Reconstructing Security after Conflict: Security Sector Reform in Sierra Leone (New Security Challenges)

New Security Challenges Series General Editor: Stuart Croft, Professor of International Security in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, and Director of the ESRC’s New Security Challenges Programme. The last decade demonstrated that threats to security vary greatly in their causes and manifestations, and that they invite interest and demand responses from the social sciences, civil society and a very broad policy community. In the past, the avoidance of war was the primary objective, but with the end of the Cold War the retention of military defence as the centrepiece of international security agenda became untenable. There has been, therefore, a significant shift in emphasis away from traditional approaches to security to a new agenda that talks of the softer side of security, in terms of human security, economic security and environmental security. The topical New Security Challenges series reflects this pressing political and research agenda.

Titles include: Jon Coaffee, David Murakami Wood and Peter Rogers THE EVERYDAY RESILIENCE OF THE CITY How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster Tom Dyson NEOCLASSICAL REALISM AND DEFENCE REFORM IN POST-COLD WAR EUROPE Christopher Farrington (editor) GLOBAL CHANGE, CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND PEACE PROCESS Implementing the Political Settlement Kevin Gillan, Jenny Pickerill and Frank Webster ANTI-WAR ACTIVISM New Media and Protest in the Information Age Andrew Hill RE-IMAGINING THE WAR ON TERROR Seeing, Waiting, Travelling Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin TELEVISION AND TERROR Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse Paul Jackson and Peter Albrecht RECONSTRUCTING SECURITY AFTER CONFLICT Security Sector Reform in Sierra Leone Bryan Mabee THE GLOBALIZATION OF SECURITY State Power, Security Provision and Legitimacy Janne Haaland Matlary EUROPEAN UNION SECURITY DYNAMICS In the New National Interest

Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner (editors) CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PEACEBUILDING Brian Rappert and Chandré Gould (editors) BIOSECURITY Origins, Transformations and Practices Brian Rappert BIOTECHNOLOGY, SECURITY AND THE SEARCH FOR LIMITS An Inquiry into Research and Methods Brian Rappert (editor) TECHNOLOGY AND SECURITY Governing Threats in the New Millenium Ali Tekin and Paul A. Williams GEO-POLITICS OF THE EURO-ASIA ENERGY NEXUS The European Union, Russia and Turkey Lisa Watanabe SECURING EUROPE

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Reconstructing Security after Conflict Security Sector Reform in Sierra Leone Paul Jackson Director of the School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham, UK

Peter Albrecht PhD Candidate, Danish Institute for International Studies, Denmark

© Paul Jackson and Peter Albrecht 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-23900-5

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 20

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Peter would like to thank his mum and dad for always being supportive – and Paul for a long, bumpy ride! Paul would like to thank his long-suffering wife Anne, his two children Sam and Andrew and his dog, Dexter for dragging him away from the computer. Both authors would like to thank all those in Sierra Leone and in the UK who have been extremely supportive of this work from the very beginning.

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Contents List of Tables and Figures

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

x

Chapter 1

Introduction

1

Chapter 2

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR?

27

Chapter 3

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict

51

Chapter 4

The Development of an SSR Concept, 2002–2005

95

Chapter 5

Consolidation and Development, 2005–2007

133

Chapter 6

Cross-Cutting Themes Throughout the Period in Sierra Leone and Beyond

171

Chapter 7

Conclusions

195

Notes

209

References

222

Index

227

vii

List of Tables and Figures Tables 3.1 3.2

The Image of the SLP Headline Statistics of the Military Reintegration Programme

53 81

Figure 4.1

The National Security Architecture

viii

120

Acknowledgments This book on Sierra Leone’s security system transformation process is the extension of a piece of work that the two authors produced during 2007 and 2008. It is appropriate to thank the many individuals who were part of this process. In particular, the member of that project’s Working Group should be thanked, including: Desmond Buck, Emmanuel Osho Coker, Kellie Conteh, Kadi Fakondo, Aldo Gaeta, Garth Glentworth, Barry Le Grys, Rosalind Hanson-Alp, Anthony-Howlett-Bolton, Al-Hassan Kondeh, Christopher Rampe, James Vincent, Alfred Nelson-Williams and Mark White. Input from the following individuals was greatly valued: Robert Ashington-Pickett, Karen Barnes, Keith Biddle, Robert Bradley, Geoff Bredemear, Piet Biesheuvel, Iain Cholerton, Andrew Cordery, Mike Dent, Ray England, Claire Fitzroy, Adrian Freer, Chris Gabelle, Emmanuel Gaima, Garry Horlacher, Liz Horlacher, Adrian Horn, Richard Hogg, Gordon Hughes, Brima Acha Kamara, Lynette Keogh, Nick Killick, Phil King, Mariama Konneh, Sarah MacIntosh, Adele McGookin, Simon Mills, Richard Moncrieff, Desmond Molloy, Emma Morley, Robert Musk, Abdullah Mustapha, Jana Naujoks, Witek Nowosielski, Peter Penfold, Mark Ravnkilde, David Richards, Paul Richards, David Santa-Olalla, Oliver B. M. Somasa. Institutionally, a special thank you to the Department for International Development, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence, Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform, International Alert, Conciliation Resources, University of Birmingham, Danish Institute for International Studies and Copenhagen Business School. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the agencies or individuals mentioned throughout. Analysis and interpretation have been added to all sources, primary and secondary.

ix

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms ACPP AFRC AFRSL AFTC AIG APC B2B BMATT CCSSP CDF CDS CHAD CHASE CHISECs CID CISU CPDON CPDTF CPP CSSP DACO DCAF DDR DfID DG DIG DISECs DSRSG EC ECOMOG ECOWAS ESF

Africa Conflict Prevention Pool Armed Forces Revolutionary Council Armed Forces of Sierra Leone Armed Forces Training Centre Assistant Inspector-General All People’s Congress back to basics British Military Training Advisory Team Commonwealth Community Safety and Security Project Civil Defence Force Chief of Defence Staff Conflict and Humanitarian Affairs Department Conflict and Humanitarian and Security Affairs Chieftaincy Security Committee Criminal Investigation Department Central intelligence and Security Unit Conflict, Peace and Development Cooperation Network Commonwealth Police Development Task Force Conflict Prevention Pool Community Safety and Security Project Development Assistance Coordination Office Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Department for International Development Director-General Deputy Inspector-General District Security Committee Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General European Community Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group Economic Community of West African States ECOWAS Standby Force x

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xi

FCO FISU FSU GAF GCPP GDP GF GFN-SSR GID GoSL HBTC HMG HR IASJP IGP IMATT IMF IRC ISATT ISD ISS JCSP JFC JFTHQ JIC JSC JSDP JTF JTFC KAIDCSO KIA LCU LDP LNP LO LPPB MACP MaSSAJ MATT MDAs MIA

Foreign and Commonwealth Office Force Intelligence and Security Unit Family Support Unit Guinean Armed Forces Global Conflict Prevention Pool Gross Domestic Product Government Forces Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform Government and Institutions Department Government of Sierra Leone Holding and Basic Training Centre Her Majesty’s Government (UK Government) Human Resources Improved Access to Security and Justice Programme Inspector-General of Police International Military Training Advisory Team International Monetary Fund International Rescue Committee Integrated Security Advisor and Training Team internal security division Intelligence and Security Service Joint Country Strategy for Sierra Leone Joint Force Command Joint Task Force Headquarters Joint Intelligence Committee Joint Support Command Justice Sector Development Programme Joint Task Force Joint Task Force Commander Kailahun District Civil Society Organisation Killed-in-Action Local Command Unit Law Development Programme Local Needs Policing Liaison Officer Local Policing Partnership Board Military Aid to the Civil Power Malawi Safety, Security and Access to Justice Programme Military Advisory Training Team Ministries, Departments and Agencies Ministry of Internal Affairs

xii List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

MIB MODAT MoD MODEP MoF MoU MRP MTEF NCDDR NCO NDI NEC NEO NGO NPRC NSA NSC NSCCG ODA OECD OLRT ONS Op PEBU ORBAT OSD PASCO POCDI&PA PRA PROSECs PRSP PSC Psyops RSLAF RSLMF RUF S&J SB SILSEP

Military Intelligence Branch Ministry of Defence Advisory Team Ministry of Defence Ministry of Development and Economic Planning Ministry of Finance Memorandum of Understanding Military Reintegration Plan Medium Term Expenditure Framework National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Non-Commissioned Officers National Democratic Institute National Electoral Commission Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation Non-Governmental Organization National Provisional Ruling Council National Security Adviser National security Council National Security Council Coordinating Group Overseas Development Assistance Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Operational Liaison and Reconnaissance Team Office of National Security Operation Pebu Order of Battle Operational Support Division Poverty Alleviation Strategy Coordinating Office Parliamentary Oversight Committee on Defence, Internal and Presidential Affairs Participatory Rural Appraisal Provincial District Security Committee Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper Personnel Screening Centre Psychological Operations Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force Revolutionary United Front Security and Justice Special Branch Sierra Leone Security Sector Reform Programme

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xiii

SEA SLA SLE SLP SLPP SSD SSR STTT TDF THC TRC UK UN UN CIVPOL UNAMSIL UNDP UNICEF UNIOSIL UNOMSIL UPP VAT WIA

Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Sierra Leone Army Spearhead Land Element Sierra Leone Police Sierra Leone People’s Party Special Security Division Security Sector Reform Short Term Training Team Territorial Defence Force Temporary Holding Centre Truth and Reconciliation Commission United Kingdom United Nations United Nations Civilian Police Force United Nations Assistance Mission in Sierra Leone United Nations Development Programme United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Integrated Office in Sierra Leone United Nations Observer Mission United Progressive Party Value Added Tax Wounded-in-Action

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1 Introduction

This book is partly a history of the United Kingdom (UK) intervention in Sierra Leone and partly a reconstruction and critique of efforts made to reconstruct a state. Between 1997 and 2007, the UK Government, along with other international partners including the United Nations (UN), fought a losing struggle to prop up a collapsing state, watched as it completely fell apart, and then intervened to prevent further bloodshed. They then committed themselves to a long-term intervention with the aim of reconstructing the Sierra Leonean state from scratch. By the end of the war in 2002 there was, in fact, very little of any state left to reconstruct. In the countryside the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had targeted firstly the Paramount Chiefs and then anyone and anything representing the central government, a central state. This included civil servants, local government officers, buildings and records. By 2002 there were very few government records remaining and most officials had fled, particularly from the countryside. The Sierra Leonean state had effectively ceased to exist. In 2007, for the first time in two decades, Sierra Leone conducted a generally peaceful national election without international peacekeeping assistance. This successful election earned the praise of international election observers as relatively free, fair and credible. Most important, these elections were conducted by and for the people of Sierra Leone, who exercised their right to vote in a generally orderly environment made possible by their own security forces. Seen within the context of the levels of violence experienced by the people of Sierra Leone in the previous 20 years, the fact that Sierra Leone conducted this generally violence-free election only seven years after the end of a civil war is a remarkable transformation. This transformation is due to improved personal security that resulted from substantial UN and 1

2 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

UK intervention and assistance, but also the leadership by a core of Sierra Leonean government officials who have sustained the security reform effort over an extended period of time, often in difficult circumstances. What is often referred to as ‘political will’ in policy parlance, effectively meaning willingness to take on external ideas about best practices, has been present, if not in abundance then at least in critical positions.

