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Since 1991, this West African nation has been brought to its knees by a series of coups, violent conflicts, and finally, outright war. The war has ended today, but it is clear that things are hardly settled. Focusing on the group spearheading the violence, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), journalist Lansana Gberie exposes the corruption and appalling use of rape and mutilation as tactics to overthrow the former government. Gberie looks closely at the rise of the RUF and its ruthless leader, Foday Sankoh, as he seeks to understand the personalities and parties involved in the war.
Based on first-hand experience, the author charts the decade-long civil war that brought Sierra Leone to its knees from 1991-2001. The group spearheading the violence claimed to be freeing the country from corruption but their insurgency killed more than 75,000 people and displaced half the population.
How diamonds have been the cause of widespread death, misery, & destruction for almost a decade in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Through the 1990s, Sierra Leone's rebel war became a tragedy of major humanitarian, political & historic proportions, but the story goes back 60 years, to the discovery of the diamonds. The diamond mining sector has become influenced by organized crime & by the smuggling not just of diamonds, but of guns & drugs, & by vast sums of money in search of a laundry. No peace agree. would be sustainable until the problems of mining & selling diamonds had been addressed, both inside Sierra Leone & internationally. Tables.
This collection of empirical and theoretical studies of social movements in Africa is a corrective to a literature that has largely ignored that continent. It shows that Africa s social movements have distinctive features that are related to its specific history.
This is the most authoritative study of the Sierra Leone civil war to emanate from Africa, or indeed any publications' programme on Africa. It explores the genesis of the crisis, the contradictory roles of different internal and external actors, civil society and the media; the regional intervention force and the demise of the second republic. It analyses the numerous peace initiatives designed to end a war, which continued nonetheless to defy and outlast them; and asks why the war became so prolonged. The study articulates how internal actors trod the multiple and conflicting pathways to power. It considers how non-conventional actors were able to inaugurate and sustain an insurgency that called forth the largest concentration of UN peacekeepers the world has ever seen.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is the third modern international criminal tribunal supported by the United Nations and the first to be situated where the crimes were committed. This timely, important and comprehensive book is the first to critically assess the impact and legacy of the SCSL for Africa and international criminal law. Contributors include leading scholars and respected practitioners with inside knowledge of the tribunal, who analyze cutting-edge and controversial issues with significant implications for international criminal law and transitional justice. These include joint criminal enterprise; forced marriage; enlisting and using child soldiers; attacks against United Nations peacekeepers; the tension between truth commissions and criminal trials in the first country to simultaneously have the two; and the questions of whether it is permissible under international law for states to unilaterally confer blanket amnesties to local perpetrators of universally condemned international crimes.
The International Peace Academy
Looks at the strategies used to begin negotiated settlements in the first Palestinian Intifada, and the impact that the media has on such affairs.
Based on ethnographic research among militias in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor on battlefields and in dangerous unregulated industries.
"Veteran investigative reporter Douglas Farah was the Washington Post's Africa bureau chief focusing on the diamond and illegal arms trade when, in the wake of 9/11, he made an explosive discovery: indisputable evidence that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups were laundering their cash by trading it for diamonds mined in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Probing the shadowy world where corrupt officials, diamond and arms merchants, vicious rebels, drugged child soldiers, and the informal Arab network of money changers known as hawalas intersect, Farah uncovered a crucial piece of the terrorism puzzle Western intelligence missed: the interlocking web of commodities, underground transfer systems, cha...