticised for embedding a weak bureaucracy and neglecting the local dynamics which divided Sierra Leone into chiefdoms, thereby decentralising the state and fuelling inter-ethnic rivalry by elevating the status of freed slaves above the Temne and Mendi people which made up sixty per cent of the local population. Unsurprisingly, the resulting two-class society and a raging welfare gap were carried into the post-independence period and, thus, an environment predisposed to patrimonialism emerged. Marginalisation and subsequent frustration amongst the youth of Sierra Leone manifested as hypo-aggressive tactics and was symptomatic of colonial legacies.

The feeling of hopelessness that accompanied the youth living in the harsh environment of Sierra Leone was tactically encouraged to manifest as acts of aggression by the RUF leadership. Indeed, the youths’ ideological barrenness when coupled with RUF leaders taking advantage of their lack of knowledge, through the spread of disinformation, was able to fuel drug use, removing their ability to consent, and, ultimately, dehumanising them. Moreover, the extreme violence deployed by the RUF was, in fact, a reflection of a deeper structural crisis of youth and modernity which were facilitated by the removal of Cold War constraints. Subsequently, whilst Taylor’s link to RUF attributes for some of the violent behaviour, colonial grievances set the conditions for the successful appropriation of long-standing local frustrations by warlords, to fulfil their agenda, and thereby create proxies. The Sierra Leonean rebel faction was able to augment considerable support from areas that failed to be emancipated from domestic slavery, itself remnants from the project of decolonisation. However, whilst historical grievances enabled mobilisation, they also proved unsustainable as the violence grew more acute and made the faction an unpopular one.

Oppressive Rule

Siaka Probyn Stevens, leading Sierre Leone from 1967 to 1985, oversaw a regime of aggressive policing that propelled frustration amongst the marginalised population and consequent outbursts of violence. By 1978, Stevens and his All People’s Congress (APC) were able to consolidate one-party rule, that resembled a dictatorship characterised by brutality and totalitarianism. In particular, Stevens closed railway networks that connected the North and the South East of the country in an attempt to prevent civilians from voting against the APC and passed the Killer Bill in 1980 which removed all media outlets other than those that were state-owned. These draconian measures granted Stevens control of the political discourse. Due to the historical context, patrimonialism thrived and Stevens’ rule was defined by a disparity in the dissemination of scarce resources, nepotism, and the subsequent rise of a shadow state.

Resentment towards the oppressive government quickly resulted in the formation of an insurgent people’s army, which exponentially garnered support through its critique of the neo-colonial regime, promising a coup, and the subsequent return to a multiparty democracy. Whilst this argument is convincing in its attribution of the violence committed by the RUF, as a response to the oppressive rule, the same rationale does not account for 9 to 10-year-old children being victims of revenge. For this reason, it is essential to view colonial history, the political context, and potential actors as inseparable and as enabling each other, when attempting to analyse the roots of violence in the Sierra Leonean conflict. Nonetheless, an oppressive regime was a trigger for civilians and radical students to initiate a rebellion in which violence was treated as a vehicle of change. Means of terror have been commonly known to be a response to the collapse of patrimonialism, and symptomatic of new barbarism, both key features of an insurgent movement.

To conclude, Charles Taylor successfully instrumentalised the neighbouring conflict into proxy warfare, thereby perpetuating the Sierra Leonean conflict, while physically extending the Liberian domain. Taylor did not intend to carry the RUF to victory, as the cessation of a stronger connection in 1992 proves. Meanwhile, the violence did not discontinue. Colonial grievances ensured widespread fragmentation and a sense of hopelessness while oppression fostered a desire for change and revenge which ultimately came to fruition in the form of terror, a means of achieving the rebel’s goals. Sierra Leone resembled a microcosm of the conflict that pervaded the rest of the continent, indicating a need to draw stronger parallels between African states for a better understanding of eruptions of violence in the region.

Edit Kruk is a final year (BA) War Studies student with a keen interest in modern slavery and the African region. Narratives through art and the history of early modern Imperial Spain, have been life-long areas of fascination.