Why Sierra Leone? In many ways Sierra Leone is a small and insignificant country on the west coast of Africa. Covering around 72,000 square miles it is roughly the size of the US state of South Carolina. It shares border with Guinea in the north and Liberia in the southeast. To the southwest it has an Atlantic coastline. As Pham points out in his introductory section, Sierra Leone has been the subject of a number of historical studies, not least the impressive History of Sierra Leone, one of a number of publications by the eminent historian Christopher Fyfe.1 Yet, even in a review of this monumental work, Paul Hair asked rhetorically whether this small state was worthy of a single country study, implying that it was too insignificant to merit academic scrutiny.2 This is a view that would probably (indeed has been already) find much acceptance with contemporary publishers seeking to sell books. So why is Sierra Leone so significant? The first reason for this is that Sierra Leone is firmly rooted to the bottom few countries in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index. Until the 2009 index Sierra Leone ranked 177 out of 177 countries included in the index. In 2009 this has improved to 180 out of 182, with only Niger and Afghanistan below Sierra Leone.3 The statistics that back up this analysis are harrowing. Whilst Purchasing power parity gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is around US$679, life expectancy is only 47.3 years, and there is a 30% probability of living until 40 years old. The adult illiteracy rate is over 60% and the female literacy rate is half the male. Through almost any measure Sierra Leone is a very poor country. Secondly, is the levels of violence experienced during a protracted war and also the nature of that war itself. In a seminal article, Robert Kaplan identified Sierra Leone as a key area of study since it was representative of the ‘coming anarchy’ of collapsing states.1 In Kaplan’s analysis the world was divided into a small group of very rich countries and chaos. Sierra Leone represented the chaos; a mixture of demographic, environ-

Introduction 3

mental and social factors epitomised by the gangs of rootless youth with no social ties to control them. Forced out of ancestral lands in the forests due to logging, with no prospects and no education, Kaplan identified these gangs as barbarians with no appreciation of social ties that would have prevented extreme violence. Indeed, Kaplan used Sierra Leone to introduce the entire article in saying that: Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian Atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, ‘blank’ and ‘unexplored’. However, whereas Greene’s vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa’s future. And West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.5 This provides a picture of the florid language used in Kaplan’s piece and his rather liberal interpretation of Malthus, but the paragraph conveys the thrust of his argument well.6 Despite his lack of historical knowledge of pre-Victorian Africa which of course did contain a patchwork of complex polities and proto-states, his thesis is basically that the modern state is dying and Africans are reverting to ‘traditional’ forms of organisation that are not constrained by modern laws and human rights. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this thesis has been subject to withering criticism from all quarters, and yet the core thrust of the argument seemed to provide a logical explanation for what several policymakers were seeing in the aftermath of the Cold War and the end of the old certainties.7 Whilst Kaplan’s analysis is clearly problematic, it managed to get Sierra Leone on to the agendas of several western countries and to puncture the smug satisfaction of the liberal victory over all alternatives that was supposed to produce the end of history. In many ways, Sierra Leone seemed to represent a microcosm of all that was falling apart in the

4 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

post-Cold War world, particularly in Africa. Warlords, shadow economies, collapsing states and the ensuing violence were all present in Sierra Leone, along with environmental degradation, illegal trading, child soldiers and extreme violence against civilians. Certainly within the UK it became a country that could not be allowed to disappear since if the international community could not save Sierra Leone then where could it save? Along with the violence, Sierra Leone is probably best known for diamonds. The alluvial diamonds that should have made the country rich have given the world the phenomenon of ‘blood diamonds’ or ‘conflict diamonds’. Whilst analysts such as Richards and Keen point out that attributing the war to diamonds is a gross oversimplification, the alluvial diamond fields certainly did play a role in prolonging the conflict and motivating certain of the leaders of both sides.8 The ease of digging the diamonds, their smuggling potential and an international market willing to allow the diamonds on to open markets and also willing to pay for them, certainly prolonged the conflict and allowed the RUF to maintain a violent uprising beyond its initial expected life. At the same time, the two kimberlite diamond mines in central Sierra Leone were ceded to mining companies affiliated to the international mercenary company Executive Outcomes following their successful intervention during the Strasser regime. Today, diamonds remain a critical element of governance. They are influential in terms of corruption and ethics and they remain a threat in so much as they are still located in one of the most unstable geographical areas of the country and are easily smuggled between the Mano Region countries. Lastly, the Sierra Leone war was renowned for violence beyond the norms found in previous wars. Estimates vary, but around 70,000 civilians are estimated to have died during the conflict with over half of the five million population being displaced. The deliberate targeting of civilians became a characteristic of a war that left many traumatised either mentally or through the physical removal of limbs. Hundreds of thousands were maimed deliberately by the RUF on top of human rights abuses carried out by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) but also Government forces, kamajor and Civil Defence Force (CDF) fighters, peacekeepers and mercenaries many of which were detailed by the Special Court in Freetown. A frequently cited Human Right Watch report explains the approach adopted by the rebels on entering Freetown in 1999: The rebel occupation of Freetown was characterised by the systematic and widespread perpetration of all classes of gross human rights

Introduction 5

abuses against the civilian population. Civilians were gunned down within their houses, rounded up and massacred on the streets, thrown from the upper floors of buildings, used as human shields, and burnt alive in cars and houses. They had their limbs hacked off with machetes, eyes gouged out with knives, hands smashed with hammers, and bodies burned with boiling water. Women and girls were systematically sexually abused, and children and young people abducted by the hundreds. The rebels made little distinction between civilian and military targets. They repeatedly stated that they believed civilians should be punished for what they perceived to be their support for the existing government. Thus the rebels waged war against the civilian population through their perpetration of human rights abuses. While there was some targeting of particular groups, such as Nigerians, police officers, journalists and church workers, the vast majority of atrocities were committed by rebels who chose their victims apparently at random… …The atrocities were often planned and premeditated. Victims and witnesses describe well-organized operations to round up civilians who were later executed, attacked with machetes, or raped. On several occasions rebels gave advance warning that atrocities were to be committed later. Witnesses describe the existence of distinct units for committing particular crimes like the Burn House Unit, Cut Hands Commando, and Blood Shed Squad. Some of the squads had a trademark way of killing, such as Kill Man No Blood Unit, whose method was to beat people to death without shedding blood, or the Born Naked Squad, who stripped their victims before killing them.9 All of this violence and the entrance into Freetown was then broadcast globally when a journalist in the city managed to film the rebels and then the peacekeepers in action. He filmed the rebels burning a family to death in their house having refused to become human shields, but he then also filmed paranoid Nigerian peacekeepers beating a mentally disturbed child they had mistaken for a sniper. All of this is in the seminal film Cry Freetown. Following all of these high profile events, particularly the brutality of the violence visited on the civilian population the international community was eventually spurred into action. This included the UK Government, whose Prime Minister, Tony Blair knew Sierra Leone because his father had been a school teacher there. A central group of senior UK politicians effectively decided that they could not allow the

6 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

country to completely fall apart and the UK eventually intervened militarily in 2000 when the UN peacekeepers were threatened and the UN commander in the field, General Jetley, openly accused the Nigerian troops within the previous Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) command of colluding with the RUF to profit from illicit diamond mining. The arrival of the British troops galvanised the UN and secured parts of Freetown and immediate area. They also gave confidence to the people who promptly began demonstrating outside Foday Sankoh’s house in Freetown. Nigerian peacekeepers opened fire on the crowd causing a surge on the house whereby Sankoh’s bodyguards also opened fire, Sankoh himself fleeing out of the back. The later capture of Sankoh and his incarceration by the British broke the remains of the RUF and by July 2001 the British Expeditionary Force and the reinforced United Nations Assistance Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) contingent took the offensive and gradually pacified the country. So why Sierra Leone? Diamonds, international intervention, violence, atrocities and poverty. It may be a small country in West Africa but it is no accident that following the war a small cottage industry of work on Sierra Leone began to develop.

Politics and conflict in Sierra Leone In many ways, Sierra Leone is a representative case for those who see the series of conflicts in post-colonial Africa as being rooted in statesupported injustice and sustained marginalisation both of particular social groups and also of periphera regions.10 Over-centralised and in many cases, personalised rule exacerbated this marginalisation and this created a form of predatory rule whereby small groups of elites grabbed power and used the state to appropriate resources. Since independence from Britain in 1961, the ethos of Sierra Leone’s political system has been characterised by centralisation of power and resources in Freetown coupled with a deep dualism between Freetown and the rest of the country. At independence in 1961, Sierra Leone became a unitary state politically dominated by chiefs with their urban allies, the Margai brothers forming the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP). The SLPP itself saw itself as a more democratic and representative party than the krio dominated United Progressive Party (UPP). After the rule of the Margai family ended in elections in 1967, the then mayor of Freetown, Siaka Stevens, became Prime Minister. However, Margai and the SLPP encouraged the military to

Introduction 7

intervene and thereafter the military became progressively politicised. Following a series of other military interventions, Stevens assumed full presidential powers in 1968 and effectively held sway until his appointed successor, Major General Joseph Momoh, took over following a one-party referendum in 1985. (Stevens was 80 years old at the time.) This one-party state was marked by further centralisation of resources and power in Freetown and a growing alienation, amongst youth in particular, in the countryside. Also by this time, the regime was almost entirely reliant on a mixture of a security agreement with Guinea and various armed groups within the country who were paid off by Stevens and then Momoh. Over this period, the state was systematically plundered by Stevens and his cronies effectively undermining every state institution in the process. With the state about to collapse Stevens handed over power and Momoh continued the slide, until finally a demoralised civil service, a collapsed military and a degraded police force were unable to counter Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh and the RUF. A detailed history of Sierra Leone is beyond the scope of this paper and is dealt with elsewhere.11 However, it is critical to understand that Sierra Leone’s history is dominated by the colonial bifurcation of a coastal colony run on modern lines and a larger protectorate ruled indirectly, with Chiefs subject to the supervision of a small civilian staff. This has profound effects in terms of governance and has created and perpetuated a core-periphery split that is at the heart of Sierra Leone politics. The institutional bifurcation has led to a continued juxtaposition of state police and Chiefdom police, magistrate’s courts and customary courts, national tax and Chiefdom tax, etc., as well as a colonial legacy of the District Officer administration. In essence, this bifurcation meant limited powers to state officials outside Freetown, dominated either by Paramount Chiefs, who continue to hold considerable power in Sierra Leone’s countryside, or the centre. Indeed, all of this was only recently sought tackled in a comprehensive effort to reform local government based on decentralisation following the war.12 As Fanthorpe points out, no aspect of the conflict in Sierra Leone has provoked more discussion than the murky dealings of the supposed adversaries, the national army and CDF fighters on one hand and the RUF on the other, in terrorising civilians and looting and destroying private property.13 In fact the only subject to come close to the same level of exposure is the role of the diamond trade in colluding with combatants on both sides.14 Most analysts agree that the basis of the violence was contained within a social cohort of disenfranchised and alienated youth that found itself open to mass consumption but socially

8 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

excluded.15 Certainly, the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) regard the fluidity of the combatants, their tendencies to change sides and to reinvent themselves as a means of disenfranchised individuals to empower themselves as militiamen.16 The cause of this alienation is regarded as clear by the TRC: a political elite that descended into a kleptocracy that maintained its power through disempowering youth and engaging in corruption. This is clearly evident from the targets of much of the early violence. Usually the first target was the chief, then his buildings and then the government offices. The consistency of this pattern is very telling within Sierra Leone, and the symbolism difficult to evade.17 Hostility to the chiefs and authority more generally is to be found very clearly in the notes taken during the various stages of the participatory exercise carried out under the auspices of what came to be called the Chiefdom Governance Reform Project.18 These discussions strongly imply that many youths joined the war out of frustration at previous bad government. This has very clear implications for the reconstruction of postwar governance in those areas where youth may use their ability to exercise their violent exit strategy as a political football.19 Whilst there was a very high casualty rate amongst chiefs during the war, and a very large rate of absence amongst chiefs (many of whom fled the RUF), Fanthorpe is correct in pointing out that the attitude to chiefs varied across rebel held areas. In fact, in the immediate post-war period, with the only exception being some urban areas, government and donors confronted a situation where restoration of the chiefdoms was seen as a priority for restoring stability and security in the countryside. Whilst the Sierra Leone government acknowledges the issues with corruption that contributed to the war, it also talks of restoring the ‘glory’ to the chiefs and returning to an imagined pre-war state.20 Paul Richards has been a long-term advocate of an approach built on class conflict in the countryside. He cites at length examples of statements by youths relating to resentment of chiefs due to labour demands and ‘community work’ and control over marriage.21 Those not complying with the wishes of wealthier families in terms of ‘bride prices’ are fined at local chiefdom courts where youths who are unable to pay are liable for further labour for the chief. Richards explores these relationships further, and ultimately draws a picture of a rural agricultural elite descended from local warlords with hegemony over slaves and dependent populations. This historical slave structure is perpetuated by a series of ‘customs’ or ‘traditions’ including a bridal and court system structured to extract labour. Given these structures of forced

Introduction 9

labour, Richards follows Durkheim in seeing the war as a form of slave revolt.22 For Richards then, the reinstatement of the chiefdom system represents a reconstruction of the historical model of forced labour in the countryside that led to the war in the first place, something that has been echoed by subsequent analysts.23 Clearly there are significant issues about how the state functioned under Stevens and then Momoh. The creation of large groups of excluded youth in particular, the exclusion of different classes in the countryside and then the neglect of the non-Freetown population was exacerbated by a predatory state that relied on alliances between high level politicians close to the regime, chiefs in the countryside and Lebanese traders who were able to access external diamond markets in particular, but who were also responsible for importing many of the consumables that came into the country. Once the match had been lit by Sankoh it was only a matter of time before the degraded machinery of the government entirely collapsed. In Freetown in 1992, the regime itself began to implode when a military coup brought a group of young officers, headed by Captain Valentine Strasser to power. The rule of the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), headed by Strasser and later his deputy, Julius Bio, although generally supported by the population, was largely ineffective. One of the people close to the events in the early to mid-1990s, and still a central figure in Sierra Leone’s security architecture, captured the atmosphere well: ‘They thought they knew all about war. It’s like all of us, when we are junior officers, we think we know everything. We don’t know anything. Honestly. That was exactly how those boys were. They were coming from the front, and quite frankly, many of them performed brilliantly on the front. That’s fine, but you can be a very good platoon commander on the front, but it doesn’t make you a general.’24 Indiscipline inevitably prevailed. The lack of control over the government, and the armed forces in particular led to an increase in RUF control in the east of the country until the South African mercenary firm Executive Outcomes was contracted by the government in 1995 to drive out the rebels. Eventually, growing internal and external pressure to hold democratic elections persuaded the NPRC to hand over power to a civilian government. Following two conferences in the Bintumani Hotel in Freetown, in which civil society representatives played an important role expressing views of the population, elections were held in 1996.25 Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) was elected President. Two months later, discussions between the SLPP and RUF began and

