Politics, War and Youth Culture in Sierra Leone


An alternative interpretation

---

Angela McIntyre is the project co-ordinator of the Interact programme at the ISS.
Emmanuel Kwesi Aning is a senior research fellow at African Security Dialogue and Research (ASDR) in Accra.
Prosper Nii Nortey Addo is a research fellow at ASDR in Accra.

Published in African Security Review Vol 11 No 3, 2002

Understanding the nature of armed conflict in Africa requires more than a political and military analysis of forms of warfare such as the employment of children as fighters. Children are seldom only instruments for other causes but can actively support their own agenda through the choices they make. Problems of governance, resource use and social organisation also need to be considered. There are often no clear lines between civilians and militaries and a simplistic ‘oppressor vs victim’ dichotomy is of limited use. The political character of youths can be better understood by considering the factors that shape their consciousness, as well as the predisposition of the society to care for them. Society has failed to offer youth protection from the adult consequences of immediate involvement in economy and politics. This has been a dynamic process rather than a static set of political and economic circumstances favourable to the outbreak of revolution.

Introduction

The use of children as soldiers in government, paramilitary and rebel forces in the Sierra Leone conflict was one of the most highly publicised cases of child rights abuse in recent years. Portrayals of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in particular cited the mass recruitment, chiefly through abduction, of under 18s into the movement.

The crisis of youth in Sierra Leone and other armed conflicts no doubt helped drive the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the use of Children in Armed Conflict into force in February 2002, and drew the attention of myriad UN agencies and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Interventions on behalf of child combatants have sought to negotiate the release of abductees, to oversee the disarmament, demobilisation, psycho-social care and reintegration of child combatants and to assist children in the tracing and reunification of families, as well as arranging alternative care for orphans and other unaccompanied children.

Currently in Sierra Leone, child and youth ex-combatants benefit from largely internationally sponsored reintegration schemes that include school attendance and skills and vocational training. UNICEF and other child protection agencies use a working estimate of 5,400 target beneficiaries, roughly 10% of whom are girls, in developing their programme interventions. Much of the remainder of Sierra Leone’s children are still in vulnerable situations; with an estimated 250,000 refugees and 600,000 internally displaced people constituting an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

The socialisation of the young generation in warfare has also left the need for an understanding and subsequent response to the political crisis of youth in Sierra Leone, which takes into account the frame of reference of a generation of young people that has spent the past 10 years surviving warfare. For these people peace (life without the influence of war) has become something of a mythical, abstract concept. Young people are left with the bewildering task of inventing their own peace. To do so will require the reconfiguration of their society, with clear guidance and strong messages from governments and authority figures conveying support and example to counteract the sense of betrayal that is undoubtedly felt by much of the young generation in this country.

While youth are commonly defined as aged 15–25, it was found in Sierra Leone that people up to the age of 35 were considered youth by virtue of their socio-economic status. According to 2001 figures, some 44.7% of the people of Sierra Leone fall into the under 14 age bracket.1 With a life expectancy of 45.6 years, the youthfulness of this society falls in line with most of sub-Saharan Africa, where populations are represented by clearly defined, broad based pyramids.2

This article suggests that understanding the nature of armed conflict in Africa demands not only political and military analysis of forms of warfare such as the employment of children and youth as fighters, but also the problems of governance, resource use and social organisation that thrive within a particular demographic space and within what have commonly come to be called ‘war economies’ or ‘economic agendas in civil wars’.

Whether children and youth are agents or instruments is a moot point to child rights advocates who unapologetically call for the protection of all those under 18 under the convention on the rights of the child. A simplistic ‘oppressor versus victim’ dichotomy, however, is of limited use in understanding conflicts in which there are no longer clear lines between civilians and militaries, and which, we propose, thrive in some way on the youthfulness of the population. The aim of this paper is not to assign responsibility or immunity to young Sierra Leoneans, rather it is to begin discerning the political character of youth in terms of the factors that shape their consciousness as well as the predisposition of the society to assume the burden of caring for them as prescribed by child rights advocates. While the humanitarian response can be informed by the imperative to provide rights for children purely as victims of conflict, the political response, particularly as it forms a part of the peace-building and post-conflict reconfiguration processes, demands a deeper knowledge of the origins and means of warfare and the extent to which warring parties are supported, actively, passively or through pure coercion, by their populations, including youth.

