Bound to Cooperate for Peace in Sierra Leone (2007)

This book wrestles with fundamental questions of practical disarmament and peace building in Sierra Leone. Although they were written prior to the May-June 2000 upsurge of violence in Freetown that led to the arrest of Foday Sankoh, these incidents underline the relevance of the authors' analyses.

IN THIS NEW YEAR 2007 we are delighted to announce the re-publication, Dear Reader, of a book about peace Building in Sierra Leone. The United Nations and ECOMOG can count Sierra Leone among their success stories, largely thanks to Nigeria’s leaders and the Nigerian army. This is the second edition of the book, which Dr Poulton organized and edited with a colleague from Cameroon named Anatole Ayissi (a diplomat and researcher who is now working at the UN office in Dakar). If UNIDIR decided to re-issue the book it is because we believe that Africa has a lot to learn from the Sierra Leonean analysis. The lessons of peace building in Sierra Leone could help improve the situations in Liberia (looking positive) and in Ivory Coast (looking negative) and in Guinea (looking grim).

Bound to cooperate – Conflict, Peace and People in Sierra Leone

co-edited by Anatole Ayissi & Robin-Edward Poulton

UNIDIR, Geneva, 206 pages Sales NO GV.E.00.0.20 UNIDIR/2000/19

This book was written not by outsiders, but by leaders of civil society in Sierra Leone, and it will be sent free to African peace specialists who write to UNIDIR in Geneva. As the title implies, governments and international organisations cannot make peace alone: they are ‘bound to cooperate’ with the villagers and civil society leaders if they want to avoid conflict and make progress. The peace process binds the political leaders to the leaders of civil society whose voices need to be expressed. Not only the people of Sierra Leone, but the whole of Africa can read here some lessons about building peace.


For more than a decade we have been working on issues surrounding disarmament in West Africa and the urgent need to control the illegal circulation of small arms and light weapons. In particular we have led research in West Africa for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) following a ‘silver thread of weapons collection and grassroots participation’ since the Malian peace process and the Peace of Timbuktu in 1996. From our research it emerges clearly that peace and disarmament cannot be achieved without the active participation of civil society organisations (CSO).

Civil society (including inter-faith councils, press associations and the media) has become one of the five pillars in the modern West African state, alongside the Executive, the Legislature, Security Forces and the Judiciary. CSOs are necessary partners for governments and international organizations undertaking security sector reform (SSR). Without human rights organizations and strong local governance groups, SSR will be weaker and abuse of power will not be curbed. Without the pressure of organized civil society, judges will be weak, police will be venal and there will be no rule of law. Without CSOs and especially the mobilization of women, disarmament, reintegration and reconciliation cannot succeed.

CIVIL SOCIETY, CHIEF PILLAR OF THE MODERN AFRICAN STATE

In post-conflict societies, after the cease-fire has been brokered and a peace agreement has been negotiated, rebel forces and armed criminals have to be dealt with through a process that we call DDDRRR or DRx3: disarmament, destruction, demobilization, reintegration, rehabilitation and reconciliation. Disarmament is obvious enough: we won’t achieve peace unless we take away the weapons and destroy them. The second ‘D’ spells Destroy, because if you don’t destroy the rebel weapons they will turn up again in another war or in a series of bank robberies and murders).

Demobilization is tougher than disarmament, because you are taking young men (and occasionally women as well) out of active combat and retraining them for civilian life. Many conflicts create gangs of youths who have known nothing but warfare. These people may have missed out on schooling, family life and the normal processes of socialization that turn Man from an animal into a citizen. Demobilization needs to be done fast, focusing on the future, and it includes medical treatments, education, and practical training for a new economic lifestyle. Many former combatants will enter government service as soldiers or customs officers or border guards. All the others will probably be trained for civilian life by specialized CSOs.

After the DDD come the three ‘R’s which depend almost entirely on civil society groups for their success. Reintegration has both social and economic aspects: new farmers or artisans or taxi drivers require loans for buying equipment, but above all they need to learn to work within the structures of village or town life with its rules and traditions. Rehabilitation often includes the rebuilding of the villages and schools that were destroyed during rebel fighting, as well as the rebuilding of the people and their social structures – and ex-combatants may not be able to participate at all if the reconciliation process has not taken place using all forms of religious, social and traditional mechanisms. Often a goat must be killed; until the goat is killed and its blood has been spilled, humans will not be able to forgive the human blood that was spilled during the conflict.

CSOs are critical to all of these issues. Without the village councils, parent-teacher associations, women’s associations, inter-faith meetings and other forums used by peace activists, DDRRR cannot succeed and peace will not return to the land. These are the subjects that are addressed in the book Bound to cooperate – Conflict, Peace and People in Sierra Leone, where civil society leaders explain the causes of the Sierra Leone war and describe their work in rebuilding society.

UNIDIR research and the growing experience of UN peace operations are creating new perceptions about Peace, Human Security and the State. Many countries have suffered from the failure of post-colonial centralized regimes - many further discredited by incompetent military regimes. Since the early 1990s, countries like Senegal and Ghana and Mali have been creating new mechanisms for decentralized governance. Decentralisation strengthens civil society – not just the urban groups that are so often perceived by donors and African governments as the most significant, but the real civil society organizations of Africa: village associations and cooperatives, unions of workers and artisans, women’s credit unions, youth groups and a thousand other associative networks. Africa’s traditions of community governance were suppressed by centralization and colonial rule.

Civil society was also repressed by young political parties building new States (often One-Party-States). Yet this new millennium has seen civil society emerge as one of the five pillars of the African State, regaining its historic African position as the second pillar, second only to the Executive. In many African countries (especially with the creation of decentralized governance mechanisms and representative, transparent local government) civil society is replacing a discredited Legislature as the most important representative voice of the people, and supplanting the Judiciary as a primary source of conflict mediation.

In peace building and disarmament – as the Sierra Leone case studies illustrate - civil society has become the indispensable partner. While peace agreements may be signed in the five-star hotels of foreign capital cities like Abuja, Accra, or Lomé, the real work takes place in the villages where militias hide and weapons need to be collected. No peace accord illustrates this better than the case of Ivory Coast: negotiations in the Parisian suburb of Marcoussis have made little impression on the rebels in the north, or on the patriotes militia in Abidjan. Perhaps we should be looking for a new approach to peace negotiation, based on the strengths of African civil society and the capacity of grassroots and women’s organizations to negotiate peace. The chapters in this book written by leading Sierra Leoneans certainly seem to point us in that direction.