10 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

eventually led to the Abidjan Peace Accords of November 1996. The unwillingness of either party to agree to disarmament or monitoring arrangements led to a breakdown of peace by early 1997. This contributed to another coup led by junior army officers, toppling the elected government of Kabbah, bringing the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and Johnny Paul Koroma to power. Unlike the NPRC which had been predominantly from Kenema and Daru barracks and were sympathetic to the SLPP, other units in the south were reputed to have been sympathetic to the RUF itself and the AFRC was certainly rumoured to have been loyal to Stevens’ party the All People’s Congress (APC) and partly consisted of young officers who had served in Freetown under the NPRC and originated in the northern and western areas of Sierra Leone.26 The coup happened on May 25th 1997 and the AFRC invited the RUF to become part of the government. This AFRC/RUF alliance managed to rule for eight months. During this period the exiled Kabbah Government and the ECOMOG force allied themselves with the local militias known as the Civil Defence Forces (CDF) along with urban militias and finally managed to muster enough resources to launch an effective counter-attack, ousting the AFRC/RUF from Freetown in early 1998. The RUF retreated into its rural heartland whilst the AFRC fractured, a number of troops ending us as refugees in Liberia whilst others formed other splinter groups. The most notorious of these groups became known as the ‘West Side Boys’ and was formed around Kono, carrying out hit and run raids across the interior.27 Horrific atrocities against civilians in rural areas were reported throughout 1998. RUF and former AFRC soldiers seeking to impose their will in the countryside perpetrated many of these atrocities, but there were also reports of acts of violence by the CDF and ECOMOG. In effect, rural Sierra Leone was prey to a variety of armed groups, having little coherence and no formal status. The Government of Sierra Leone, although internationally regarded as legitimate by virtue of its electoral mandate, depended on Nigerian troops, the CDF, and government forces referred to as the ‘Loyal Troops.’ This latter faction was composed in large part of loyal soldiers and police trained by ECOMOG in Lunghi, whilst Kabbah was in Freetown. Under the command of ECOMOG, they constituted the front lines in the fight to retake Freetown in February 1998. In June 1998, the UN established an Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL), composed of 40 military observers to oversee the beginning of Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR). From July 1998 to January 1999, 1600 combatants went through the process.

Introduction 11

However, in early January 1999, AFRC and RUF combatants nearly seized control of Freetown. Appalling atrocities were inflicted on civilians and widespread destruction of property took place. An estimated 3000–5000 people are believed to have been killed or abducted during this period and hundreds were mutilated. The spiralling decline in security implicit in Sierra Leone’s descent into virtual anarchy is critical to the context of what has been achieved in Sierra Leone since the end of the war. Such a descent into anarchy as Sierra Leone experienced in the 1990s cannot be reversed by a three- or five-year development programme. This reality is at the heart of the group of reforms that eventually produced Security Sector Reform (SSR) – or, in our terms, security system transformation – in Sierra Leone. The pattern of the country’s recovery from civil war and transformation of its security structures began with fire-fighting (immediate responses to threats despite the lack of comprehensive policies and strategies), moved to medium-term reorganisation and reform and finally, to long-term commitment to security transformation by both country and international advisors. At the same time, it is imperative that in taking a critical historical view that we bear in mind the extreme circumstances under which those decisions were taken. This narrative explains how this evolution occurred and the consequences of actions taken.

The security context in the late 1990s and early 2000s A series of political and security crises had affected Sierra Leone since the early 1990s. Ostensibly these came to an end with the Abidjan Peace Accords of 1996 and the subsequent Sierra Leonean elections of 1997. The international community, led by the UK and UN, became more fully involved in the country following these elections and a series of UK-funded programmes followed on with the aim of supporting the newly elected democratic government recognised by international law. These programmes were very wide-ranging, incorporating a comprehensive overhaul of the whole of the Sierra Leonean government machinery, including Parliament, the judiciary, police and civil service, as well as support for a military that was seen as having been ineffective in dealing with security outside Freetown. Despite the impressive list of supported activities, this was not matched by resources. The entire budget for armed forces support was a mere £150,000 and the initial funding was provided at a time when, according to the then High Commissioner, ‘no integrated funding and

12 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

we could only draw from limited Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) funding. There was no Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) or full Ministry of Defence (MoD) commitment other than providing personnel’.28 This proved to be inadequate to create a functioning military, or even to improve the conditions of the Sierra Leonean troops, many of whom were under or even unpaid, poorly supplied and equipped and inadequately housed. The consequences were obvious. In May 1997 there was another coup, this time staged by Major Johnny Paul Koroma.29 This led to the ousting of President Kabbah, who was exiled to Conakry in Guinea. A military junta was established by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which invited the RUF to participate in the government. All reform initiatives ground to a halt. While President Kabbah was exiled in Conakry, serious talks ensued about disbanding the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF) altogether and expanding the police force.30 The fact that the armed forces had been discredited so completely in the eyes of the public substantiated these considerations. ‘There was a strong feeling from people around Kabbah to do away with the army…. The argument was that if you looked at history, military coups had prevailed. We came back [to Freetown] with those ideas still going around.’31 It was the Nigerian-led, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)-mandated military force which became decisive in combating rebel forces in Sierra Leone and in ‘kick[ing] the junta [AFRC] out of Freetown’.32 It was also the Nigerians who were instrumental in arguing for a reconstruction rather than a complete destruction of the Sierra Leonean armed forces. Following the return of Kabbah in February 1998, reform initiatives quickly resumed and in October of that same year, a Department for International Development (DfID)-funded preliminary diagnostic study of the civil service was conducted.33 Around the same time Brigadier General Mitikishe Maxwell Khobe, Sierra Leone’s Nigerian Chief of Defence Staff (a loan service officer), called for external assistance to build up a ‘small, highly mobile, properly equipped Armed Forces that is highly motivated, disciplined, loyal and committed to the State’.34 Following Kabbah’s return the Government did disband the army for a short period of time. However, following considerable debate, by December 1999 the Government relented and reinstated the army. In short, as one participant in the critical Cabinet meeting noted: ‘The government simply could not afford at the time to let all these excombatants out. The decision was taken in that meeting to take the army onboard again’.35

Introduction 13

Khobe argued that it would be unwise to disband a body of men who were battle tested and hardened.36 ‘His line was clear: better to keep them in the army, being fed and trained, rather than becoming another band of rebels to fight. Don’t forget that Johnny Paul [Koroma] and [Foday] Sankoh were returned to Sierra Leone in 1999 to participate as members of government. A lot of the people [including past and serving soldiers] were in fact loyal to Johnny Paul’.37 A military plan was produced, identifying the ideal size of Sierra Leone’s army to be 6000.38 While ideas on the table could not be implemented due to ongoing conflict, they formed the core of a post-war plan for the stabilisation of Sierra Leone. As an informed outsider observed: ‘The fact that he was overthrown, that he came back and that he still wanted to work with them [the armed forces] helped Kabbah to gain support. They said, ‘This man, even though he’s back, he still wants to work with them, let’s give him a chance’.39 All of this took place against a background of continuing conflict leading up to the rebel invasion of Freetown in early January 1999. During the conflict, Kabbah more or less controlled two separate sets of military actors, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring group (ECOMOG) and the Civil Defence Force (CDF).40 Reports from around 2000 suggest that the CDF played a key role interdicting RUF supply lines in the south. These units received very little material support from the Government; yet the Kamajor41 units were regarded as amongst the most effective (though never completely trusted) forces available to the Government. In 1999 the RSLMF consisted of the equivalent of two battalions armed with AK-47s, Chinese munitions and traditional hunting weapons; the rest of the armed forces had either been discredited during military coups or the AFRC rule of 1997–98. Uniforms were non-existent; equipment was in poor repair. Since the units relied on ECOMOG for combat support, their role was restricted mainly to guard duty. In June 1999 the Sierra Leone Security Sector Reform Programme (SILSEP) team of three UK personnel were deployed to Freetown with producing a study of the level defence and security management needs of the Government of Sierra Leone. By July 1999, UK political involvement and logistical support to ECOMOG in the form of weapons, ammunition and vehicles had produced at least a partial victory over the RUF. This led to the Lomé Peace Agreement, which turned into a milestone in the development of peace. In its wake, a number of different SSR and development activities ensued, taking advantage of the relative stability of the country. However, these were all taking place

14 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

within a very shaky power-sharing arrangement between the RUF/AFRC and SLPP. It soon became clear that ‘he [Sankoh] couldn’t cope with the situation. He would adopt two different poses, either slump on the sofa and pretend he was asleep or he would shout and scream. The only people he showed respect were the people who stood up to him …. He would shout about everybody letting him down. I stopped him in full flow: “Hang on a minute, Mr. Sankoh, British taxpayers have just paid for refurbishing your house, the bed you’re sleeping on.” Sankoh replied: “And it’s not even that comfortable,” and I said: “Then give it back!” People pampered to the delusions that he had about himself’.42 While Sankoh and members of the RUF took up key positions in the new administration, including membership on the National Committee for DDR, it became apparent that they did not intend to honour the Lomé Peace Agreement in the long run and ‘Sankoh became more aggressive’.43 This volatile post-conflict political environment was also affected by the deployment of a new peacekeeping force, UNAMSIL, which had expanded from the UNOMSIL, took over from ECOMOG and almost immediately inherited a hostile situation. The turning point and terminal blow to the RUF came in early 2000, when people marched to Sankoh’s house to protest RUF activities and approximately 20 demonstrators were shot by RUF supporters. The Sierra Leone Police (SLP) captured Sankoh on 17 May. He was subsequently handed over to government security forces and together with several senior RUF commanders taken into custody. The RUF were expelled from the government. This led to a stalemate with the RUF, which had come to believe that they were invincible and in effective control of most of the country outside of Freetown. At this time, UNAMSIL was not able to exercise any effective control outside of the city. The context was one of widespread deterioration in security (there were several incidents involving the humiliation of UN military personnel) and a real danger of UNAMSIL collapse. The UK’s intervention, officially brokered in November 2000, acted as a catalyst for a new ceasefire, this time signed in Abuja. Another key event occurred when Issa Hassan Sesay took over RUF leadership. Following events of May 2000, Sankoh was incarcerated by the Government at an undisclosed location in Freetown. In the meantime, the Government, supported by international actors, sought to find an RUF successor to Sankoh, preferably someone amenable to negotiation: The Government of Sierra Leone started to send feelers out – if Sankoh was not available, who would be? There was a suggestion that Issa

Introduction 15

Sesay might be the one. Eventually, it was decided that a letter would be sent to Sesay from Sankoh. We took Sankoh to Lunghi by helicopter, blind-folded, and placed him in the Presidential suite – he thought he was on the way to becoming the President! At Lunghi he was seen by President [Olusegun] Obasanjo of Nigeria and President [Alpha Oumar] Konaré of Mali, then the Chairman of ECOWAS. In the end, Sanoh signed a letter which effectively handed the command of the RUF to Issa; he signed off. Issa Sesay negotiated the RUF into DDR and massive numbers went into the process. A lot of weapons were surrendered by the RUF from August [2001] to January 2002.44 Another observer close to the events has noted that by ‘by 2001, most of the steam had been taken out of the RUF, especially when [Sankoh’s] followers started to agree with Sesay. The germ of politicizing the RUF came with him.’45 The overall context of Sierra Leone of the late 1990s remained extremely unstable, unpredictable and difficult in terms of security. The country was still subject to civil war involving the RUF and Government at one level, but then also incorporating a number of groups, including the AFRC, the West Side Boys and other less well-defined groups. There was virtually no rule of law or sustainable security outside Freetown except in isolated pockets such as Bo and the army was dysfunctional, underequipped and incapable of carrying out offensive operations. Despite this, external military intervention from the UN, ECOWAS and the UK had resulted in the creation of the roots of reform initiatives and the reinstatement of Kabbah following his return from exile.

