Comments on Bushpaths to Destruction: IB’s contributions
What IB has tried to do in his articles on the origins and character of the RUF, I insist, is highly commendable. It deserves serious comments from informed Sierra Leoneans in general, and social scientists in particular. Whether we like it or not, the impact of the RUF’s activities on our country in the last five years is likely to be with us for years—or even generations—to come. Anybody who tries to provide information that would help us to understand how this organisation came to be formed, who the principal characters in its formation are, and what its discourses and strategies for socio-political change entail, ought to be treated seriously.
Besides, as researchers, we owe a duty to those who have suffered as innocent bystanders in this war to explain to them and to posterity why such suffering and, indeed, a lot of mindless atrocities have happened in the name of political liberation.It is an exceedingly difficult thing to write about clandestine war organisations, especially when they have a highly dishonourable public record. Actors are often unwilling to talk for fear of reprisals from both society and fellow comrades. Scholars of underground movements, therefore, face a serious dilemma. Should they wait until all the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle are in place before publicising their findings or should they tread the piecemeal path of historical reporting—hoping that each small piece of reporting would tease out further information about how to arrange the pieces in the jigsaw.
IB has justifiably and courageously chosen the second approach. He is telling us that we should start from a crude ordering of the pieces and keep re-arranging them until we are satisfied with the final picture. In any case, as he is very much fond of saying, "there is no such thing as definitive history". All history is open to interpretation. We may be fortunate, at least, that because of his pioneering efforts we may not have to deal with a jigsaw puzzle where some of the big pieces are missing! Those who are asking for exact dates, the full cast of the drama, and so on, would have to exercise patience as work proceeds on putting the pieces together.I believe that IB’s postings have advanced our knowledge of the RUF war in four main areas.
1. Prior to his postings, we knew very little about the events that led to the formation of the RUF. We knew some of the names of the actors ( including some of the radical students), the roles of some countries—Libya, Liberia, Ghana and Burkina Faso—in the formation of the organisation, and the atrocities in the battle field. Linkages were however very imprecise and our overall knowledge of the dynamics was very cloudy and poor. It may still be. But for the first time, we can now concretely link some names to some events, including the way actors straddled the various countries in the sub-region and afar as the strategy of armed struggle was being worked out. Whereas before, we were operating at the level of generalities, we now have something concrete to hold on to. It makes the job of verification and falsification relatively easy.
2. The view that the RUF is a non-ethnic organisation has always been in competition with more sectionalist perspectives. IB’s postings emphatically discredit the sectionalist perspectives. Three such perspectives are worth mentioning. The first, dominant among sections of Northern elites, says that the RUF war is both a Mende-inspired war against the APC and an intra-Mende clan or family war for dominance of local political institutions. The second, popular among sections of Mende elites, says that the RUF war is a Northern-inspired war to exterminate the Mende people or "ethnie"—a project which is alleged to have started with Agba Satani S.I. Koroma’s APC. A third, emerging from sections of Krio elites, maintains that the war is a struggle for power among people from the provinces.
The interesting thing about the RUF’s origin according to IB’s postings is its unambiguously national composition and outlook, and the influence of commonly shared city experiences and social solidarity among certain strata of youth. The early history of the RUF was driven not by ethnicity but by the quest for power, which was buttressed by a strange secular ideology we are yet to fully understand. Ethnicity means very little to most of our city youths today. I get this message from my young nephews, nieces and their friends every time I visit home. The consciousness of some of our youth may be lumpen, as IB’s postings affirm, but it seems to be far more advanced in the potentially destructive area of ethnic politics than that of our elites and politicians. In this regard, the ethnicity or nationality of Alie Kabba in the unfolding drama is absolutely irrelevant. It is bad enough to have suffered in the hands of youth who profess a very incoherent and dangerous ideology and strategy, but I dread to think of what would have become of Sierra Leone if any of the three sectionalist perspectives was true!
It is also worth mentioning a fourth perspective of the origins of the war that stands discredited by IB’s articles. This is the perspective which says that the Sierra Leone war is a spill-over from the Liberia war—i.e. everything was fine or under control in Sierra Leone until Charles Taylor decided to punish us for allowing our territory to be used by ECOMOG as a staging post for intervention in the Liberian war. Alie has tried to resurrect this perspective in his very sparing response to IB. It is the popular view among many writers on the Sierra Leone war, including that of our governments. Implicit in this perspective is the view that Sankoh and co. are mere agents of Charles Taylor, who were sent by Taylor to destablisie Sierra Leone
and reduce the ECOMOG pressure on the NPFL in Liberia. If IB’s account is correct, it is very clear that Sankoh and co. are no agents—they had their own agenda which had been developed independently of Taylor.