This article aims to place the agency of youth in the Sierra Leone conflict within a framework of what we term as constructive social incentives. We define these incentives as those elements within a society that contribute to stability, and orderly, as opposed to violent, social change. They constitute the broad range of elements that shape people’s choices, including those of youth. The erosion of incentives can be brought about by warfare, taking the form of disintegration of family and community cohesion, educational and economic opportunities; narrowing the available choices and survival strategies and ultimately, the protected social spaces afforded to young people for growth and development.

This article considers the origins of the war in Sierra Leone and of the RUF, and offer some explanation for the involvement of youth beyond the ‘lumpen’ hypothesis put forward by Ibrahim Abdullah and his colleagues.3 Rashid argues for the use of the word lumpen:

for want of a more appropriate collective term to describe a conglomerate group with diverse social and ethnic origins ... It is therefore used primarily in its crude Marxist sense to represent that strata of the society that cannot fully employ or sell its labour because of capitalist transformation, restructuring or retrenchment.4

This article offers an alternative to the notion that the marginalisation of youth and their subsequent revolt was brought about through capitalist transformation in this context. Society as a whole has failed in offering youth protection from the adult consequences of immediate involvement in economy and politics, and that this has been a dynamic process rather than a static set of political and economic circumstances favourable to the outbreak of revolution.5

Poverty erodes the ‘social and political buffer’ and effectively exposes young people directly to economic hardship and oppression, narrowing their choices, which, in the extreme case of children abducted into armed movements, amounts to taking a position either to ‘fight or die’. The coercive methods used to induce young abductees to fight have been well documented in Sierra Leone and have included forcing children to commit acts of violence against their own families and community members. This brutal severing of the social contract represents a collective failure on the part of families, communities and governments, to offer protection. Localised definitions of childhood and youth, although not always harmonious with international standards, provide benchmarks in the self-consciousness of social breakdown. Our recent research in Sierra Leone briefly explored adult attitudes toward children versus youth and found that the imperative to protect children (defined variously as under 18s or under 15s in both popular conceptions and in national legislation) to be non-negotiable and absolute. Youth, on the other hand, are subject to some ambiguity, and their perceived role as both victims and perpetrators in the war establishes them as political actors by local perceptions.6

The interest in youth agency lies in seeking out the political significance of youth and youth consciousness in the war, the need for reconciliation with, and recognition of, youth as stakeholders in the peaceful reconfiguration of Sierra Leone.

The origins of war in Sierra Leone

The interplay of bad governance and deteriorating economic conditions were among the key causes of the Sierra Leonean conflict. This was evident under the various regimes spanning both the colonial and post-colonial periods through the 1970s and 1980s until the end of the civil war in February 2002. David Keen has argued that:

even under colonial rule, a pattern of economic development based on the extraction of largely unprocessed raw materials had combined with widespread corruption among Sierra Leone politicians and traditional chiefs to create deep pools of resentment among those excluded from this system of profit and power.7

After independence and especially under the leadership of Siaka Stevens, the economy improved through efforts that sought to rationalise the extraction of minerals as a way of reducing illegal economic activities and corruption. These processes concurrently sought an increase in tax revenue for the development of infrastructural and social services.