SSR in Sierra Leone Since the late 1990s, the post-civil war experience of Sierra Leone has become synonymous with a cluster of policies known in the international community as SSR. Indeed, Sierra Leone is frequently seen as the example of SSR, as it provides many examples of SSR best practices. However, to date, there has been no comprehensive study of how this process was conducted in Sierra Leone between the late 1990s and the 2007 elections. This narrative documents Sierra Leone’s security system transformation during the conflict and post-conflict period of 1997–2007. It chronicles the UK Government’s intervention, including the evolution of its role from direct implementer to advisor. In addition, it analyses key security issues that arose during the period, some of which remain current. In

16 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

particular it aims to puncture the mythology around SSR in Sierra Leone that has been developed in the absence of a comprehensive study that in some way SSR is completed in that country. SSR, as it turns out, is as much about a continuous process as it is about short or even mediumterm development programming. It is a truism in the small world of SSR to say that there are as many different ways of undertaking SSR as there are contexts of doing so. Clearly any account of SSR in Sierra Leone is going to be very heavily contextualised by the situation at that time and the effects of the war. In Sierra Leone’s case it also relies on a context whereby the former colonial power, the UK, intervened and was able to provide significant leadership over a long period of time. Indeed, it is striking how welcoming the Sierra Leonean executive was of its former colonial masters, appointing Keith Biddle as police chief, and suggesting that David Richards should become the Chief of Defence Staff. This makes Sierra Leone an exception rather than a rule. And yet this case remains important for a number of reasons, not least because if SSR fails in a state like Sierra Leone then it rather begs the question of where this particular bundle of policies might actually succeed. It is in this regard worth pointing out, as we do elsewhere in the volume that never before and never since has the UK attempted such a comprehensive set of reforms under the banner of SSR. It is also true that the nature of this work is open to subjective analysis. Both of the authors of this volume have themselves worked in Sierra Leone, and although neither were part of the UK Government – one from a university the other from a non-governmental organisation (NGO) – clearly both have particular views on what was happening at the time. Our work in collating this book has been greatly enhanced by our reliance on those who were involved in the process. Indeed, much of the fieldwork involved in researching this book was effectively interviewing UK and Sierra Leonean policy-makers, technical experts and other practitioners involved in the country over the entire period. As a result this book deliberately aims to be subjective rather than technical or objective in tone. Because of these factors any policy recommendations drawn from the Sierra Leone experience need to be viewed with caution when applied to other contexts. Sierra Leone’s entire infrastructure, including buildings and records, had been destroyed during the civil war and whilst the Government of Sierra Leone, with the substantial support of the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and the UK, was struggling to establish basic security across the country, it was simultaneously restructuring

Introduction 17

non-existent intelligence and security systems. This is very rare in postconflict periods, indeed, in development environments in general, and may explain why, in the case of Sierra Leone’s security system, initial SSR was a top-to-bottom process. There are many reasons for this, but two of the most important were the urgency of the tasks required in the capital of Freetown and the fact that international advisers had little technical understanding of regional and local security actors outside the formal government structure located in the capital. Thus, any conclusions drawn as to the implementation of SSR top-to-bottom reform efforts in other contexts should recognise that Sierra Leone’s specific needs and the understanding (or lack thereof) of international actors at the time dictated this approach. Other contexts may call for alternative strategies.

SSR and the security system in Sierra Leone One of the key characteristics of the security system transformation in Sierra Leone is the idea that Sierra Leone shaped the concept of SSR as it was evolving in the international community at the time just as much as SSR came to shape Sierra Leone. While the term ‘security sector reform’ is used in both Sierra Leone and UK Government documentation, there was no clearly concept outlined by DfID of what SSR entailed when SILSEP was initiated in 1999. There was certainly no idea of an overarching concept of linking security with governance that would be recognisable. According to one definition, SSR only dealt with the management of security and defence and specific institutions, including the National Security Advisor (NSA)’s office, overseeing and managing their actions. An alternative definition discussed at the time included the intelligence services and coordinating security sector actors, such as the NSA’s Office. However, one of the key elements in the development of security system transformation in Sierra Leone was the expansion away from these narrow definitions to encompass a broader range of defence and security activities that could be supported by DfID. It was a modification of the 1980 Overseas Development Act by then Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short that allowed DfID to engage in not only expanding the concept but also the implementation of security-related programming. Any assistance given at the time would have to fall under section 1 of the 1980 Overseas Development Act, i.e., the promotion of the development or maintenance of the economy of a country, or the welfare of its people. The question

18 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

faced by DfID in the spring of 2000 was whether contributing to the establishment of the infrastructure for military reintegration, the relocation of a new, civilian-led MoD and the establishment of accountable intelligence services were likely to have this effect. As expressed by the Treasury Solicitor in 2000, the rationale was ‘the welfare of the people of Sierra Leone will be placed on surer foundation if the armed forces and intelligence services are properly established within the democratic framework of the country rather than being allowed to operate outside it’.46 Avoiding DfID’s direct involvement in working with the armed forces and intelligence agencies, which was seen as inappropriate for development agencies, was to be ensured by seeing its contribution as ‘ringfenced to advisory and implementation posts within the Ministry of Defence and subordinate headquarters’.47 However, as one anonymous DfID officer noted in one of the early drafts of the proposed role of a Military Advisory Training Team (MATT) in Sierra Leone: ‘In principle, we can support MoD in exercising civilian control of the military but not the military itself. Once we have the terms of reference we can consider whether to make the case to senior management. I am not optimistic’.48 Steering clear of operational matters and logistical support was one way for DfID to draw a clear line between what it could and could not get involved in. The reluctance within DfID to fully engage in defence and national security initiatives constituted a tension between the Government of Sierra Leone and the UK. At the same time, there was a clear recognition that transforming Sierra Leone’s security system required the application of precisely the same approaches: principles and processes that apply to any other public sector reform programme. This tension has been characteristic of the entire security transformation process in Sierra Leone and still continues. Within Sierra Leone, the origins of SSR were not in ‘hard security’, but public administration, civil service reform and governance. In 1998, as Kabbah returned to Freetown, the Government of Sierra Leone contacted DfID and requested assistance in conducting a review of the civilian management of the armed forces. This included legal and constitutional requirements and the relationship between the MoD and the Defence Headquarters. Following two joint DfID, FCO and UKMoD missions in 1998, a security sector package was designed with input from all three departments. The total expected cost to DfID was £1.6 million and the stated reason for this focus on the military and its management was the Sierra Leonean military’s historical role in staging coups and counter coups.

Introduction 19

While this was the initial point of departure in June 1999, the SILSEP team of two, embedded in the MoD with four Sierra Leonean staff, soon realised that it would be impractical to restructure the MoD alone. Reforms were required across the Defence structure and included the need for a Defence Review to identify roles and to inform a structure for the armed forces down to sub-unit level. They proposed an expansion in terms of reference to UK MoD, FCO and DfID. This recommendation was accepted by MoD and FCO; initially, it was not supported by DfID. By mid-2001 following the introduction of several ongoing activities it was observed that the SILSEP project would benefit from a more holistic approach. This would mean more coordination and interface with other governance and security sector reform activities, as well as more engagement with Parliament, civil society and the media. Parliamentary and civil society oversight of the armed forces in particular, as well as activities of the intelligence community and Office of National Security (ONS), were identified as being weak points. Given the history of the politicised military within Sierra Leone, it is perhaps unsurprising that civil control over the military was regarded as weak. This was partly a function of the military feeling that they should not be subject to civil control, which created difficulties in establishing operational approaches within a MoD, but also significant mistrust of military personnel who were identified with the excesses of history by many civilian staff. Differential pay and conditions of service further added to this divide. At the same time, the exercise of civil control requires some degree of experience and skill, which was certainly lacking at this time within those organisations expected to take up these roles, including Parliament. At the inception of SILSEP in 1999, civil society’s role in securityrelated transformation had not been formally defined and engagement was ad hoc. In fact civil society had not played a significant part in security and was outwardly wary of involvement with security services. In fact, comprehensive, structured involvement of civil society in the security system transformation process only began as late as 2006. However, it was recognised early on that checks and balances would be necessary if the democratic process in Sierra Leone was to be enhanced, even if it was extremely difficult to act on this at that time. With the UK Government’s 2000 White Paper on International Development, Eliminating World Poverty, approaches in Sierra Leone received a boost. DfID clearly recognised security as an essential condition for sustained development and poverty elimination.49 At the core of this was an acknowledgement that without effective civil control over accountable and effective armed forces, long-term peace and stability would be difficult

20 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

to achieve and sustain. This was also backed up by significant evidence on the ground that the general population frequently put ‘security’ at or near the top of their concerns, even when the term ‘security’ may be defined very broadly. In Sierra Leone this definition of what security has meant to the general population has shifted from fear of being victims of conflict and the RUF in particular, to a more conventional fear of organised crime and smuggling, coupled with an increasing concern with economic security, specifically unemployment creating alienation amongst youth. This has created synergies and tensions within the UK Government approaches to Sierra Leone and the roles of the different programmes and agencies in supporting the Government in combating these issues.

The importance of labels Having mentioned above that Sierra Leone has become important for the spread of SSR, it may seem a little incongruous that we have chosen the term ‘security system transformation’ for the title. Whilst the term ‘reform’ remains in use, it is true to say that this means different thing to different people. In the absence of a definitive definition of what SSR means, we take the view that what happened in Sierra Leone was a transformation from a non-existent security system to a functioning security system rather than a reform of an existing system. Comprehensive reform of security structures in Sierra Leone since the end of the war has spread across a wide breadth of institutions. It reached deep into internal and external security institutions, altered command structures, provided topto-bottom training and established staffing policies, procedures and behaviour. It created agencies to coordinate security information and facilitated a two-way flow of that security information from the community level up to the President. It also reached out to the people of Sierra Leone, who had experienced horrific violence at the hands of their own security forces during the war, and began the difficult task of reversing public suspicion of security forces and involving citizens in their own security. Thus, in its title and narrative, this book stresses that what happened in Sierra Leone was not merely sector reform, but a comprehensive transformation of the objectives of security provision, the mission, management and coordination of security institutions and reform of not just the sector, but of the system whereby and through which security is provided. While the term ‘SSR’ is used here when discussions centre on international debates (conceptual debates in particular), we posit that the history of the security transformation process in Sierra Leone since 1997 deserves the more comprehensive term.

Introduction 21

The phases of reforms in Sierra Leone The period 1997–2007, which forms the core focus of this book, can be roughly divided into a series of distinct phases, each with its own changing set of policies and responses to changing context. This does not imply that there was no continuity between these phases, but rather that each phase tended to be governed by a changing contextual situation governing the activities within each phase. Events in the first period, 1997–2002, were determined by the overriding context of open conflict. The state of emergency in Sierra Leone at the time left no space for sitting back and developing a strategy. The country was in urgent need of support and decisions needed to be taken quickly. Programmes started in collaboration between the UK and the Government of Sierra Leone were shaped as responses to consecutive crises until 2002, when the war and accompanying disarmament and demobilisation were declared over. During this period, the lack of any capacity to oversee the armed forces (which had staged two coups since 1992) and the inability to properly coordinate responses to security threats and collect intelligence were addressed by the establishment of the SILSEP. Given that police primacy in addressing internal security threats had been the priority of President Kabbah since 1996, the SLP were given a new ethos of Local Needs Policing, gender-based violence was addressed through Family Support Units, and vehicles, communication equipment and uniforms were provided. Finally, the judiciary was supported through the Law Development Programme (LDP). At the time, as a result of the context in which operations began and because of the personalities involved, there was almost no integration of these programmes. There was no coherent concept of the security sector, and thus, no organised sense of which institutions needed to be reformed. However a general sense of direction emerged that began to take on a life of its own in subsequent phases. The initial phase until 2002 was therefore dominated by attempts to begin a security reform process in the context of fighting a war and enforcing a stuttering peace punctuated by repeated ceasefires and resumptions of conflict. Even when the conflict ended officially in January 2002, there were significant areas of the countryside where conflict continued and certainly many areas that were not under the direct control of the government. The first post-war presidential and parliamentary elections were held that year, made possible by deployment of what was the biggest UN peacekeeping mission (17,000 foreign troops) to date and assisted by the SLP. The election results were a triumph for President Kabbah, who by then

22 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

had come to be seen as the man who brought peace to Sierra Leone after a decade of war. These elections marked the beginning of the second phase of Sierra Leone’s security transformation process. In 2002, the nascent agencies and programmes that had helped win the war were faced with a set of challenges very different from the emergency operational planning they had conducted until then. Emerging issues included substantial rivalries between security agencies and ministries and the thorny issue of whether the UK should continue to perform direct military operational command duties or adopt an advisory role. The Government of Sierra Leone also had to deal with large numbers of armed former combatants without a functioning military and only a partly-developed SLP. An additional key development in this phase centred on producing (and linking) security strategy and development objectives for Sierra Leone. In practical terms, this was reflected in the completion of the partlyinterrelated Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and Security Sector Review processes, where the latter was reflected in the former’s Pillar One, which promotes good governance, peace and security thus integrating security into mainstream development policy within the country. The importance of the Security Sector Review carried out during this period cannot be underestimated in terms of setting future policy direction. First, it gave much needed conceptual clarity to the institutions involved in or contributing to the security sector, institutions that had a stake in defining what security meant for Sierra Leone. Second, the ONS established in 1999 as a mechanism for coordination of input from the security sector, matured during this phase and became one of the most capable and trusted security institutions in the country. Third, the fact that the Security Sector Review was integrated into the PRSP aligned security and development to a degree that they had not been before in Sierra Leone or elsewhere. This last point in particular has had repercussions outside Sierra Leone in terms of bringing two different agendas – security and development – very explicitly together. Whilst the two had coexisted for some time, Sierra Leone was instrumental in redefining security as a broader governance issue rather than a policy area contained within the purview of MoDs and security institutions themselves. In addition it brought security programming out of an approach based on providing training and equipment and into an area where governance, civil control and linkages between security institutions became critical. This not only has implications for the military but also for intelligence, penal, justice and police systems, as well as how external donors may or may not fund activities in

Introduction 23

these areas. Particularly for DfID, which is constrained by what overseas development aid can fund, this agenda created a set of difficulties, despite the obvious benefits for the poor of Sierra Leone. We will return to this later. The final period of this study, 2005 to 2007, was a consolidation and development phase culminating in the successful general elections of 2007. In 2005, the UK moved its DfID Sierra Leone offices from London to Freetown. One of the most important innovations of UK support for security system transformation at the time was the broadening of its support to the justice sector as a whole, rather than to the police more narrowly. Prior to the Justice Sector Development Programme (JSDP), little assistance had been given to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) and prison services, in particular. Questions emerging regarding the future direction of security system transformation in Sierra Leone also arose during this period. The sustainability of some of the measures deemed necessary during a war was questioned more strongly. One of the core issues was the affordability, future size and shape of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF). Whether the country needed a military capability at all had been questioned for many years; indeed, the Security Sector Review, produced between 2003 and 2005, identified the main threats to the country as being generated internally. Issues raised in the Security Sector Review continue to be of relevance.

