The Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration programme started in Sierra Leone in 1998. Among others, its objectives were to collect, register, disable and destroy all conventional weapons and munitions retrieved from combatants. But Lansana Gberie argues that DDR processes are “expensive, time-consuming, and often irritating. It challenges one’s sensibilities, for example, to come to terms with the idea that fighters who have been guilty of gross atrocities will be compensated and helped to resettle and reintegrate into society, while the millions of their victims, whose lives had been battered by the combatants, will remain derelict. “

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fighter was probably no more than sixteen, but he was already well-practiced in the front’s affecting sententiousness. “What we want,” he said, his voice sounding like some old recording, “is peace that does not leave us in pieces.” I was talking to him in the diamond-rich district of Kono, eastern Sierra Leone, in 2001. The disarmament process, thrown into chaos after the RUF abducted 500 peacekeepers in May 2000, had picked up again, and a large contingent of heavily-armed Pakistani troops were camped a couple of miles to the other side of the ravaged district. Many of the RUF fighters, some still with weapons, were digging for diamonds. Fatorma – for that was the RUF fighter’s name – said that his gun, an old AK 47, was all that he had in the world. It was a life and death matter for him. Without it he feared he would be killed. “This is what makes me a man,” he said. “Why should they ask me to give it up? It will be end of our Revolution.”

Fatorma was right. The RUF, which was almost entirely without political support, surviving only because it was armed, would cease to exist once its weapons were taken away. The UN, which was funding the process, did not seem very aware of this. They had also put in place an elaborate political programme which would allow the rebels to participate in elections that were to be held the following year, 2002. The psychology of the armed in an atmosphere of lawlessness has been commented on by many, but to face someone like Fatorma – very young, rootless, without any other skills, in an environment degraded by warfare in which he was a prime participant – is to add a new, totally frightening, meaning to the phenomenon. With their weapons – small, cheap, easy-to-hide guns – they have a feeling of real power and a stake in what goes on around them; and they can be highly destructive, especially when drugged (as is often the case). Without them they feel alienated and hopeless, but far less dangerous to overall society. It is the reason why the UN has made disarming of militias and their encampment and reintegration into the wider society a cardinal part of any process of transition from war to peace in every war-affected country that the organization has been involved with.

“A successful DDR/RRR process,” concludes the National Programme for Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reinsertion, a 2004 document produced jointly by the Ivorian government and the UN mission in the country, ONUCI, “makes the difference between peace and a return to war.” Put so starkly, the question whether DDR (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration) is a requirement for peace looks like a no-brainer. Can there be any question about the need for disarming combatants and having them completely demobilized and reintegrated, as civilians or into the professional military, in any transition from civil war to peace programme? In fact, DDR programmes have been such a core aspect of peace missions in the recent past that peace operations have become almost unthinkable without them.

It has not always been like that, however. The problem of dealing with unwanted combatants, or ex-combatants, is as old as warfare itself. The current policy of DDR is a distinctively UN strategy; its humanitarian provenance cannot be doubted. This, as we have noted, has not always been the case. As Marx noted, when Julius Caesar, the great Roman general, wanted to demobilize some unwanted Gallic soldiers who had, at various times, caused him serious problems, he had the right hand of hundreds of them cut off. This was not recreational cruelty in the manner of some of the neurotic indulgences of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF); it was deadly rational business. The soldiers, if not put out of business, could have posed a grave danger to Caesar’s emerging dominion, and Caesar had no time for a protracted programme of a more humane nature – these were cruel and turbulent times. Napoleon, the French revolutionary leader and a child of the Enlightenment, would have found Caesar’s tactic too barbaric. So, as soon as he was sure of his own imperial ambitions, he had thousands of his own soldiers, suspected of Republicanism, shipped to Haiti, there to be killed by the revolutionary forces of Toussaint L’Overture and the plague.

The UN-monitored programmes of disarming and demobilising West African civil war combatants have involved essentially the same logic: most combatants in such wars were hastily recruited, sometimes forcefully, and although they always get coarsened by warfare, normal life for many of them can really only be found outside of the armed forces. Conventional militaries in any case cannot absorb many of the ex-combatants, who, increasingly, are children anyway.

Sierra Leone’s war began in March 1991 when a former army corporal and photographer, Foday Saybanah Sankoh, invaded the country from Liberia with a small band of Sierra Leonean dissidents and mercenaries from Liberia and Burkina Faso. In a very short time, the war engulfed the country with a destructive force. The war led to a complete normative collapse. It directly triggered three military coups - one in 1992, the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) coup led by Captain Valentine Strasser; another in 1996, a palace coup that led to Strasser's replacement by his deputy Brigadier Maada Bio; and the most destructive, in 1997, a bloody putsch that temporarily terminated the democratically elected government of Tejan Kabbah. By the end of 1996, upwards of 15,000 people had been killed and almost two-thirds of the country's population of 4.5 million displaced.

The economy collapsed, with a negative annual growth rate of minus 6.24 per cent between 1991 and 1995. By March 1996, an estimated 75 per cent of school-aged children were out of school, and 70 per cent of the country's educational facilities, already troubled by the time war started, were destroyed. Only 16 per cent of the country's health facilities were functioning by March 1996, and almost all of these were in the as yet untouched capital (untouched by war, that is). By the end of 1999, the casualty figure had risen, by most estimates, to upwards of 70,000, and Freetown had itself been partly destroyed in a devastating attack by the rebels and rogue government soldiers in January 1999. Thousands of civilians, including young babies, had their hands crudely amputated by the rebels in a campaign of insane terror.

