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ABSTRACT
The Sierra Leone human rights community has played a high-profile role in the country's long and troubled peace process. This paper seeks to both describe and assess that role and takes account of, inter-alia, the activities of NGOs and the United Nations human rights program. The period chosen for review, 1998 to 2000, covers the most significant stages of the peace process: from the return to Sierra Leone of its elected government in early 1998, through the phase of the Lome peace negotiations/agreement, to the adoption of the Abuja Agreement in November 2000. The paper concludes that the human rights community can take credit for a substantial contribution to the peace-building process. Failures on the part of the human rights actors to achieve peace-process related goals are also identified and analyzed.
I. OVERVIEW OF THE SITUATION, 1998-2000
A. January 1998 to January 1999: Return of the Government to the Rebel Incursion into Freetown
In February 1998, the Economic Commission of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), the Nigerian-led West-African military intervention force, succeeded in ejecting a military/rebel junta regime, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) that had joined forces with the armed opposition Revolutionary United Front (RUF), from Freetown and much of west and southern Sierra Eeone. In March, the elected civilian government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah returned from its exile in Guinea. Over the course of the following weeks the diplomatic community also came back to Freetown and international humanitarian programming was re-invigorated. The period also saw the return of a UN Special Envoy as well as the deployment of World Bank and other international assistance.
The mood of the period was optimistic, at least among the Freetown elites. Though the rebels were still active, particularly in the north and parts of the east, it was widely considered to be only a matter of time before they would be overcome by the ECOMOG forces under their lauded commander, Brigadier General Khobe. Sierra Eeone was apparently entering a post-conflict reconstruction phase in which the focus would be on the consolidation of peace and restoration of normality. This belief prompted initiation of an ambitious program for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of former combatants and the establishment of a small UN mission, The...