What have we learnt? What does the experience of transforming the security system in Sierra Leone tell us about SSR? What worked and what did not work? First, perceptions of the people of Sierra Leone, the most important stakeholder for both Sierra Leone and UK governments, indicate that there has been a significant positive change in levels of security on the ground. This was made clear by a survey of the general population in a number of districts that was carried out as part of this study, the results of which are included in this narrative. One of the core conclusions from the study is that getting the right people on the ground and taking action is more valuable than detailed, extensive and time-consuming planning. When capable people are empowered to make decisions, they devise ways to work together. As a consequence, subsequent reforms are more effective. National ownership is also critical, even when there is a relatively weak government at the start of a process. One of the most positive elements of

24 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

the UK intervention was evolution of the role of most UK staff as advisers, not as implementers. As leaders of actual security system reform processes, Sierra Leonean staff was endowed with confidence and provided the necessary space to build institutions in a politically tense environment. The development and maintenance of a good, national team is critical, since the turnover of international advisers is chronically high. However, this relatively simple statement belies the difficulties of recruiting and retaining qualified national staff, particularly given historically inadequate conditions of service. Sierra Leone lacked a SSR strategy at the beginning of the security system transformation process. There was a good reason for this: the Government of Sierra Leone was effectively at war and individuals needed to make rapid decisions without being constrained by strategies. This was accompanied by the lack of an exit strategy, which may be as much down to the nature of the process as anything else. It is clear that SSR is not ‘finished’ and there remain significant weaknesses in the governance of security in Sierra Leone. Without the development of reliable civil governance mechanisms, reliance on a small pool of nationals is positive in terms of leadership, but negative in terms of sustainability and potential risk. The risk is that a professional security system emerges that can then be misused if the country becomes unstable. If the number of qualified staff does not reach a critical mass, it may not be adequate to sustain progress in unstable periods. One of the core questions for security system transformation – or SSR – in light of the Sierra Leone experience – is whether or not SSR can be referred to as a coherent cluster of activities. As the experience in Sierra Leone attests, there is an element of SSR as a post-hoc rationalisation of events that happen on the ground. It can be argued that initial SSR efforts, particularly those that occur in an immediate post-conflict environment, are, by definition, fragmented and incoherent. Only after experience on the ground can enough specific context and information be gathered and analysed in order to begin the construction of a coherent and appropriate set of SSR strategies. SSR was a relatively new approach for development agencies in the late 1990s; the international community was only beginning to come to terms with what SSR actually entailed. Evolution of international approaches to SSR and transformation of the security system in Sierra Leone were occurring at the same time. Thus, Sierra Leone provided the international community with an on-the-ground example of the need to allow enough ad hoc reform to occur in order to construct subsequent institutional linkages and integrated reform strategies and pro-

Introduction 25

grammes. Early reform activities conducted by international and national actors in Sierra Leone contributed to international learning about the timing of SSR and the fundamental need to structure SSR based upon the foundation of context. Thus, in many ways, while SSR came to shape Sierra Leone, the transformation process in Sierra Leone came to shape international approaches to SSR – as a concept, a set of policies and an integrated set of programmatic approaches. Above all, it has to be recognised that SSR is a political project for national and international politicians, policy-makers and practitioners that requires a long-term commitment by both national actors and international agencies.

The structure of this book The book is designed partly to provide an analysis of what happened and partly to provide a chronological narrative across the different periods of intervention outlined above. It is divided, consequently into different types of chapter. Having provided a brief contextual study of the war and how Sierra Leone got to where it found itself in this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 goes on to outline the importance of the Sierra Leonean case for the development of security sector reform and the conflation of security and development more broadly. It provides a narrative history of the development of SSR as a policy approach and outlines some of the mythology that has grown up around the Sierra Leonean case. Chapter 3 begins the narrative of SSR within Sierra Leone. Beginning with the war situation it outlines the conflict context of the beginning of the reform process and the decisions taken on the ground to develop some elements of the security structures. It also discusses the initial SLP reform measures and attempts at reforming the legal backlog that was paralysing the judiciary. The chapter then describes the development of the MoD and the reformation of the RSLAF. Finally, it also covers initiatives in the field of intelligence, with the development of the ONS and the Central intelligence and Security Unit (CISU), along with the formation of a locally-based intelligence system. Chapter 4 continues this pattern of analysis, tracing through the three security institutions – police and justice, military and intelligence – and looks at the beginning of the articulation of a SSR concept in Sierra Leone and the increased interaction amongst these institutions. This increased interaction was due, in part, to the changed context due to post-2002 peace arrangements and to the growing realisation on the ground that there were overlaps in activities that should be removed

26 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

or resolved. Core features of this period were the expansion of the SLP beyond the government-controlled areas surrounding Freetown, Bo, Kenema, Moyamba, Bonthe, Pujehun and Port Loko, the comprehensive reform and retraining of the RSLAF, establishment of an effective MoD HQ and development of a workable intelligence architecture. Again Chapter 5 continues to follow this through and looks at the consolidation of these activities in the lead up to the 2007 election. It also unpacks some of the weaknesses in the previous approach, particularly focusing on the introduction of the JSDP. The JSDP was introduced to further take on the limited work of the LDP and to develop the work of the justice sector in terms of backing up the front line services that had been the previous focus of reform efforts. Chapter 6 brings the themes together in a chapter that attempts to pick out and analyse trends over time and to look at some of the results of the reform process. In particular it looks at the implications of the process within Sierra Leone and also on the donor agencies involved in implementing the reforms. It aims to puncture the mythology of SSR in Sierra Leone and to use the historical evidence to show that the bundle of reforms introduced in the country looked far more coherent in retrospect than they did at the time. It contains sanguine lessons for donor agencies in terms of managing to get the right people into the field at the right time and allowing people to take decisions on the ground. In addition, it also shows the paralysing influence of overly bureaucratic planning procedures within larger organisations like DfID. Lastly, the conclusion traces the actions that were then taken in this context to rebuild a state and then draws on this experience to pull out lessons from that experience. In particular, it concentrates on the construction of a security apparatus and the importance this gained for broader development of the state within the country. Sierra Leone has also been seen as an paradigm of a collapsed state and hence its reconstruction was viewed as more generally important than just for that country alone. Apart from the implications for the rest of the Mano River region, particularly Guinea and Liberia, the example of what later came to be known as Security Sector Reform has been employed internationally, not least by the UK’s DfID. Indeed, in some ways, the example of Sierra Leone has become over-used and a mythology has grown up around what happened in the absence of a detailed reconstruction of events following the war.

2 How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR?

One of the key elements of security system transformation in Sierra Leone is the idea that Sierra Leone shaped the evolving international concept of SSR in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the same time, SSR certainly also shaped attempts to build peace within Sierra Leone, which was part and parcel of a broader process of building a state that had collapsed. The state, DfID argued in its 2010 policy paper on state-building and peacebuilding1 ‘…equates with: (a) the institutions or rules which regulate political, social, and economic engagement across a territory and determine how power and authority are obtained, used and controlled (e.g., constitutions, laws, customs)…’ (DfID, 2010). The paper also acknowledges the central role of non-state actors, but they are predominantly defined as either marginal to decision-making (civil society organisations) or as ‘informal groupings’ (e.g., gangs and drug cartels). If peacebuilding and state-building today are explicitly considered two sides of the same coin by the donor community, this was also the underlying rationale of UK support to Sierra Leone in the late 1990s. That support should be directed towards an identifiable central authority was never questioned – not even as that authority’s power and reach across the territory of Sierra Leone was weak, indeed, partially nonexistent. SSR as interlinked with development was initially introduced in March 1999 in a rather narrow sense by the UK Government, and by Clare Short, the first Secretary of State for International Development, specifically. Notably, this was only three months before SILSEP in Sierra Leone began implementation. Thus, in quite literal terms policy development around what was implied by ‘security sector reform’ and implementation took place in parallel. The comprehensiveness of reforms as they unfolded in Sierra Leone, cutting across intelligence and defence governance and policing and 27

28 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

military transformation, was due to a unique combination of circumstances. Of central importance were the personalities involved at the executive level in the UK, including Tony Blair and Clare Short, who recognised early on the links between security and the broader process of development, including poverty reduction. At a general level, she noted: ‘We can not build good government without effective and democratically accountable security sectors.’ (Clare Short, March 1999, Speech). In this way security institutions became central to state-building processes and also to steering the PRSP process where security formed a key element of the country’s overall post-conflict strategy. From the perspective of the UK Government, SSR in Sierra Leone is frequently presented as ‘a success’ and as being important in terms of generating lessons for good practice. Indeed, SILSEP is referred to as a ‘flagship’ in rebuilding Sierra Leone’s security architecture, which by Sierra Leoneans and donors alike is regarded as the best managed and led set of institutions in the Government of Sierra Leone. Indeed, one of the UK Government’s key lessons from their intervention in Sierra Leone, repeated in several policy documents in Sierra Leone and in Whitehall, was the importance of a comprehensive and holistic approach to transforming the security system – also referred to as SSR. The fact of the matter remains, however, that the UK has never again attempted to design and implement a set of SSR programmes similar to those used in the case of Sierra Leone. One reason, no doubt, is the sheer breadth of the intervention, and the unusual circumstance that the UK was the primary and dominant intervening power. The BBC captured the uniqueness of UK-Sierra Leone relations in 2002, when Tony Blair made his first visit to the small West African country, following the official end of conflict: ‘When President Ahmed [sic] Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone walked up to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s jet to greet him, he was flanked, along with several ministers, by two white men in uniform. The two men were Brigadier Patrick Davidson-Housten, President Kabbah’s British security adviser, and Keith Biddle, the British Inspector General of the Sierra Leonean Police.’2 The UK not only supported, but was also considered a legitimate, integrated part of the core security institutions defining national sovereignty. Apart from the uniquely close relationship between the UK and Sierra Leone, other reasons for British reluctance to engage in a similar breadth of SSR-related activities have to do with the security environment and priorities emerging in the wake of 9/11, and subsequent interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. As alluded to elsewhere in this volume, these two interventions that came to define wars of the 2000s,

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 29

have, according to Clare Short, led to a loss of legitimacy in using military instruments together with those of foreign policy and development. However, reluctance to engage in SSR is also a reflection of a development community’s reluctance to engage with what is considered the ‘hard edge’ of national security, including defence and intelligence governance. Instead, the focus is on what may be considered the ‘core business’ of any bilateral development agency: bettering conditions for the poor. Indeed, as we enter the 2010s the concept of SSR is disappearing altogether from DfID discourse, and being replaced by ‘S&J’ (Security and Justice) as indicated in the 2009 White Paper Building our Common Future. In short, SSR is considered to be too security-orientated, and to be dominating issues related to the broader justice sector, particularly judicial reform. In brief, SSR is for the state, and indirectly for the poor; S&J is for the poor, and indirectly for the state. These are semantics with very real and practical implications for how programmes in the field of security and justice are devised. In this chapter, we wish to show how the concept of SSR developed internationally, driven primarily by the UK, and how international thinking shaped and was shaped by experiences in Sierra Leone. From a point of departure of relative fragmentation in programming, attempts were made to join up and coordinate the various elements of security transformation in Sierra Leone. This move towards what is often referred to as a ‘holistic approach’ was directly reflected in activities on the ground in Sierra Leone, including through the production of a Security Sector Review in 2003–2005. The chapter shows how, through this process, a disparate set of actors were brought into Sierra Leone’s SSR process. The chapter also looks at how support to the justice sector, specifically, changed through experiences on the ground, and how these lessons informed international policy debates. Specifically, we do this by exploring the change from a narrow focus on making the SLP more effective to a focus on making the justice sector, as a whole, more responsive to the population. Furthermore, we look at the shift from an almost exclusive focus on efforts on state institutions to much more robust attempts to engage with what is now referred to as non-state actors. SSR, not defence or police reform per se, is inherently developmental in approach. It is aimed towards strengthening accountability of those actors that provide internal as well as external security. Nonetheless, it is often said that this process of merging security and development has led to the ‘securitisation of development.’ The lack of development came to be seen as a cause of insecurity instead of an issue of inequality and injustice. However, because SSR is not a matter of military implementation of

30 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

train-and-equip programmes, the core argument of this chapter is that SSR was as much a process of the ‘developmentalisation of security.’ However, it is still worth emphasising here that while DfID continues to work on issues around security and justice, they have almost entirely disengaged from defence and intelligence-related programming.