By the 1970s and 1980s the economy plummeted as a result of re-intensification of corrupt practices, centralisation of governance coupled with clientelism and the neopatrimonial tendencies of Siaka Stevens’s regime. Stevens employed a series of techniques including both repression and co-optation of political opponents. For example, recruitment into the army and police was based not on merit but on connection and recruitment of youths. These people were supposed to ensure regime survival and conditioned to be violent if the need arose to support the regime. This was the spirit within which members of the All People’s Congress (APC) youth league were groomed. Jimmy Kandeh has argued that:

Conversion of state offices and public resources into sources of private wealth has been the primary mode of accumulation among Sierra Leone’s political elite since independence in 1961. Siaka Stevens ... turned over the entire diamond and fishing industry to Jamil Sahid Mohammed, his Afro-Lebanese crony and business partner ... Mohammed attended cabinet meetings (although he was not a minister or official member of government) occasionally vetoed ministerial appointments, reversed ministerial decisions and routinely violated government foreign exchange regulations.

By 1991, the country had experienced an almost seamless progression from politically motivated violence to criminal violence in terms of the ability of political and military leaders to engage in criminal activities resulting in the neologism ‘sobels’, a word used to describe those who were soldiers by day and engaging in thuggery and other rebel-associated activities by night. Second, interference with conventional sources of state revenue during different periods arising from a combination or otherwise of the above factors resulted in the growth of alternate structures or strongmen. The result of the state’s response to this complex mix of problems undermining sources and potential for revenue while at the same time threatening the survival of the state, was the privatisation of the state apparatus.

The role of youth violence in Sierra Leone’s war

There is a need for a nuanced and differentiated approach to discussing the child soldier phenomenon in the context of the allegations against Freetown youth culture per se. It is salient to emphasis here that though the RUF had a large youth component as its members, this youth membership comprised members of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds going beyond the borders of Sierra Leone.8 This questions the assertion that the centrality of Sierra Leonean youth culture alone explains the origin and dynamics of the war, specially given the fact that the members of the RUF were not made up of only Sierra Leoneans alone but residents of other countries in West Africa, with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. For example, when the initial group of what was supposed to be the RUF leadership arrived at the University of Ghana in the mid-1980s, they were supported by other Ghanaian student radicals who shared their vision of an egalitarian society.9 While the Ghana government was initially sympathetic to their views and demands, the real training and initial armaments for their revolt came from a mixture of sources, namely Burkina Faso, Liberia and Libya.

The insurrection by the RUF developed into a full-scale civil war when it entered Sierra Leone from Liberia, at Bomaru in Kailahun District and Mano River Bridge, Pujehun District, on 23 March 1991. The civil war, more than others in the sub-region, was characterised by widespread violence and gross abuse of human rights raising many questions both within Sierra Leone and on the international scene regarding the rationale behind the war. The participation of children in particular began to draw condemnation from the international community. Hundreds of case studies and testimonials have subsequently been collected from children, some as young as eight or nine years old, and some of whom have fought for the RUF, the SLA, the CDF, as well as Liberian faction groups.10
In an earlier work, it was argued that by late 1990, Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front had a cadre of child soldiers in the specially formed Small Boys Unit (SBU) in which children from Sierra Leone were active.11 As recently as February 2002, fieldwork interviews undertaken in Sierra Leone showed that some of these children had fought for different Liberian groups. Their involvement in Sierra Leone thus began as early as late 1991.12

Of those culpable in the use and recruitment of children, the RUF has been given the only real contextual analysis by Paul Richards in Fighting for the rainforest. Richards examines the rituals and mechanisms employed in the mid-1990s to guarantee the loyalty of young people, revealing what was in fact a rather sophisticated use of incentives other than the obvious one of terror:

… the rebels have more positive inducements of loyalty as well. Some are straightforwardly material. One young girl was asked why she came to identify with the people who seized her from her home, answered frankly: “they offered me a choice of shoes and dresses—I have never had decent shoes before. 13

More importantly, the state of youth in what Richards calls ‘rural slums’, devoid of any educational opportunities or constructive social incentives of any kind, proved especially fertile ground for recruitment:

For many seized youngsters in the diamond districts functional schooling had broken down long before the RUF arrived. The rebellion was a chance to resume their education. Captives report being schooled in RUF camps, using fragments and scraps of revolutionary texts for books, and receiving good basic training in the arts of bush warfare. Many captive children adapt quickly, and exult in their new- found skills, and the chance, perhaps the first in their lives, to show what they can do.14

Recruitment tactics, however, did not remain static and responded to the state of the population throughout the conflict. In keeping with the trends of poverty and the decline of security, infrastructure and social cohesion, the more ideologically focused targeting of the potes and rural populations progressed to increasing reliance on abduction, facilitated by increasing vulnerability. Testimonials from the 1999 siege of Freetown seem to indicate that abduction was employed more as a terror tactic than as a means to increase the ranks.15 The emphasis on education seems also to have petered out toward the end of the decade, which was perhaps symptomatic of a parallel breakdown of the system of social incentives within the RUF itself as it increasingly came to rely on forced manpower. The current notion of ‘youth culture’ in Sierra Leone carries connotations of both the birth of the RUF as well as the more recent and arguably less ideologically motivated associations of youth with the movement.

Shifting RUF agenda: From ‘constructive’ to ‘destructive’ social incentives?

After waging a brutal, destructive and protracted war against three successive regimes,16 the RUF captured Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, on 25 May 1997 taking over power from the constitutional government of Ahmed Tejjan Kabbah. After this development, efforts were made by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ceasefire monitoring group (ECOMOG) to reinstate the constitutional government to power, paving the way for subsequent attempts by the UN troops, UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) to disarm and reintegrate combatants who took part in the war.

Several explanatory and analytical frameworks and models have been presented for understanding, clarifying and interpreting or providing reasons for the origins, dynamics and rationales behind the conflict. Among them has been the key explanatory framework of a spillover of the Liberian war. According to Michael Brown, “the widely held view that internal conflicts are often triggered by external ‘contagion’ or ‘spillover’ effects is particularly suspect”. Nevertheless, Brown posits that “in this sample of active internal conflicts, only one—the civil war in Sierra Leone—was triggered by ‘spillover effects’” from a neighbouring state.17 Recently, however, the issue of economic greed has been raised as more important than the political grievances that underpin conflicts.18 Although this argument had been presented much earlier by Yusuf Bangura who argued that “in countries rich in natural resources, ... the political goals of wars often interact with the multiple logics of resource appropriation ... the looting of private property, and vandalism”. Such complicated outcomes have led many commentators to portray contemporary wars as being basically anarchical.19

Sierra Leone’s ambassador to the UN, Ibrahim Kamara, has recently commented on these different perspectives. He has argued that:

[t]he conflict was not about ideology, tribal or regional differences. It had nothing to do with the so-called problem of marginalised youths, or … an uprising by rural poor against the urban elite. The root of the conflict was and remained diamonds.20

The nature of Sierra Leone’s youth culture21 and the notion of ‘excluded intellectuals’22 have also been expounded as key factors in explaining the war, but the assertion that the ‘lumpen’ and ‘subaltern’ youth factor in the conflict influenced and contributed to the specifically different trajectories that the war in Sierra Leone has taken, needs to be more carefully interrogated.

This analytical framework focuses on the centrality of youth culture and on their behaviour during the civil war. It attempts to give credence to the notion that lumpen youths found within the city of Freetown were key actors not only in the emergence of the crisis but in the specifically brutal trajectories that the war took. It asserts that a key factor to understanding the present crisis and the dynamics of the war and violence is the centrality of youth culture in Sierra Leone.23 In other words, the nature of youth underclass culture has been seen and posited as central to the drama surrounding the war and the continued violence.

If one takes Rashid’s argument for the use of the Marxist notion of lumpen to describe youth subculture to its logical conclusion, it shows several fallacies. First, to describe a large segment of the population as subalterns and lumpens because they cannot sell their labour does not explain how and why their labour cannot be sold in the first place. Neither does it explain why in other societies with unemployed or unemployable youth, such characterisations are not applied.