This perspective on "spill-over" effects may be useful only to explain the coincidence of interests between the RUF and the NPFL and the decision to attack Sierra Leone after—not before—the ECOMOG intervention. It seems that an attack or war in Sierra Leone was imminent anyway, whether Sierra Leone had sided with ECOMOG or not.
3. We now have very strong leads on two big questions that have always baffled me on the origins of the RUF: how could Sankoh, a non-radical, lead a supposedly radical movement? Who recruited who? If IB’s account is correct, there are two or indeed three phases in the construction of the RUF project. The first was the set of student radical activities and turbulent events at FBC that led to the expulsion of 41 students and three faculty members in 1985. This period was largely marked by the propagation of a motley set of ideas, drug-driven social meetings and campus radical activism. The second saw the beginning of the hardening of previous student-inspired radicalism into practical strategies for "revolutionary" change. This period was still dominated by the bulk of radical youth. It was indeed a radical youth—largely ex-students—project. Alie Kabba and PANAFU played very prominent roles in this second phase. Sankoh, we are now told, was recruited by the radical youth, not the other way around. Military training was acquired in Libya. Radicals combined formal university studies with active training for the "revolution".
The third phase started after the military training in Libya. Prior to this, PANAFU had split into two irreconcilable camps leading, indeed, to expulsions. A detailed account of the origins, debates and activities of PANAFU is needed to enrich our understanding of the origins of the RUF. A book or a full article on the organisation would not be a bad idea given its central role in understanding the problems of our country. Who led which wing in the PANAFU debates on the road to Libya? What were the issues? What were PANAFU’s relations with the labour movement, the reconstituted students movement, the professional associations and wider politics in society? How was PANAFU structured organisationally in the country and what was its national and social reach? Was PANAFU a broad-based or small close-knit movement? Alie is said not only to have been expelled by PANAFU for choosing the road of armed struggle but that he abandoned the "armed struggle" group ( or was isolated ) after the split with comrades in Libya and decided to get on with his studies. Others are said to have returned home from Libya but decided not to have anything to do with the armed struggle project. A third militant core—including Sankoh, Rashid Mansaray and Abu Kanu—decided to put into practice what they had trained for in Libya. Sankoh later eliminated his ideologically-oriented comrades to maintain total control of the movement. Some of the actors, including Alie, are on the Net and in various corners of the world.
They should be able to confirm or disprove this reading of events. Alie’s book is anxiously awaited by most of us, but its publication will take quite some time. He owes a duty to Sierra Leoneans to respond to the issues that have been raised about his role in the early history of the RUF. In any case, IB’s revelations offer an opportunity to other researchers to further pursue these issues.
4. An interesting pattern has emerged about how the key actors traversed the various countries in the sub-region and Libya to prepare for the armed struggle. First is Libya’s pre-eminent role in the whole project. This has always been known to much of the informed public. What is new is the conduit through which recruits were linked up to Libya, the number of people who received military training, the feuds within the ranks of the radicals, and how the baton for leadership of the "revolutionary" movement was passed from Alie to Sankoh. We are told that Libya trusted only one individual, Alie, whom they gave money to co-ordinate the project and facilitate the travel plans of his comrades. It would be extremely useful to know the counterpart individual in Tripoli who co-ordinated these activities. IB’s sources say that between 30 and 50 Sierra Leoneans trained in Libya. And that four groups went in July, August and December of 1987, and January of 1988 respectively. Alie says 28 out of 31 of those who went to Libya "in the course of three years" took part in military and ideological training ( he says that three others, Olu Gordon, Ismael Rashid and Sidi Jalloh, did not train).
What is clear is that Sierra Leoneans trained in Libya to make "revolution" at home. Alie should explain whether or not he facilitated this process. Is everything that IB says on these issues fiction? How many visits did Alie make to Libya? Did he undergo military training or did he not? IB says he "dodged" military training on medical grounds. Did this and the problems of the distribution of money contribute to the split with his comrades? What were his relations with Foday Sankoh in Libya? If he never visited Benghazi ( as he stated in one of his postings) and only stayed in Tripoli, is it the case that the training took place in Tripoli and not in Benghazi? Or did he co-ordinate military and ideological training activities in Benghazi from Tripoli? Clear answers to these questions would help the historical record.
