Chronological Index:
Sierra Leone: List of extremely violent events perpetrated during the War, 1991-2002
Last modified: 3 April 2008Aline Leboeuf
March 2008
Cite this item
Aline Leboeuf, Sierra Leone: List of extremely violent events perpetrated during the War, 1991-2002, Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, [online], published on 5 March 2008, accessed 9 February 2010, URL : http://www.massviolence.org/Sierra-Leone-List-of-extremely-violent-events-perpetrated, ISSN 1961-9898
- Introductory remarks to the entry, page 1
- I. 1991 (March 23) - 1993: Beginning of the RUF insurgency against the Sierra (...), page 2
- II. 1994 – 1997 (April): Combatants that were sometimes hard to identify (...), page 4
- III. 1997 (May 25) - 1998 (February 12): After a military coup forced President (...), page 7
- IV. 1998 (February-December): The retreat and revenge of the AFRC/RUF, page 8
- V. 1998 (20 December) - 1999 (January): The invasion of Freetown, page 11
- VI. 1999 (March) - 2000 (April): RUF controlled major parts of Sierra Leone but (...), page 14
- VII. 2000 (May) - 2002 (January): The end of the status quo and RUF’s (...), page 15
- VIII. Bibliography, page 17
Introductory remarks to the entry
This entry attempts to present the known events of extreme violence that happened during the civil war in Sierra Leone, whilst placing them in their historical context. The civil war lasted from March 23, 1991 to January 11, 2002. According to the Crimes of War Project around 75,000 people lost their lives, 2 million were displaced and 20,000 were mutilated (Danny Hoffman, 2004: 216). However, according to David Keen, several different sets of figures are available, and “[their] origins [...] are rarely explained.” (Keen, 2005: 1)
As of yet there is no published academic research which provides a detailed historical narrative of the extremely violent events which resulted from the war, and that goes beyond the policy-oriented work of such organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, No Peace Without Justice or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Report. There is, however, academic research explaining and contextualizing those events (see for example Richards, 1996; Keen, 2005; Gberie, 2005) but without trying to describe those extremely violent events themselves in detail. This is a “work in progress”, because it uses existing and reachable written sources: it can therefore only provide a temporary “story” of events. It is mainly drawn from sources of non academic literature, even though it refers at times to some articles or books that provide historical data on the war and scarce data on the extremely violent events that took place. It mainly uses four non-academic sources that can nonetheless be described as well-researched:
- The reports of Amnesty International since 1996 (older reports have not been accessed yet).
- The reports of Human Rights Watch since 1998
- The small part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report that can be found on the Internet (TRC, 2004).
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created in Sierra Leone at the end of the war (in accordance with the Lomé Peace Agreement and the TRC Act, 2000) to reconcile the Sierra Leoneans and to confront the past. It sought to write the history of the causes, nature and extent of violations and abuses that took place during the war, using Sierra-Leoneans’ testimony. It delivered a report in October 2004 that was officially published only during the summer of 2005. - The “Conflict Mapping in Sierra Leone” Program of No Peace without Justice, 2004. No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ), a human rights organization, won a European contract to “gather reliable information so as to put together an accurate picture of what happened in Sierra Leone” and to inform the Special Court of Sierra Leone. Basing their work on research conducted by Sierra Leonean NGOs, they published an “Executive summary” report that provides for a legal history of violations and abuses in Sierra Leone.