In the case of Sierra Leone, the introduction of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and economic recovery programmes (ERPs) by both the Siaka Stevens and Momoh governments was in reaction not so much to capitalist transformation as to state inability to perform its assigned functions. What took place in Sierra Leone, which has been erroneously characterised as ‘capitalist transformation’, was a confused economic re-engineering process in which corruption had become a hallmark of national politics. During this process, the economic elite manipulated the economy to get more access to resources, backed by the shallow and empty rhetoric of ‘constructive nationalism’, that is, a process through which the fruits accruing from the nationalist struggle would be shared fairly and equitably among the citizens of Sierra Leone.

Thus one can argue that Rashid’s choice of words is situational and spurious. First, those workers who were retrenched because of his perceived ‘capitalist transformation’ process and whom he equates and links to lumpen and subalterns were in fact honest, hardworking people who formed the working class strata of Sierra Leone society. Furthermore, even if a subaltern culture and discourse centred on violence did emerge in Sierra Leone, it was more likely a response to elite manipulation of politics and the economy to serve narrow, non-state interests than a youthful predisposition to idleness and anti-socialism.

In Ibrahim Abdullah’s essay on ‘Bush path to destruction’,24 he applies the term to refer to the large unemployed and unemployable youths, mostly male, who live by their wits or have one foot in what is generally referred to as the informal or underground economy.25 Abdullah regards this youth as predominantly second-generation city residents having defective education and ill-formed political consciousness. Their popular resorts are peri-urban spaces known as the pote, constructed around the odelay or masquerade, which formed the cultural and organisational foci or site of the city’s lumpen youth. According to the argument, those associated with these cultural sites are known for their anti-social behaviour: smoking marijuana, petty theft and violence, among other things.

The overall impression is of a backward, unenlightened Sierra Leonean youth with a collectively negative attitude, who gravitate naturally toward violence and become ideal ‘canon fodder’ for rebel insurgencies. As Peter and Richards describe it:

There are two main adult reactions to youth involvement in civil wars [emphasis added]. The first is to stigmatise youth combatants as evil (as ‘bandits’ and ‘vermin’) ... Many under-age recruits are from remote rural regions. Poorly educated, they are readily despised by urbanised elites. Elites always fear ‘unwashed’ youth. Africa is no exception. Sometimes, as in Liberia and Sierra Leone, colonially rooted attitudes to interior peoples reinforce the stigmatisation of young rural combatants as ‘barbarians’ ...26

This captures the elitist perception of the ‘rural’ youth, in which they are consistently described in derogatory terms. The youth found within Freetown and its outskirts after independence in 1961 were perceived as illiterates, unenlightened and rebellious with primitive instincts. These youths, it was asserted, had nothing good and positive to offer society. Rooted in colonial attitudes and fostered by the continuing presence of an ever threatened elite, the irrational fear of barbarism from the bush persists. It has even been subtly co-opted by the Western media’s portrayals of the conflict in Sierra Leone as an irrational orgy of massacre and pillage spurred by greed for diamonds.

The marginalisation of youth in Sierra Leone came about as a result of political and economic factors that eventually led to the Sierra Leonean crisis. The youth of Sierra Leone thus had an interest in joining any process that in their worldview would contribute to improving their living conditions. The rhetoric of the RUF and the initiation of war activities were interpreted in this narrow context. For some, the RUF offered a different incentive: to bring about change through destruction. Gaining control through the use of terror tactics and destabilisation of the countryside, the rebel movement was able to further limit the choices of the population. In this way, they were highly successful: they controlled the dynamic of increasing vulnerability.

The movement thrived not because of a generation predisposed to violence, but because constructive social incentives offered to youth were insufficient to guarantee the perpetuation of an already failing state built on a society destabilised by a failing economy. Instability, in turn, further undermined the society’s ability to protect its children. As the buffer approached collapse, the choices of youth pushed to the end of a continuum between free will and coercion were narrowed down to ‘fight or die’ for those who fell into the thick of violence. And so the project of sustaining the RUF came to adapt to new socio-economic realities that were far from anything that might resemble capitalist transformation.