Early days, narrow definition The debate on the development of SSR as a policy concept is relatively recent. If it was a novelty for a development agency, in this case DfID, to engage in security-related programming, it has always remained on the margins of dominant development discourse and practice. For instance, the importance of providing support to Ministries of Finance is not questioned to the same degree and direct budget support is seen somewhat of a necessary evil. However, robust DfID support to ministries of defence is rare. Uganda, Sudan and Sierra Leone spring to mind, but support to the security sectors of these countries is ultimately regarded as being at odds with good practice, indeed, doing so is instinctively taken to be an unbalanced securitisation of scarce development resources. SSR has often been presented as ‘too political’ compared to the ‘a-political’ conventional interventions around building schools and roads. The history of SSR as somewhat of an anomaly among the instruments at the disposal of development agencies has meant that implementation of activities under its heading has taken place and in relative isolation from broader development (Albrecht and Buur, 2009:392). The key period in making DfID policy around SSR explicit was undoubtedly the late 1990s. At this point in time Sierra Leone was in the midst of conflict and the country’s security apparatus had all but collapsed. Combined with a general understanding in 1990s that conflict was the main obstacle for development to take place in the aftermath of the Cold War, new ways of thinking international assistance were necessary. In support of Sierra Leone at the time, the UK therefore, rather uniquely, deployed military, development and foreign policy instruments, building up the Government’s capacity to fight a war. With a certain sense of urgency, and a Minister who wanted to set her own footprint, one of the first and most significant statements on SSR came in 1999 from Clare Short as she presented the concept of SSR at King’s College in London. Indeed, it is the one policy event, which gave birth to the ‘developmentalisation’ of security, and from which all other significant developments of SSR-related thinking and pro-

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 31

gramming and practice has flowed. Short defined the security sector in the context of its importance to long-term, sustainable development. The definition that she presented at the time was, however, rather narrow in scope. First, it centred on the intelligence services, and second it emphasised the civilian structures responsible for oversight and management of the security forces. The police and wider civil and criminal justice systems were explicitly excluded from SSR, standing outside the remits of classic overseas development assistance. Short said: By security sector, I mean those who are responsible, or should be responsible for protecting the state and communities within the state. This includes the military, paramilitary and intelligence services, as well as those civilian structures responsible for oversight and control of the security forces. I am not today discussing the police or the wider criminal justice system (Clare Short, March 1999, Speech). In general, the definitional exercise that has surrounded SSR represents a significant degree of pull and push between theory and practice, in London and abroad and with direct effects on the ground regarding which institutions to involve in SSR exercises, and more importantly which institutions to exclude. SSR, which was only vaguely defined at the time, became closely aligned to key processes of stabilisation, centring on concepts such as ‘conflict prevention’, ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘sustainable development’. And Short herself, probably thriving on the potential controversy, never hesitated. ‘I don’t remember feeling very under attack,’ Short recalls, ‘I think it was put to me that this was the right thing to do, that it might be controversial, that we had to be brave, etc. I was just convinced of the case’ (Clare Short, June 2008, interview, UK). Short was not a development expert, but she very much had a political agenda. In Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, support was given variously to contain the armed forces which had staged two coups during the 1990s, fight a war against rebel forces, re-establish the SLP, which had collapsed, and set up coordination mechanisms of the security sector and intelligence collection capacity. Specifically with respect to UK’s involvement in Sierra Leone Clare Short (June 2008, interview, UK) recalls: The army is gone, we are trying to rebuild the state and it doesn’t have any armed forces, so that was the obvious role for the British, to

32 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

help train the new Sierra Leonean army. By then, because Britain sort of accidentally had taken this straight forward position, there was a committee set up, chaired by Robin Cook [UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, 1999–2001], to say how do we do this Sierra Leone policy? But this was all done – believe what I am saying – it wasn’t planned in advance (Clare Short, June 2008, interview, UK). There is little doubt that Short – referred to as ‘an elemental force’ by her staff – was instrumental in pushing DfID into the hitherto foreign territory of defence and intelligence reform. She acted on instinct rather than principle regarding the type of activities that DfID, as a development agency, could become involved in (Albrecht, Stepputat and Andersen, 2010).

Fragmentation in policy and fragmentation in practice Short’s decision to support SSR in Sierra Leone, and her speech at King’s College on DfID’s intention to engage in security-related programming beyond policing took place during a time that witnessed somewhat of a seismic shift in development thinking. Needless to say that while DfID – emerging as the UK’s new and powerful development agency – was at the frontline of thinking around the development-security nexus, they did not take this decision in a political vacuum internationally. Four donor meetings had taken place during 1992–1993 in The Hague, Tokyo, Berlin and Paris, where it was decided that limits could be imposed on the military spending of developing countries. At an OECD-DAC conference in Ottawa in 1997, however, it was recognised that merely imposing limits on military spending would not be effective. By extension, an important step was taken towards emphasising the need to strengthen budgetary decision-making processes (Omitoogun and Hutchful, 2006; Albrecht, Stepputat and Andersen, 2010). This was the initial stages of a process towards ‘developmentalising’ donor approaches to military expenditure, which was further advanced in 2000 at a DfID meeting held around that very topic. From this latter meeting it emerged that defence should be treated no differently than other parts of the public sector in terms of policy formulation, budgeting, and implementation. In brief, the key principles of transparency, accountability and comprehensiveness in planning should apply. This new approach, dubbed as the ‘process’ or ‘governance’ approach, combined good governance practices and sound financial principles with

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 33

security considerations. Attention was directed towards the institutional framework for managing trade-offs between different sectors and for the effective management of the resources devoted to the defence sector as well as the oversight and governance of security bodies. The debates on military expenditure taking place during the 1990s and Short and DfID’s distinction between the ‘security sector’ and the ‘criminal justice system’ remained relatively far removed from current conceptions of the ‘holistic approach’ to SSR. The separation of security and justice was reflected in the approach pursued on the ground in Sierra Leone, however, and also in the budgetary separation of different financial and management streams within DfID itself, which did not always work together. In fact, and perhaps unsurprisingly, at times the separate justice and conflict groups within DfID were more rivals than representatives of the same organisation, fighting over both resources and power to define policy direction. At the level of the individual, the insistence on maintaining bureaucratic separations is one of the unproductive ways, but depressingly common ways of safeguarding one’s turf. In sum, it should therefore always be assumed that individual interest conditions approaches to institutional reform, indeed, ideological conviction is often irrelevant in this regard. This partly explains the fragmented picture that emerges when policy statements are being discussed, because, as a rule, some degree of collateral damage always follows institutional change. Within Sierra Leone itself, this fragmentation was a result of the context in which operations began, and not least because of the personalities involved in the process. This affected the discussions that took place about which institutions were to be reformed and also how. With respect to the police, for example, tension remains today about whether the primary organisation of internal security falls within the justice sector or the security sector, where the former is seen as relating to human or individual safety and the latter to state/government security (Howlett-Bolton, 2008). The fact that this conceptual conviction was upheld by the JSDP in the face of those Commonwealth Community Safety and Security Project (CCSSP) advisers that remained had real impact on the direction of justice sector reform after 2005. Against all identified ‘best practices’ the programme was split in two between security-related programme activities (mainly Operational Support Division (OSD)) and public safety components (Family Support Units (FSUs), judicial capacity, and so forth). Only today in 2010, as a new security and justice programme is being developed, the Improved Access to Security and Justice Programme (IASJP), are the links between security and justice explicitly recognised.

34 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

As already alluded to, this conceptual rivalry papers over individual power struggles in Sierra Leone and in London, and reflects institutional turf wars. Tension continues between the SSR community within DfID, surprisingly small, and justice development experts that stand firmly on keeping the policing as a public service separate from oversight of the armed forces and democratic control of intelligence agencies. Indeed, with DfID’s 2009 Development White Paper, it appears that the former ‘school of thought’ has succeeded in all but remove SSR from development discourse. It notes in passing: ‘Through approaches such as security sector reform – for example working with Minister of Defence or parliamentary committees – we will help the poor benefit from accountable and effective security organisations they can trust, operating within the rule of law and adhering to human rights standards.’ By comparison, security and justice, and treating them as basic services, are discussed in detail under its own heading (DfID, 2009). In the late 1990s policing was the responsibility of what at the time was called the Government and Institutions Department (GID), whereas SSR, military matters and intelligence essentially, fell within the remit of the Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance Department (CHAD), now referred to as Conflict and Humanitarian and Security Affairs (CHASE). Justice remained a separate area for intervention within DfID for a number of years publishing its own policy documentation and maintaining separate budgets. In terms of training, for example, DfID established an ‘SSR Practitioners Course’ for all those engaged in SSR activities in the first half of the 2000s. As late as 2006, it was decided, by the protagonists of security and justice narrowly focused on basic service delivery that a more specifically justice-orientated course was necessary. The fact that they were established as separate courses is a reflection of the fact that justice and SSR, respectively, were never entirely integrated. It is the SSR community, relatively small at DfID, which has been most adamant in promoting what has become a growing trend to conceptualise and operationalise connections between security, development, justice and democracy. ‘Holistic’ and ‘comprehensive’ reform or a ‘system-wide’ approach to reform of the security sector have in this regard been used as concepts to describe hitherto separate fields of intervention. Looking back on the late 1990s and early 2000s, the separation of what may broadly be referred to as internal and external security provision within DfID had real consequences in Sierra Leone. Keith Biddle recalls from this period: We actually queried DfID about this. CHAD was running the show regarding security in the military, and came out on visits. On the

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 35

other hand, you had the Government and Institutions Department doing the police. And we said: ‘Why isn’t CHAD doing all of this?’ The argument had been in the Government and Institutions Department that they would retain all policing aspects throughout the world under all circumstances. The argument was that policing was about governments and communities. It wasn’t about military solutions to conflict. There was a lot of turf war involved in this. Logically, the police should have been part of the security sector reform part, and DfID, in 1998, in fact issued a book (sic) that stated that the police are actually dealt with on their own provisions. So security sector reform was not part and parcel of what we were doing and never formally became part and parcel of what we were doing. There was clearly a lack of integration of thought in London. [Cross-departmental initiatives such as] the conflict pools and the Stabilisation Unit [managed by DfID, FCO and MoD in collaboration] have been informed by some of the disputes and problems that we had (Keith Biddle, June 2009, interview, France). The fact that direction of police and defence programming, respectively, did not come from the same department in DfID had, as mentioned, real consequences. An example is the battle between advisers over Paramount Hotel and whether it should house the SLP’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) or the MoD. This was really a consequence of rivalry in London, and by extension in Sierra Leone. In both places decisionmaking and thinking was only partly joined up, directly conditioned by personalities rather than a comprehensive framework for security sector reform. Biddle recalls: The reporting through separate desks eventually manifested itself with the tension over Paramount Hotel. [The adviser to Sierra Leone’s MoD] was reporting that everything was okay and that the IG can easily clear this building. I was served with a letter saying: ‘In 5 days’ time we intend to start work, so get your people out of there.’ [The other adviser] was not telling any lies. I could’ve cleared them if I’d said: ‘Yes, okay, I’ll send them all down the road. They’ve got nowhere to live, but let’s forget that.’ He didn’t tell them any lies. He didn’t tell the truth, but didn’t tell any lies. No one was coordinating this in DfID, because we were reporting to separate desks, some dealing with country specific issues, other with humanitarian matters. DfID didn’t regard community policing

36 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

as part of SSR at that stage. And so that eventually manifested itself with the nonsense over Paramount Hotel, which we could write up as mere fuss now, but at the time it was pretty dangerous because we were all out there. Somebody had made plans for the place [Paramount Hotel] and got the President to agree. The problem was that we could not deliver on this, because the coordination in London hadn’t provided any for me to find somewhere for my people to go. The fact that 300–400 policemen were housed in this place hadn’t crossed anybody’s mind in London (Keith Biddle, June 2009, interview, France).

