The independent commentary on British political affairs.
The independent commentary on British political affairs.
May 2008
Vol. 11, No. 11
A People's War: Brenda Boardman | The shadow over Brown's plan's to change the way we are governed: … More…
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When Tony Blair touched down near Freetown on his valedictory Africa tour in May, it meant a lot more than providing an opportunity for the tabloids to laugh at him wearing a brown robe, becoming crowned chief and being offered wives aplenty as his own wife looked on. Ask Sierra Leoneans and they don’t just like the former British prime minister, they love him. In Sierra Leone there are street shacks shakily painted in the Union Jack. There is a black taxi motoring around the capital. There is a child named Tony Blair.
In 2000, Blair ordered a short, sharp intervention that he made count. Fewer than 1,000 British soldiers helped put a stop to the country’s horrific war that had begun nine years earlier, killed thousands, displaced half a million, and left both UN and Nigerian-led west African troops, known as ECOMOG, floundering in their attempts to put a stop to the drug-fuelled limb-chopping, raping and murder. Seven years on, Britain remains lead bilateral donor.
Along with Kosovo, it marked the first real test of the ‘ethical dimension’ of Robin Cook and Tony Blair’s foreign policy. It was the defining characteristic of his foreign policy: ‘We have been strongly activist, justifying our actions, even if not always successfully, at least as much by reference to values as interests,’ said Blair in a speech last year.
Enthusiasts hail Britain’s intervention in Sierra Leone as the master template for how such value-driven foreign policy should work: a quick military intervention, credited with ending the war, with minimal loss of life — one British soldier was killed — followed by sustained support for development.
At the end of the war in 2002, Britain committed to support Sierra Leone until 2012 and today gives more money per person than to anywhere else. Advisors stayed behind to train the army, which had been responsible for five coups in the country since independence from the British in 1961. Many soldiers had joined the rebels during the war, earning themselves the name ‘sobels’ and outdoing each other’s heinous acts.
So successful is the effort to entrench a healthy respect for democracy among both civilians and soldiers that when presidential and parliamentary elections were held this summer, the opposition party and presidential candidate were elected into office largely peacefully. Sierra Leone, which usually ousts its leaders with a combination of coups, bloody battles and murder sprees, joined a small coterie of African states in which power has changed hands fair and square through the ballot box.
Most of those nations are also in a much better state than Sweet Salone — as it is known affectionately in the local Krio dialect — battling daily with a war-devastated infrastructure and a population in which seven in every ten people live below the poverty line.
On results day, outgoing president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah held hands and joked with former insurance executive and president-elect Ernest Bai Koroma as he was sworn into office in State House. Failed hopeful Solomon Berewa, then vice president, smilingly pledged his support for the new leader.
It was a scenario that moved the British-led military training and advisory team profoundly, not least because tight security made the peaceful transfer possible. Today the British reckon the country has the best-trained soldiers in west Africa. Its soldiers vote in civilian clothes and largely stay off the streets. Sierra Leone may soon supply its soldiers for African peacekeeping missions, in a triumph that will complete the military turnaround.
There were never any guarantees. At one point, the peaceful election process could have gone either way. Koroma’s campaign convoy was attacked in the mostly Mende east, which traditionally supports the outgoing Sierra Leone People’s Party. Tear gas, stone-throwing, live firing and — in an ominous reminder of the war in which rebels hacked through civilians’ limbs with blunt blades — machetes came out once again.
Along with local armed police, British soldiers escorted what turned out to be the country’s president-in-waiting to safety after he had to abandon his vehicle following one attack in the diamond-rich east, heavily fought over during the war and a hotspot region to this day.
In a fragile country with so many unemployed, disaffected youths — many of them ex-fighters connected to various factions of the war — ready to be bought or swayed by drink, drugs and money into violent diversion, British-trained security services closed down any chance for trouble to ignite.
That many Sierra Leoneans assume the British would step in once again at the first sign of trouble is also a useful misapprehension. Many think the small training unit up on the hill is a hefty battalion, and the British — who maintain a visible presence in their Land Rovers and dine out in their camouflage — feel no need to disabuse anyone of the assumption. A large-scale naval training operation ahead of elections this year also boosted confidence in the former colonial ruler’s paternalist interest.
However, progress in development — a lack of which, along with corruption, is largely credited for starting the war — has so far undergone a path as bumpy as the country’s mud-rutted roads. Since 2002 the UK government has given £210m to develop the country, including more than £10m a year direct to government coffers to spend how it pleases, with little to show for it.
The country ranks second from bottom in the UN’s Human Development Index and has the highest maternal mortality in the world. So keen has Britain been to make Blair’s baby work, it has not been as exacting about results as it should.
The UK was forced to halt direct budget support this year after it emerged no audited accounts had been received since the end of the war. Even so, DfID wants to keep going, hoping to increase spending in the country from £40m last year to £55m this year. Despite huge evidence of corruption and little evidence of any improvement in poor people’s lives, the British felt things were generally going in the right direction and that was good enough to keep the money flowing.
It’s worth noting that voters thought better of such apathy. In a country deeply and equally regionally divided — the Muslim-majority north voted for the opposition, the mostly Christian Mende south for the ruling party — swing voters picked the opposition largely because of this dismal lack of development. Voters complained hourly of having no reliable electricity, water supply, roads, jobs, health or education system, and wanted change. It was a vote against international development efforts as much as the ruling party, which presided over $1.6bn debt cancellation and a national budget, one third of which is provided by donors.
Britain has been lucky and picked its reputation up by the skin of its teeth several times in Sierra Leone. In both military and development fields it has gone very wrong, very publicly. The military intervention credited with stopping the war was actually an operation to evacuate expatriate workers used to cocktails at sundown in their dilapidated former colony, but has somehow been remembered as an invasion to save Sierra Leoneans.
It was several years too late for that, and critics claim embarrassed British diplomatic dithering made the situation worse. The British ran into scandal when its own customs officials stopped UK mercenaries Sandline International from delivering weapons to Sierra Leone despite a UN arms embargo. Sandline said the embargo did not apply to weapons in support of the legally-elected government and that in any case the Foreign Office knew all about it. The scandal led to Sandline’s withdrawal and British humiliation.
Britain’s public distaste for mercenaries won the besieged country no favours. Keen for a clean end, the British helped negotiate peace accords that saw the entry of rebel leader Foday Sankoh into government, which proved disastrous. Sandline’s head Tim Spicer said his company’s forced withdrawal, along with Sankoh’s government presence, led to the horrors of the 1999 Freetown invasion and the deaths and mutilations of thousands. While Britain claims it rescued a failing state from the brink, Spicer says that it was Britain that first sent it there.
British money has been lucky with the new president, who might turn development money into something that makes a difference. He wants to run the country as a business, overhaul the Anti-Corruption Commission (which gained a reputation for being more corrupt than those it investigated and worried the British so much it withdrew funding), and has embarked on a tight management consultancy-style health-check on all ministries and government agencies with a transition team of brainy Salone volunteers plucked from posts the world over.
There is genuine sense of change, energy and, crucially, patience filling Sierra Leonean streets and fields. Sierra Leoneans now know they can vote the government out of power if it doesn’t deliver, just as they did the outgoing ruling party. As donors are fond of saying, Sierra Leoneans themselves will make the difference. Maybe Britain, and Blair’s legacy, will get lucky again.
Katrina Manson is a journalist based in Sierra Leone.