Understanding why disarmament is so important in such a situation requires a mere examination of how difficult the whole process was. In May 2000, months into the process, the UN announced that it had disarmed 24,042 militia combatants, but that these combatants had turned in only 10,840 weapons. That same month, a RUF commander invaded one of the disarmament camps on grounds that the UN had disarmed some RUF combatants without first clearing it with him. He had some UN soldiers and military observers tied up, beaten and detained. That RUF commander is now in the custody of the UN-Sierra Leone Special Court, charged with crimes against humanity. It was a week after this incident that the RUF captured the 500 UN troops (of the Zambian contingent), precipitating one of the biggest crises in the UN’s peacekeeping history.

At the end of Sierra Leone’s disarmament process, about 70,000 combatants were disarmed and demobilized. They were mainly Revolutionary United Front guerrillas and their main nemesis, members of the Civil Defence Force (CDF). An interesting report on the aftermaths of the DDR process, entitled What the Fighters Say: A Survey of Ex-Combatants in Sierra Leone June-August 2003, makes a number of important comments on the motivations of the combatants in the two groups. The survey took place over a year after the disarmament process, and since it relies on the expressed views of the ex-combatants to draw its conclusions, these comments should be regarded with healthy skepticism. The report argues that “Overall, the data support the view that the fighters in the conflict were largely underprivileged individuals who had been failed by the Sierra Leonean state.” It states:

Over one-quarter of fighters came from households in which the father had passed away before the war; fully one third had lost at least one parent by the time the war started; and almost 10% had lost both parents at the start of the fighting…

Moreover, nearly 60% had been displaced from their homes before they joined a faction. These figures are much higher for the CDF – where more than three-quarters of the combatants had been forced from their homes [by RUF attacks] before they decided to join. Particularly for the CDF, the uprooting of their lives caused by the war was an important part of their story of participation.

The report argues that:

Across factions, both political and material motivations mattered for the recruitment of fighters. RUF combatants claimed that they fought to express dissatisfaction, to root out corruption, and to bring down the existing regime. CDF fighters argued that they aimed to defend their communities from the violence brought by the war. Political motivations notwithstanding, there were strong material incentives as well. RUF combatants were promised jobs, money, and women; during the war, they received women, drugs, and sometimes more valuable goods. [My emphasis] The CDF helped to meet the basic needs of the members and provided increased security for their families.

The issue of political motivation with respect to the RUF – that business of fighting to “root out corruption” – is seriously undermined by the fact that, as the report notes, “87% of RUF combatants reported being abducted [and forcefully inducted] into the faction and only 9% suggest they joined because they supported the group’s political goals.” On the other hand, the CDF, which was aggressively pro-government, had “62% of [its] combatants [reporting that they joined] because they supported the group’s political goals,” with only 2% suggesting they were “forcibly recruited.” The rest said they participated because they were “scared of what would happen if they did not join or to take revenge on the RUF.” There are other interesting set of statistics. With respect to corruption and governance, “more than half” of the ex-combatants “believe things are about the same or worse than before the war.” But “while members of different factions have found distinct ways of reintegrating, they tend to share a largely positive assessment of the progress made by the government in addressing fundamental economic and political challenges in the country,” with fully “83% of the respondents” [the survey interviewed 1000 ex-combatants] believing that “access to education is better now than it was before the war,” and 65 % believing that “access to medical care has substantially improved.”

How can one make sense of the apparent cognitive dissonance in these views? It probably reflects a profound issue at the heart of the war: most of the combatants, particularly those in the RUF, can hardly be expected to have a good idea of conditions before the war, because they were mainly children when they were recruited to fight. Now a good number of them are grown-up and are now facing the usual challenges of eking out a legitimate living in an impoverished country with few opportunities. What to do?

Francis Kai-Kai, who managed Sierra Leone’s DDR programme, recently told me that his National Committee on the DDR got the ex-combatants quickly through the Disarmament and Demobilisation phase – which included some technical training and a little cash support – and then had them integrated within the general ambience of poverty. “We didn’t want them to feel privileged for a long time,” he said, “that would pose problems in the future.” Now the Sierra Leone government is working on a Poverty Alleviation Scheme, with World Bank support, and with Kai-Kai as one of the key players. The success of this scheme would lead to a more general improvement in the living standards in the country, from which the ex-combatants will presumably benefit. It remains to be seen how this will play out. The reintegration aspect, in other words, is ongoing.

DDR processes are expensive, time-consuming, and often irritating. It challenges one’s sensibilities, for example, to come to terms with the idea that fighters who have been guilty of gross atrocities will be compensated and helped to resettle and reintegrate into society, while millions of their victims, whose lives have been battered by the combatants, will remain derelict. Patient work, however, can pay off. One of the more creative steps taken by the UN and the Sierra Leone government was the Community Arms collection initiative. Officials decided to go beyond the combatants and ex-combatants, and target various communities in Sierra Leone in an effort to induce ordinary people to give up deadly weapons. The initiative was so successful that since the war ended there have been fewer incidents of violent crime in Sierra Leone than even before the war started – which is to say, crime is very low in the country.

At the end of the disarmament process in Sierra Leone, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a statement welcoming the development. The statement noted that it was time for “the extension of State authority throughout the country, the restoration of ex-combatants, the restoration of the Government’s control over natural resources, and the resettlement of returning refugees and internally displaced persons, as well as forging national reconciliation, remain crucial tasks for the peace process which also requires generous support from the international community.” The very difficult and less dramatic task of governance and economic development, in other words, would now start. That task, like the reintegration process, is still ongoing; Sierra Leone’s future stability will depend on it. The jury is out on the whole process.

• Lansana Gberie, the author of “A Dirty War in West Africa”, is a Sierra Leonean researcher and journalist.
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