International momentum The fragmentation that was visible in Sierra Leone’s SSR process, backed up by policy as it was presented by Short in the late 1990s, would in the coming years, in international policy at least, become less evident. This push towards what is now referred to as ‘holistic,’ ‘comprehensive,’ ‘system-wide’ approaches to SSR came, as indicated above, from CHASE within DfID. However, even within CHASE there has never been a substantial number of staff advocating for DfID’s involvement in programming around ‘hard security,’ meaning inclusive of defence, the military and intelligence services. In reality, it was only a very small number of people within CHASE, at times just an individual, who drove this agenda. At times there have been none at all pushing forward a comprehensive SSR agenda. Nonetheless, it was this concept of SSR that was to gather momentum in international policy-making circles, partly because of those individuals and allies that have been SSR Advisers in the so-called S&J Team in CHASE, but also because DfID backed them up with funding through the Conflict Prevention Pools (CPP). SSR, as it was emerging, was thus part of a move towards integrating security and development, and the UK played a major role in promoting and formulating this agenda. Short captures the undeniable perception in the international community following the end of the Cold War, stating a common perception at the time: ‘There was a massive growth in conflict within and between countries, causing enormous suffering and preventing development. I mean, you couldn’t be intelligently interested in development in Africa and not be focused on how you bring all these conflicts to an end.’3 During the first half of the 2000s, and based on concrete experiences from post-conflict reconstruction, it was the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that became the international

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 37

organisation most heavily involved in developing a SSR policy concept, initially by producing the 2005 reference document Security System Reform and Governance. There should be little doubt that it was the UK, and CHASE in DfID specifically, that was the central player in directing the production of this and subsequent SSR-related documents. This is not least indicated by the fact that during this period DfID’s Senior SSR Advisor chaired the OECD DAC’s Conflict, Peace and Development Cooperation Network (CPDON). OECD-DAC thus became a platform from which the UK could influence the future direction of SSR thinking internationally. This was not done by the UK Government in isolation, but, as Jennifer Sugden (2006:2) has argued, also involved a range of experts, primarily from the UK, from academia, international organisations and NGOs. The OECD-DAC Handbook on Security System Reform, which followed two years later in 2007 and had strong UK backing, was produced to provide ‘guidance to operationalise the OECD-DAC guidelines on SSR and close the gap between policy and practice’ (OECD, 2007a:15). Unlike the early formulations of SSR described above, the police and judiciary were placed together with the military and intelligence services within a seamless security framework – or system as referred to by the OECD. It is within these two documents from 2005 and 2007 that the clearest articulation of a holistic approach to SSR can be found. The overall aim of SSR, it is stated, is to ensure that the security sector in a given country is capable of meeting the security needs of both state and people in a manner consistent with democratic norms, good governance the rule of law (OECD, 2005b). In addition, the OECD emphasises the necessity of approaching not any one security provider in particular, but security providers as a system of actors, thus addressing the overlapping fields of security, law enforcement and justice simultaneously (Andersen, 2006). It should be noted here that whilst the UK did play a leading role, there were other institutions that were important in bringing SSR to the attention of a number of international actors. The OECD was a chief player and along with them DCAF in Geneva also played, and continues to play, a leading role in developing the SSR agenda. In addition, the UK established a Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform (GFN-SSR) with an explicit brief to provide support for Southern security networks. Whilst some of these have eventually fallen by the wayside, largely as a result of internal changes within DfID, they have all had a profound impact on SSR thinking. Having said that a number of institutions were involved, it should also be noted that there was a very British core to a number of them, with a close network of individuals, many of whom

38 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

were British or at least English speakers (Canadian and Irish) who knew each other and this group was influential in driving forward initiatives.

Defining scope of SSR – in Sierra Leone and internationally The concept of ‘security sector reform’ existed and was used in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, but there was some lack of clarity about which institutions to include when attempting to define the concept. One definition reflected Short’s concept in the late 1990s of what the security sector entailed, involving only the armed forces and the institutions overseeing and managing their actions. Another definition included the intelligence services and, particularly, the institutions with a mandate to coordinate responses from the various actors of the security sector, including the NSA’s Office (the predecessor to the ONS). Neither of these definitions encompassed the SLP, the MIA, the judiciary, prison services, parliament, civil society or chiefdom institutions, all of which have important roles regarding the provision of security and justice to the population. Producing Sierra Leone’s security sector review between 2003 and 2005 forced through a need to clearly define those institutions that should contribute to SSR in the country. As explained in greater detail elsewhere in this book, the security sector review’s primary aim was to assess potential and actual threats to realising Sierra Leone’s Vision 2025, a document framing a vision for long-term development. Furthermore, the security sector review was produced to identify the institutions which could counter these threats, and to make recommendations on how they could do so. For practical reasons, it therefore became of central importance to have a clearly outlined working definition of the agencies that were encompassed by the security sector. This was not only the case because of sensitivities around making an authoritative claim on threats to Sierra Leone, but also because of the political consequences of including some actors and excluding others. In the second half of 2003, a definition of the security sector was proposed as a precursor to initiate the review process. Under the heading ‘What is the Security Sector?’ the following institutions were considered relevant to defining threats to Sierra Leone security (Defence Advisory Team, 2003): • Governance and oversight mechanisms, including parliamentary committees.

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 39

• The ONS and the CISU. • Government departments, including interior, justice, defence, foreign affairs, and finance. • Uniformed services: the military, police, prison service, customs and immigration. • The judicial system, including the Anti-Corruption Commission. • The TRC. • Private security companies. • Non-state paramilitary forces. • Civil society stakeholders and NGOs. There is little doubt that the security sector review process helped to conceptually clarify the boundaries of the security sector. Indeed, as noted by one of the leading figures within the Sierra Leone Police who was a member of the security sector review secretariat in the ONS, the review process ‘in 2003 sort of harnessed all the other transformations that were taking place. From then on it became clear cut that all institutions should be involved. It became clear that there were other institutions than the police and armed forces’ (Desmond Buck, Working Group meeting, 2008). This process of clarification in Sierra Leone, which had a practical purpose, was reflected in a similar parallel process within the OECD, which culminated in the publication of the 2005 reference document Security System Reform and Governance. According to OECD-DAC’s definition, which has become an authoritative blueprint for external actors, four clusters of actors fall under the heading of the ‘security system’: • Core security actors: armed forces, police, gendarmeries, paramilitary forces, presidential guards, intelligence and security services, coast guards, border guards, custom authorities, and reserve and local security units. • Security management and oversight bodies: parliament/legislature, including committees, ministries of internal affairs, foreign affairs and defence, national security advisory bodies, customary and traditional authorities, financial management bodies and civil society actors, including the media, academia and non-governmental organisations. • Justice and rule of law institutions: ministry of justice, correction services, criminal investigation and prosecution services, the judiciary (courts), other customary and traditional justice systems, human rights commissions and ombudspersons.

40 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

• Non-statutory security forces: liberation armies, guerrilla armies, private bodyguard units, private security companies, private military companies and political party militias. In the Handbook, published in 2007, the security system was also described as being made up of several smaller systems, where the police services fall within both criminal justice and state security, albeit within an overarching security framework (Albrecht and Buur, 2009:394). These two processes of conceptual clarification, which took place in parallel in the first half of the 2000s, have not, however, led to a set definition of the security sector or SSR. Different actors continue to embrace broad or narrow understandings, and a variety of terms are often used interchangeably, including security sector reform, security system reform, security sector modernisation, security sector transformation, and so forth. In addition, as set out above, DfID has never been unequivocally in favour of supporting the breadth of security institutions listed above, while, somewhat contradictory, also being the agency which has pushed a comprehensive approach to SSR. The main point to keep in mind here is that SSR, as it was pursued in Sierra Leone from the late 1990s, was politically motivated from the very top of the UK Government. In other words, the decision to engage did not come from within any one specific Department, although Short’s decision to engage in SSR as the head of DfID was decisive. The most important evidence of the driving force of engagement is difficult to locate is DfID’s general reluctance to engage in defence or intelligencerelated programming outside the Sierra Leonean context. However, within Sierra Leone, there is also evidence of how DfID’s reluctance was consolidated concurrently with decrease of political interest in Sierra Leone. One case in point, which will be explored in greater detail below, is the transition from a police-focused CCSSP to the broader focus of JSDP, encompassing the justice sector more comprehensively. Re-establishing Sierra Leone’s justice sector has so far spanned more than a decade and has informed international thinking and best practices of justice sector transformation as it is designed today. Indeed, many advisers who built their career in Sierra Leone, including Biddle, remain central to developing police programmes, in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the Sierra Leone process has helped to change the focus from separate police and justice reform programming towards the justice sector as a whole. JSDP was a response to this broadened understanding of what is needed to enhance people’s security and justice. The police and justice experience in Sierra Leone has also generated increased attempts to incorporate non-state providers of security and

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 41

justice into programming. In 2010, a programme to this effect was designed in Sierra Leone, referred to as the IASJP. As part of its rationale, the paper that presents the various options for future programming, emphasises that ‘13 of JSDP’s 17 components focus on state and institution-building.’ In turn, it argues, ‘it is deemed unlikely that additional HMG support to state and institution building will, by itself, sufficiently transform the MDAs [Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the Sierra Leone state] to enable them adequately to meet the needs of vulnerable and marginalised groups.’ The mid-2000s witnessed somewhat of a shift in the acknowledgement of who the main providers of security and justice are in the Global South (DfID, 2004; Scheye and McLean, 2006). This was not least a reflection of donor agencies’ disillusionment with host governments that did not appear to take state-centric reform efforts forward with sufficient speed. In addition, these developments fit neatly with DfID’s mantra of ‘providing services to poor, marginalised and vulnerable people, in a nonpartisan, equitable, and accountable manner.’ The following two sections show how justice sector programmes have been informed, and in turn themselves informed what has been considered best practices in justice sector development.

JSDP – representing a DfID approach Until 2005, while the SLP had received considerable support, support to the judiciary and the broader justice sector did not receive the same level of resource. There is no denying the significant impact of Commonwealth Police Development Task Force (CPDTF) and CCSSP – on the police. However, as indicated by one of the advisors to the JSDP, arriving in Sierra Leone in 2005: ‘The SLP is the only functional unit in MIA, there is a huge imbalance. The SLP is frustrated in terms of the judiciary, which is better, but not functioning’.4 It was the strength of the CCSSP that it resurrected the SLP, but also its weakness, because other institutions in the justice sector were regarded as of secondary importance or simply neglected. Leading figures within CCSSP have been adamant about how they sought to establish a police directorate within the MIA, but that consecutive ministers – Charles Margai, Prince Harding and Sam Hinga Norman – were not in favour of substantial changes to the Ministry. The fact remains, however, that early support to the justice sector was fragmented, and heavily biased towards strengthening the state police. The JSDP constituted a fundamental break with both the approach and management of the projects that were meant to support justice

42 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

sector development. The most radical change was the switch from a focus on efficient internal security provision to a focus on the governing structures of the justice sector on the one hand, and on the delivery of service at the local level (and outside Freetown) on the other hand. This was ultimately a shift from supporting a ‘police force’ to developing security and justice as ‘public services.’ The CCSSP and Law Reform Programme had started implementation during a period with little appreciation of what a holistic approach to SSR might look like. Certainly, the need for mutual support of programming around the judiciary and the police were not readily accepted. In the reports of CCSSP consultants the tone is outright hostile and impatient towards the judiciary, which was regarded as corrupt, unprofessional and inefficient. In other words, the CCSSP leaders did not regard it as their responsibility to support judicial reform – and, indeed, strictly speaking it was not (Albrecht, 2010:69). With a focus on the justice sector within JSDP, priority reform areas were clearly expanded to a disparate number of activities and institutions. The approach became both more about development, i.e. public service delivery, than security, i.e. making the state more effective, and more about looking at the justice sector within one framework of programming. These developments had been long underway, recognised as early as 2002 by Biddle, while he was still the IGP of Sierra Leone and the CCSSP was still being implemented. At the end of the day, however, Biddle was a police officer. The fairly radical shift from reform under CCSSP and the Law Reform Programme into JSDP, and the apparent cohesion in what effective support to the justice sector might look like, coincided with the publication of the 2005 OECD reference document Security System Reform, which was heavily influenced by the UK, DfID and experiences in Sierra Leone specifically. The changes in programme that came with JSDP were reflected in a fundamental shift of attention, and reflected ‘developmentalisation’ of the security agenda in Sierra Leone. In 2007, it had become clear that there was a general move away from direct support to securityrelated programming by DfID. Priority reform areas included outof-date and inaccessible laws and procedures, including a defined need to begin a process of indexing customary law, overcrowding of prisons, delays in courts, absence of adequate juvenile justice provision, lack of support mechanisms which meet the ‘needs of the poor, vulnerable and marginalised’ to access justice, lack of connection between community needs and police operations, and so forth (JSDP OPR, 2007:9–10).

