BY MARCELLA FITZGERALD
LONDON - A war between rival armed factions, fanned by imperialist interests, has been going on in Sierra Leone since 1991. The havoc being wreaked on the workers and farmers of this West African country, however, only became headline news in the British press as the background to a controversy surrounding Sandline International, a British mercenary group.

The focus of attention in the big-business media is whether Sandline breached United Nations sanctions against Sierra Leone by supplying arms to Nigerian troops to oust the government of John Paul Koroma, and whether the British government knew about and sanctioned the group's actions. The Nigerian troops, fighting under the banner of the West African "peacekeeping" force known as ECOMOG, reinstalled the British-backed regime of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah in March 1998.

The British government and capitalist press have used the controversy to applaud British complicity in organizing the coup as supposedly supporting democracy in Africa.

London has long supported successive pro-imperialist regimes in Sierra Leone with arms and military training. In 1994 the British government brought in 58 Gurkha troops and, when these took heavy casualties, fell back on mercenaries provided by "Executive Outcomes," an outfit run by former members of apartheid South Africa's Special Forces.

Kabbah's Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) had come to power in March 1996 in an election financed by the British government. The SLPP, one of the longtime bourgeois parties, has traditionally represented the interests of capitalist forces in the rural areas outside Freetown. The army did not back Kabbah.

In face of a rural guerrilla opposition, Kabbah brought in Sandline to train a rural militia of 40,000 made up mostly of Mende tribal hunters called kamajors. Kabbah, however, was overthrown by Maj. Koroma and other army forces in May 1997.

The Nigerian dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha, under the ECOMOG facade, immediately sent troops into Sierra Leone with the stated intention of restoring Kabbah. On June 2, 1997, Nigerian naval vessels shelled the army headquarters in the capital city of Freetown and seized the international airport.

Washington and London made no comment on the Nigerian intervention. UN secretary general Kofi Annan, addressing the Organization of African States, called on those present "to do whatever is in our power to restore it [democracy] to its rightful owners the people. Verbal condemnation... is not sufficient," words that could only be seen as a green light to efforts to overthrow the Koroma government.

Imperialists want mineral resources
A British colony until 1961, Sierra Leone is a vastly rich country whose people are among the most exploited in the world. Imperialism has fostered the divisions between the different peoples in Sierra Leone - the Temne, Mende, and others - to maintain their domination of the country.

Sierra Leone is rich in diamonds, gold, bauxite, and rutile (titanium oxide). Sierra Leonan diamonds are among the best in the world. This natural wealth, however, has never been developed to benefit the Sierra Leonan people but has always been sucked out of the country into the coffers of the imperialist conglomerates. Life expectancy in 1992 was 42.4 years, and infant mortality in 1994 was 200 out of 1,000 live births. In 1996, according to UNICEF's figures, 5,000 children in Freetown died before reaching their first birthday. Average income per capita is less than $250 a year. With diamond exports to imperialist metropolises taking precedence over education, illiteracy afflicts about 80 percent of the population.

Although Sierra Leone is rich in marine resources it loses $30 million of fish due to poaching by foreign vessels. A British "aid program in 1990, allegedly designed to help prevent poaching, cost Sierra Leone more than its entire income from fishing. Some 65 percent of the population is engaged in agriculture, but, the economic crisis and distortions caused by imperialist domination, aggravated by the war devastation, has led to increasing imports of food and fuel.

Imperialist mining companies have used private armies such as Sandline - which is linked to the South African mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes - to defend their pillage of Sierra Leone's resources with arms and by installing client regimes. Kabbah agreed to pay Lt. Col. Timothy Spicer, Sandline's boss, for putting him back in power with $10 million worth of diamond concessions. According to a May 13 article by New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner, the mineral trader Rakesh Saxena underwrote the Sandline operation in Sierra Leone.

These conditions have periodically sparked resistance by working people and others. Since 1980 the colleges in Freetown have been closed for long periods because of strikes and protests by students and others. Throughout the 1980s there were strikes by public employees and other unions against the regime's economic policies. Under this kind of pressure, the Kabbah government made public promises that it would take measures to resettle people displaced by the war, cut the illiteracy rate from 80 percent to 40 percent, build a health center in every chiefdom, and commence a road-building plan to link all the villages.

In March 1997, two months before it was overthrown, however, the Kabbah regime introduced a steep increase in fuel prices under pressure from the International Monetary Fund. It had already lifted restrictions on the operation of private - mostly foreign - capital and had promised to set up a so-called free trade zone. This undermined the regime and allowed Koroma's forces to carry out a coup.

Washington's complicity
Hampered by popular opposition to sending imperialist troops to intervene directly, Washington, London, and Paris have begun to set up projects to train African "peacekeeping" forces to defend their interests. In 1997 the Clinton administration launched a African Crisis Response Initiative, which aims to train 10 battalions from 10 governments in Africa.

The imperialist powers have also trained troops in Uganda, Senegal, and Malawi. The last two are countries that Paris considers its preserve. The French government has replaced its troops in the Central African Republic with a force drawn from six African states and run by French "advisers." London is not the only power that backed the intervention in Sierra Leone. Bonner reports in the May 13 New York Times that, according to an unnamed senior Clinton administration official as well as Sandline itself, the British mercenary group kept the U.S. State Department informed of its operations "at the highest level." Sandline reportedly brought in planeloads of assault rifles, mortars, and ammunition into Sierra Leone, as well as "personnel."

U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin tried to downplay these facts. In a May 11 press conference, he described Sandline as merely a "private security firm that protected mining and construction interests in Sierra Leone."  
 
 
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