Ghana is the other key country in the preparation of the "revolutionary" project. As IB states, it was chosen because it provided perfect cover to work on the recruitment drive. Rawlings was sympathetic to Gadafi. Both made coups and attempted to restructure their countries along populist lines. We are not told in IB’s narrative whether the Libyan People’s Bureau in Accra also worked with Rawlings’ PNDC and intelligence units in recruiting Sierra Leoneans for training in Libya; and indeed, whether the Sierra Leonean radical students in Accra discussed their clandestine activities with relevant
Ghana "revolutionary" organs. It is important to note that our radical students arrived in Accra when radical politics in that country was severely under attack. By 1983, Rawlings and Kojo Tsikata, the PNDC strategist, had fallen out with the top cadres of the radical June Four movement (Chris Atim, Yeboah, Yen, Napoleon, Nibuah, Garba, etc.) and the Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary League, both of which were very instrumental in setting up the mass-based anti-establishment political cells that ruled Ghana during much of the first year and half of the PNDC government. Among the radical groups, only the National Democratic Movement of Kwasi Botchwei (Finance Minister for more than ten years) and Yao Graham remained in government after the great purge of the radicals in 1983. Yao was to leave later as the regime lurched further and further to the right under the weight of IMF programmes.
The big question is who did our radical students in Accra relate to when they were in Ghana? Were they active in the Ghana students movement? Did they link up with the rump of the radical lecturers at Legon who stayed behind to criticise the PNDC programme? The Vice Chancellor at the time, Akilakpa Sawyerr, who was mentioned in Alie’s response, was a founding member of the NDM. He is a brilliant radical scholar who from what I know about him would not have approved of revolutionary activities that clearly bordered on adventurism. It is instructive to note that by the time our students came to Ghana the labour movement, students’ union and staff association had withdrawn their support from Rawlings and were engaged in various forms of campaigns against the IMF/World Bank programmes of structural adjustment and the PNDC’s false steps at democratisation. Were our students isolated from the discourses on the campuses and on the streets or did they decide to act strategically by maximising the opportunities that relations with the host government, Ghana, and the paymaster for their already allegedly conceived "revolution", Libya, had to offer?
The other key country in the political drama is Burkina Faso, which IB’s sources now claim is not central to our understanding of the formation of the RUF. This sits very uneasily with some of the statements from victims of RUF atrocities that RUF instructions in some captured villages during the early stages of the war were given in French! I have had discussions with some ex-students who have first hand experience of Burkinabe presence in villages in Pujehun at the early stages of the war. It is even believed that they started most of the atrocities in the war. Is it the case that our radicals did not train in Burkina Faso, but that through their links with Taylor, they were able to get hold of a contingent of Burkinabe fighters for the Sierra Leone operation? If this is the case, could we add this contingent as a fifth tier in the composition of the RUF—the vanguard group of Sankoh, the ideologues and the Liberian lumpens; the special forces or the NPFL warriors on loan; the wosus; the pekin sojas; and the Burkinabes. Was Rashid Mansaray also in charge of the Burkinabes?
Some tentative lessons
1. Dictatorial regimes tend to encourage equally dictatorial and voluntaristic methods of resistance. Those who take the decision to fight back may feel that any form of resistance is in order as long as governmental dictatorship is overthrown. Indeed, they may even believe that they are doing society a favour because of their bold decision to fight. When this happens political actors care less whether the people they seek to liberate understand their message or not. "The people themselves would be forced to be free"! The lesson here is that we should never again allow any form of dictatorship to take hold on our society.
2. Students or youth do not make ( have never made) successful social revolutions. They can contribute to revolutions but cannot and should not lead them. Any society that alienates its youth to the point where it feels it has to take the initiative to liberate society may be paving the way for its destruction. Youth are very impressionistic, and are generally cut off from the burdens of productive activities. They often lack the discipline that goes with participation in economic production, family life and public institutions. This is the case whether the youths have been overcome by drugs or not. It becomes doubly catastrophic when the youth that seek to shoulder the responsibilities of social change are products of the drug culture.
3. A revolution is a serious business. As Mao once put, " a revolution is not a dinner party". It is a class project. A few individuals cannot make revolutions just because they are against the system. If the classes or groups they seek to liberate are not integral parts of their revolutionary project they are likely to commit atrocities in the name of revolution. Classes impose discipline on actors, and check voluntaristic behaviour. You cannot love the freedom of workers and peasants much more than the peasants and workers love themselves. If your subjects do not understand you or are not with you in your revolutionary project, it means that you have a wrong theory or do not understand their social conditions and aspirations. You should try again through further study and discourse, not action. If instead you proceed with the project it could lead to atrocities and dictatorial rule. There is a powerful text in classical Marxist writings against such types of voluntaristic behaviour. It was written by Lenin against some of his comrades who were only interested in revolutionary action. It is called "Left-Wing Communism and Infantile Disorder".
Yusuf Bangura
15 December, 1996