In its way, the RUF offered a new system of social incentives to youth, of a negative, destructive variety, an answer to what the state and society failed to provide, and sustained itself not on a population of the disgruntled unemployed, but on a youthful population rendered physically, socially and ideologically vulnerable by protracted warfare. The society under siege, in turn, grew progressively less able to maintain its own cohesion and to prevent either voluntary or coerced participation in the project to overthrow the state.

Agents or instruments?

Ibrahim Abdullah explored the social and intellectual linkages between the RUF-to-be, the student movement and the marginal youths otherwise referred to as lumpens.27 He saw this interaction as key to the emergence of the civil war. He argued that the marginalisation of youth and the absence of a radical political culture was a factor in explaining why rebellious youths generally turned to bland uncritical and undifferentiated discourses on pan-Africanism and other seemingly radical ideas, such as Gaddafi’s Green Book and Kim II Sung’s Juche idea, in pursuing an ideational alternative to guide their action.28 He saw students immersed in the rebellious youth culture becoming the articulate mouthpiece of a disaffected youth cohort attacking APC party rule and calling for fundamental change.

While his hypothesis describes the political origins of the RUF, it falls short of broader contextual analysis. It is true that the RUF resembles no other rebel movement, and that the trajectory of the war was unique.

But the lumpen hypothesis confines the interpretation of youth and youth politics within a particular economic framework, and neglects the broad range of social and political factors that enabled the prolongation of the conflict and in a circular fashion, the increasing vulnerability of communities to violent subjugation.

The war economy that developed in Sierra Leone was a significant departure from the conditions that gave rise to the RUF. It offered entirely different incentives requiring new survival strategies that undermined the ability of the society to maintain protected social spaces for young people.

The displacement of communities, the collapse of what little remained of education and health services, social cohesion and the accompanying poverty and hardship came to dwarf the potes as fertile recruiting grounds. The state of capitalist transformation, was, if it ever even began, arrested in its latent stages and gave way to the economic conditions to which the society, including the RUF, came to adapt.

Conclusion

It is critical to understand not only the origins of ‘youthful rebellion’, but the events that have led to current, local interpretations of youth culture and how they will influence the reconfiguration of the society and post-war policies. While disarmament appears to have been successful, the conditions for ongoing conflict are still very much present. They will continue to play themselves out within families, communities, on campuses and with traditional authorities. But the productive participation of youth requires constructive social incentives: cohesive communities, accessible education and recognition of the rights of youth to participate in the peace process.

It also means a re-orientation of policies in a way that supports a youthful population. The scale of youth violence seen in Sierra Leone was ultimately due to the absence of social and economic buffers. To challenge authority and seek independence is part of a natural development process, which, if not contained at socially acceptable levels within an orderly society, can be instrumentalised for any number of ends. The burden of care on stable societies in industrialised nations is absorbed by a greater proportion of economically productive adults and a smaller portion of children and youth. The ‘population pyramids’ seen in sub-Saharan Africa, with half or more of the population being children and youth, face not only crises of social services but also the challenge of protecting and productively engaging their young majorities, in many cases in the post-war recovery project. The political immaturity of rebel movements with youthful bases in no way detracts from their ability to wreak devastation. Whether or not liberation agendas are coherent, youth remain a political force with which to be reckoned; whether they are agents or instruments of violent upheaval.

The position of youth as stakeholders in the peace process is not an easy one, given the events that have shaped the prevailing view of youth in post-war contexts. They are seen as both victims and perpetrators of violence. The countless, small-scale acts of reconciliation that make up the real peace process require empathy and understanding of the ongoing vulnerability of young people as well as recognition of their potential as peacemakers, rather than an imagined predisposition to violence.

Notes