Oil, patronage and corruption in the MENA region: the case of Saudi Arabia

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By Ibrahim Gabr:

Saudi Arabia is a country built on oil. By looking at the country through the theoretical lens of the resource curse, we can gain more insights into the relation between political patronage and this ‘resource curse.’ By examining a case study of patronage in Saudi Arabia, as well as the resource curse and the political patronage and corruption which are associated with it in the Kingdom, it is proposed that economic diversification represents one of the most critical policy avenues for this resource-dependent government. In the context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the Kingdom has brought about the deep entrenchment of monarchical regimes that use patronage so as to secure the loyalty and quiescence of their domestic populations without making any legitimate efforts towards democratic reform.

On the basis of these realities, and in the context of the resource curse, a clear and negative causal relationship exists between a country’s degree of economic diversification and the amount of patronage which occurs in its society. Examining the regional level for a common denominator which serves to perpetuate patronage within the reason, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as a centralizing force in the MENA region, is potent in allowing these regimes to perpetuate their unhealthy and undemocratic reliance on patronage as a pathway to regime stability. Thus, there is a certain extent to which the boom-bust cycle of the energy market, which is what lies at the crux of the resource curse, facilitates this type of patronage-based governance. On this basis, in spite of significant and publicly-disseminated promises of reform, the occurrence of an endogenous or exogenous shock in the international energy market could completely derail the Monarchy’s plans. With this, it would appear that patronage, in the context of the MENA region’s oil-producing states, is likely to continue well into the foreseeable future.

The nature of the resource curse and economic diversification as a solution

Many countries which have abundant mineral, gas and oil wealth have suffered from poor economic performance, and entrenched autocratic or dictatorial regimes. The notion of the curse is premised on poor policy because it is a corollary of states misusing the rents, which are accrued from their resource wealth and widespread corruption.[1] Much of this has to do with the fact that natural resources, in developing world contexts, are difficult to manage. As some of the countries’ governments do not have far-reaching administrative powers, they are often dependent on foreign oil companies, and have regime-based needs that are different from those of the population; they thus misuse their mineral and oil wealth and thus preclude the country’s economic or political development.[2]

In this context, the resource curse is thus a problem that tends to plague states that are newly beginning to produce oil or other mineral wealth, and absent optimal fiscal management, can continue to haunt them across decades of production. In other cases, like that of Saudi Arabia, a wealthy and long-standing oil-producing regime, the consequences of the Oil Curse have more saliently pertained to leading to the entrenchment of sub-optimal forms of governance, and to less effective production paradigms. Writ-large, the oil curse’s enduring reality is thus one of sub-optimal natural resource management which precludes both longitudinal economic development and governmental reform. In this context, economic diversification emerges as the key to eliminating patronage in these resource-driven contexts. Because patronage prevents democratization from emerging in these countries, the democratic corollaries of economic diversification are important in building a middle-class capable of pushing for democratic reform.[3] Contra-existing dynamics wherein these patronage-based regimes are capable of buying off important domestic stakeholders, because of wealth concentration, the pursuit of diversification allows for such a middle-class, educated in nature, to make a whole-hearted push for democratization, and the decline of patronage which is attendant to it.[4]

Saudi Arabia – high dependency/high patronage

The degree of political patronage and rent-seeking which exists in the country is perhaps one of the most significant in the MENA region. As noted by one regional commentator, the Saudi regime has completely obviated any shift towards economic reform, and has preferred to embrace policies which allow it to maintain a significant degree of control over the international oil market all the while engaging in significant patronage-based expenditures at home. Thus, because the Saudis do not have a legitimate program for the purposes of economic diversification, examining their case requires understanding how the country has sought to perpetuate its policy of regime stability through patronage by stabilizing its ability to meet expenditure needs in the contexts of an international energy market that still functions on the basis of a boom-bust logic.[5]

With this in mind, stabilizing expenditures has always been one of the most significant problems faced by oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia. Due to the boom and bust nature of the oil economy, these countries require strong fiscal policies that are simultaneously responsive, responsible and transparent in nature. With this in mind, some of the best approaches to stabilizing these expenditures lie in creating sources of control, which are external to the state. Thus, one option is to use cash transfers to redistribute oil revenues throughout the population. In doing this, it then becomes possible to create a population that has a stake in the oil economy, and which is thus responsive in pressuring the government to stay responsible. In a similar regard, another option is to privatize domestic oil ownership, and thus create a structure in which the domestic private sector exerts similar fiscal pressure on government so as to create some aura of legitimacy for a government that would be otherwise nothing more than based on its ability to provide rents through patronage.[6]

