Revolutionary United Front

Revolutionary United Front (RUF), guerrilla unit formed in 1991 in Sierra Leone whose actions created instability in the country that led to the overthrow of the government and a long civil war. The group later financed itself through control of the country’s diamond resources and for 11 years carried out violent attacks on civilians that claimed some 50,000 lives and displaced approximately two million people. The group was notorious for recruiting children into its ranks and raping and maiming its victims. In 2002 United Nations military efforts disabled the group and restored peace in Sierra Leone.

The RUF’s leader, Foday Saybana Sankoh, was a former student activist who in the 1970s had spent time in exile in Libya, where he came under the philosophical influence of Muammar al-Qaddafi. While in Liberia in 1991, Sankoh aligned himself with a Liberian antigovernment guerrilla unit, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, and with its leader, Charles Taylor, who had previously made an armed incursion into Sierra Leone. (Taylor later would become president of Liberia following an eight-year civil war.) He and Sankoh founded the RUF, which in March 1991 began carrying out attacks on towns along Sierra Leone’s eastern border with Liberia. Within a month the RUF had taken control of a sizeable region of the eastern part of Sierra Leone and was on track to overtake the government.

In April 1992 a small military group unconnected to the RUF deposed the country’s president. The RUF continued its campaign against that new military junta, committing atrocities against civilians across the country, and thousands fled to neighbouring Guinea. By 1994 the RUF had systematically eliminated many rural workers in the country’s diamond-mine areas, and by year’s end thousands had been murdered and half of the country’s 4.6 million people had been displaced. The strength of the government’s army was dwindling, and the RUF successfully continued to exploit many of the diamond mines.

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By early 1995 the RUF had commandeered nearly all the country’s economic resources, and it had kidnapped and enlisted hundreds of young men against their will, often having drugged them. With several thousand in its ranks, the RUF moved within several miles of Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. At the time, the mission and principles of the RUF were poorly understood by the public, as was Sankoh’s identity. A manifesto issued by the RUF in 1995, “Footpaths to Democracy: Toward a New Sierra Leone,” gave people their first vague idea of the group’s goals. The manifesto decried the country’s “state sponsored poverty and human degradation” created by “years of autocratic rule and militarism” and stated the RUF’s goal of creating “equal opportunity and access to power to create wealth” through armed struggle.

The government enlisted the help of Executive Outcomes (EO), a South African security firm that had once assisted the Angolan government in its fight against UNITA rebels. The EO troops first arrived in May 1995, and within days they had beaten back RUF forces from Freetown. They regained control of the diamond mines shortly thereafter. EO continued its assault on the RUF, and by 1996 the RUF was weakening and called for a cease-fire. Peace talks began in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and went on for nearly a year, during which time RUF attacks continued. A new president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, was elected in Sierra Leone in February 1996. The government and the RUF reached a peace accord in November.

In May 1997, however, a military putsch sent Kabbah and his government into exile in Guinea. The coup leaders formed the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which included members of the RUF, to rule the country. In the period that followed, the country fell into chaos. Banks and other government institutions closed down, while rape, murder, and general lawlessness brought the economy to a standstill. Troops from the Economic Community of West African States (the Economic Community Cease-Fire Monitoring Group, or ECOMOG)—a force comprising thousands of soldiers from Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and, later, Mali—intervened to combat the AFRC and the RUF. In March 1998 Kabbah returned to Freetown and took control of the country, while ECOMOG forces pursued AFRC and RUF groups around the country.

Sankoh, who had been arrested in Nigeria in March 1997 and subsequently turned over to the Kabbah government, was sentenced to death in October 1998. The RUF undertook what would be its bloodiest endeavour to date, “Operation No Living Thing.” They abducted, dismembered, and murdered thousands of people in a countrywide sweep. On January 6, 1999, the AFRC and RUF entered Freetown again and committed further systematic atrocities to subdue the population; nearly 6,000 civilians were killed before ECOMOG could force them out. In July another peace accord—the Lomé Agreement—was signed. The Lomé Agreement proposed a power-sharing plan that gave Sankoh and other rebels a role in the government in exchange for the disarmament of the RUF and AFRC forces. In spite of the agreement, RUF soldiers continued their attacks on civilians as well as on UN peacekeeping troops, who arrived in November. Sankoh was recaptured by government forces in May 2000. The UN troops and recently arrived British forces continued deploying to rebel-heavy areas, securing significant areas of the country and negotiating with the rebels. The overall disarmament of RUF forces began in May 2001. The end to the civil war was declared officially in January 2002.

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A UN Special Court for Sierra Leone set up in 2002 indicted five leading members of the RUF—Sankoh, Sam Bockarie, Issa Hassan Sesay, Morris Kallon, and Augustine Gbao—for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law. Sankoh and Bockarie died before their trials, Sankoh of natural causes and Bockarie in a shootout with Liberian forces. The other three were tried together and on February 25, 2009, were found guilty: Sesay and Kallon on 16 counts and Gbao on 14 counts.