These solutions are important because stabilization funds have simply not been efficient in precluding the oil curse or the economic suffering which occurs during bust portions of the boom-bust cycle. As all of these oil curse-related variables relate to improper fiscal management of the oil economy, stabilization programs are nothing more than a Band-Aid on a wound that is already infected. Given that some of these countries lack structures of governance needed for proper fiscal management, there is thus no way for their stabilization funds to be well-maintained or appropriately-managed. As such, these do not represent a reliable fix for either the problems of the oil curse or the boom-bust cycle.[7] Even where the potential for such structure exists, in wealthier contexts like Saudi Arabia, the insularity of the regime, combined with its ability to use patronage to buy off potential opponents, creates a context of insularity which detracts from the potential for reform.

In terms of the Saudi Arabian context, its stabilization is, to a very large extent, ensured by the volume of the oil which it exports, and its influential position in terms of international oil diplomacy. In truth, the Kingdom has done very little to diversify or stabilize its economy, especially when compared to a country like Qatar or the UAE. Instead, the Kingdom has relied on its sheer volumes, and the rents captured by the ruling family and dispersed throughout the population, so as to maintain stability in the contexts of downturns. With this, the Saudi strategy has always been to use volume and wealth for stabilization, rather than to embrace the type of domestic economic differentiation and diversification which might represent a solution or buffer vis-à-vis the shocks of the international energy market. Thus, it would appear that Saudi Arabia has not made a legitimate attempt to move away from the dependence on oil which lies at the heart of its patronage-based political system.

The perpetuation of patronage: the US as a facilitating institution

The relationships between the USA and KSA have themselves taken on characteristics analogous to those of client-patron relations. As MENA region oil powers like Saudi Arabia have such strong protectors, in this case in the form of the American hegemon, they do not necessarily face significant exogenous pressure for reform. Indeed, America and Saudi Arabia, as an example, are trapped in a dyad of mutual dependency wherein the Saudis can count on the Americans to protect them from regional or even domestic threats. Simultaneously, the Americans are guaranteed relatively open access to oil markets in periods of crisis inasmuch as they are aware that the Saudis can increase production so as to maintain price stability throughout the international system. Thus, this mutual dependency reinforces these MENA region states’ abilities to maintain regimes premised on patronage even in a context where economic diversification would represent a far superior long-term solution to the structural economic and political issues which they face.

Conclusion

In the end, the case of Saudi Arabia demonstrates a clear causal relationship between significant energy reserves, the occurrence of the oil curse, low levels of economic diversification, and the perpetuation of political patronage and corruption. Tangibly, efforts which have been made to bring about diversification and thus endogenous economic growth across these countries have been modest. The likely reason for this continuing reality is that, even in the context of high state expenditures in a boom-bust market, the logic of patronage which underlies the stability of these oil-producing MENA-region regimes is one that is beneficial to their long-term political viability. Thus, absent an endogenous or exogenous shock, either in the form of an Arab Spring analog or a massive global energy disruption, the future of these states, as it pertains to the perpetuation of patronage, is likely very bleak indeed. While some states in the region have already taken anticipatory reforms to preclude the denouement of such revolutionary patterns in their own territories, such exogeneities remain a perpetual vulnerability, and thus dramatically shape the risk profile of the region.

Ibrahim Gabr is currently an honours undergraduate student in political science at McGill University in Canada.

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Notes

[1] M.L. Ross, ‘The political economy of the resource curse’, in World Politics, 51:2 (1999), pp. 297-322.
[2] M.L. Ross, The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
[3] A. Gelb, Oil Windfalls: Blessing or curse? (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1988).
[4] Ibid.
[5] M. Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[6] M.L. Ross, ‘Will oil drown the Arab Spring? Democracy and the resource curse’, in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2011).
[7] Ross, The Oil Curse.

Additional Sources

Alexeev, M. & R. Conrad, ‘The Elusive Curse of Oil’, in The Review of Economics and Statistics, 91:3 (2009), pp. 586-598.
Alhajji, A.F. & D. Huettner, ‘OPEC and Other Commodity Cartels: A Comparison’, in Energy Policy, 28 (2000), pp. 1151-1164.
Fasano, Ugo & Zubair Iqbal, GCC Countries: From Oil Dependence to Diversification (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2003).