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 43

The focus on the SLP as an institution, ensuring that it would be able to perform effectively as provider of internal security, was definitively and understandably, perhaps, being taken over by a focus, which fit DfID’s preoccupation with development. This had to do with the fact that direction was now coming from DfID rather than the Cabinet. Tony Blair, Robin Cook and Clare Short based their decision to support Sierra Leone on the assumption that ‘it was the right thing to do.’ Whatever was good practice in development – and dealing with security actors was not it – had been changing throughout this time period. However, the JSDP reflected both the SSR concept that was evolving, and simultaneously, the inherently hesitant approach of a development agency to security-related programming. This shift in focus has been held consistently by the JSDP, both at the central level and in Moyamba District, which came to be regarded as the programme’s ‘pilot district’ outside Freetown and the Western Area. It was therefore almost a given that there would be a number of complications involved in broadening the focus from what was predominantly a police project – CPDTF/CCSSP – to a sector-wide justice sector project – JSDP. First of all, the £25 million were now earmarked not for the police alone, but for the police, judiciary, prisons and MIA. The CCSSP had focused heavily on supporting SLP equipment procurement and this focus disappeared with JSDP. As already noted above, the Government of Sierra Leone has, for various reasons, not been able to replace this equipment. In turn, the JSDP supported infrastructure such as prisons and separate office space for Family Support Units. This change in programming signified a shift in external advice, which became much less personalised. Keith Biddle, Adrian Horn and Ray England had played an integral role in stabilising Sierra Leone in close collaboration with Sierra Leone’s executive, not only through advice, but through active involvement. Indeed, certain members of CCSSP, who had practically become core staff members of the SLP according to some sources, actively fought against a broader focus on justice sector institutions, because it clearly had negative consequences for the SLP – and for their own positions. A focus on the justice sector was nonetheless in line with concepts of best practices at the time of a ‘holistic’ approach to SSR-related activities. The next change of direction in justice reform has been underway almost since JSDP began implementation, culminating in the design of IASJP in 2010. Before looking at the shift in focus from the state to those actors that have been perceived as non-state, it is worth exploring some of the policy-thinking

44 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

that has informed current debates on non-state actor inclusion in SSR or as it is now referred to, ‘security and justice programming’.

Moving away from the state Debates in international circles around how security and justice may be enhanced at the local level, have been quite far-sighted with respect to engaging non-state actors. However, because practice in many ways preceded theory, very little guidance was available to practitioners on the ground, including during the periods when CCSSP and even JSDP began implementation. In the case of Sierra Leone, the SSR process began in the midst of conflict in 1999. It was above all focused on supporting the democratically elected government in winning a war, building up the capacity of the state to do so, and to provide internal security. The overall SSR process was therefore relatively ad hoc until 2002, when conflict was officially declared over, and implementation at District level only began in earnest thereafter. In 2004, DfID published its first coherent briefing on the issue, called Non-state Justice and Security Systems. It states that security and justice institutions presided over by non-state actors are ‘critically important in the context of DfID’s pro-poor approach to security and justice’. These actors, the note continues, ‘deal with the vast majority of disputes’ and are ‘widely used in rural and poor urban areas, where there is often minimal access to formal state justice’ (DfID, 2004:1). The briefing recognises that this approach to reform is politicised, neither neutral nor solely technical, but one that raises broader governance issues. There often is no separation between providing security and justice, on one hand, and local governance institutions on the other: ‘[A] person who exercises judicial (or quasi judicial) authority through a non state justice system may also have executive authority over the same property or territory’ (DfID, 2004:3). In other words, those very mechanisms that are being used to seek redress are often also deployed to control the distribution of land and resources by local elites. Unsurprisingly, as in the case of reforming state policing agencies, intervening locally, and engaging with nonstate actors such as paramount chiefs is a highly political endeavour and will undoubtedly confront resilient structures of authority that are likely to yield considerable legitimacy. As part of DfID’s design of Primary Justice Pilots in Malawi, tensions arose because chiefs saw an inherent threat from the programme, as other types of dispute resolution mechanisms would be used, challenging their de facto monopoly to settle such

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 45

cases. In the specific case of the MaSSAJ, officially commenced in January 2002, which the Primary Justice Pilots were part of, 60% of funding was, according to one of the advisers to the project, spent on non-state actors. In 2006, OECD published a report which called for what was referred to as a ‘multi-layered’ approach to reforming those actors and institutions that provide security and justice (Scheye and McLean, 2006). Drawing on the definition of non-state actors purported by DfID’s policy briefing, it is concluded that statutory as well as non-statutory providers of security and justice should be encompassed by reform efforts. This approach, it is stated, ‘targets the multiple points where service occurs and strengthens the linkages between state institutions and local justice and non state providers’ (GFN-SSR, 2007). In the Security System Reform Handbook, published just after in 2008, this line of thinking was consolidated, stating that a multi-layered approach ‘helps respond to the short-term needs of enhanced security and justice, while also building the medium-term needs of state capacity and critical governance structures’ (OECD DAC, 2007). The multi-layered approach is, however, not avoiding state engagement and can even be considered state-centric. In the 2006 report that presents the most radical outline of the multi-layered approach, it is stated that whatever support is provided ‘to non-state systems, however, ought to be balanced by the establishment of mechanisms to link them to state systems’ (Scheye and McLean, 2006:32). Similarly, the Security System Reform Handbook is predominantly preoccupied with the capacity of state institutions.

Non-state actor involvement in security and justice In December 2005, a National Policy Framework for the Justice Sector in Sierra Leone was presented within the framework of the JSDP. It represented a ‘holistic sector-wide approach to support the development of an effective, efficient, impartial and accountable Justice Sector that is capable of meeting the needs of all the people of Sierra Leone’ (JSDP, December 2005:2). The document is not short of formulations around the importance of including what are referred to as ‘Customary/Traditional Laws and Practices.’ These include, inter alia, development of policies on the judicial role of traditional leaders, implementation of initiatives that promote Constitutional principles and human rights and enhanced accountability of traditional leaders to the public. Likewise, the Justice Sector Reform Strategy and Investment Plan, launched in February 2008, has as one of six targets to ‘improve public satisfaction levels with Local Courts,

46 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

Paramount and Local Chiefs’ (GoSL, December 2007:V). As one of the initial advisers to the JSDP notes: ‘Each system will have its own advantages and disadvantages and both need support, even if the state system will inevitably require a greater share of financial resources’ (HowlettBolton, 2008:8). Under JSDP, substantive work has been and is still being undertaken in Freetown, where the focus is on distribution of power among the recognisable institutions of the state. Inevitably, as the focus moves to Chiefdom level, as it has done in Moyamba District in the case of the JSDP, any attempt of JSDP programmes to impact institutions controlled by the chiefs touches on local level distribution of power, and is therefore deeply political. During JSDP implementation there have been no attempts to fundamentally alter the institution of the Local Court. Rather, focus has been on how to confine chiefs to their legally defined role in arbitrating cases, a management role which presumably can only be played by state institutions – the Local Councils and the SLP. In Moyamba, apart from supporting the Magistrates Court, direct work with the Chiefs has channelled through human rights training. Inevitably, conflicts occur; a 2009 assessment reported a Local Court Chairman complaint about cases no longer being reported to him. Such complaints could reflect redistribution of power in the Chiefdom, but also could be due to the fact that local court fines are a source of income for court employees, who are not paid regularly, if at all. This implies, of course, that the JSDP has had some impact on how justice is delivered. As the assessment suggests, however, this is also partly due to civil society activities in the District, in particular in Local Courts, where officials have presided over cases that were not under their jurisdiction. The question remains, however, whether the balance of power in Moyamba has been fundamentally altered. Given the role of chiefs as providers of 80% of local level justice (according to common in-country estimates), and also the identification of chiefdom justice as being influential in the road to conflict in the first place (Richards, 1998; Jackson, 2005, 2007) it is still striking how little direct attention they appear to have received from the JSDP. Apart from providing support to the drafting of a Local Courts Bill and a restatement programme around customary law (in Moyamba District), the JSDP has not prioritised support to Local Courts and traditional justice systems. The 2007 assessment quoted above notes that ‘the majority of disputes are resolved through the informal system outside the Local Courts (headmen, section chief, village elders or paramount chief). This is

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 47

a weakness of the programme, which has put greater emphasis on formal justice institutions’ (JSDP OPR, April 2007). This circumstance ultimately reflects the difficulty of working directly with chiefs to change their practices. This is also reflected in assessments of the JSDP carried out in 2007, 2008 and 2009, where remarkably little space is devoted to this layer of primary powerbrokers in Sierra Leone’s local communities. There are several reasons for this, some of which has been discussed elsewhere at a general level and with a specific reference to Sierra Leone’s SSR process (Albrecht and Buur, 2009). First of all, the function and rationale of how chiefs operate is not well-understood by external actors. While they understand and accept the importance of including Chiefs in justice programmes, donors and their consultants have difficulty designing appropriate programmes targeting Chiefs. Second, because Chiefs are obliged constitutionally to serve the ‘government of the day’ and because they are deeply political in their own right, it is difficult for donor agencies to find the appropriate balance between support of state and non-state actors. This in turn leads to the vital issue of state sovereignty: while national actors might agree that Chiefs are vital leaders in Sierra Leone, national-level officials might not accept that donor support is not passed through them. In 2009, DfID/Sierra Leone produced a document, proposing a ‘new intervention,’ IASJP in Sierra Leone, which is meant to run for a threeyear period until 2013. At the time of writing, the project design process has not taken place, but the document, outlining terms of reference for that process, suggests that the programme will place delivery of improved access to security and justice in Sierra Leone ‘at both the centre of our ongoing state-building and human development interventions’ (IASJP TOR, 2009). The document also suggests that among the six key threats to building sustainable peace in Sierra Leone is ‘a lack of individual or community legal redress or rights’ (IASJP TOR, 2009). The programme is expected to support achievements and the ongoing activities of the JSDP, which is described as ‘operating in several districts’ (IASJP TOR, 2009). The most important aspect of the document, however, is that for the first time in the context of Sierra Leone’s SSR process, there is a recognition in programme design documentation that informal security and justice providers are at least as vital as formal providers. However, apart from referring to ‘informal’ and ‘traditional’ security and justice service providers, and indicating that they will be consulted

48 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

and engaged in the new programme, they are not dealt with in any depth. Therefore, even if paramount and sections chief and village headmen are not mentioned in this short document, it must be assumed that these are the actors that are referred to. For the first time it looks like Sierra Leone will have a programme that focuses on the ‘non-state’ and the ‘state,’ but what this will look like in practice, and what the impact will be, remains to be seen. So whilst the importance of engaging Chiefs, or more generally the actors holding the power to govern and provide security and justice at the local level, cannot be underestimated, it is clear that much work needs to be done to understand these local issues, particularly the politics of local governance (Jackson, 2007).

Conclusion This chapter has explored how the concept of SSR through practical programmes on the ground was shaped by experiences in Sierra Leone, and vice versa, how SSR came to shape the country’s peacebuilding process. There are three main reasons for this. First, is the fact that within the UK Government, consensus prevailed that the foreign policy instruments at its disposal had to be deployed simultaneously. DfID’s establishment in 1997 as a Department separate from FCO was crucial in this regard, as development was considered on par in importance with military and political power. Second, Short’s ambitions as a politician – rather than as an agent of for development per se – meant that breaking new ground was of high priority. Merging security and development certainly fit this agenda. Third, and on this backdrop, DfID came to play an absolutely central role in defining SSR policy internationally, most notably through OECDDAC. It is striking, however, that SSR in the comprehensive way that it was pursued in Sierra Leone has never been attempted in the same way in other parts of the world. 9/11 and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have played their role in complicating the merger of security and development within one framework. In these places, to state the obvious, military force has by far been the most important instrument. By extension, and as Short argues elsewhere in this volume, the legitimacy of using military power in support of development programmes has been greatly limited. More importantly, however, is the underlying and fundamental reluctance among development agencies to engage robustly in SSR, which is considered marginal to core development issues. As soon

How did SSR in Sierra Leone Impact on International Policy-Making on SSR? 49

as Sierra Leone stopped being a Cabinet issue, a more traditional development agenda took over. Developments of international thinking around SSR are well-reflected in both Sierra Leone’s attempts to coordinate the security sector and the country’s consecutive justice-related programmes, which have informed and been informed by international policy-thinking. In the early stages of Sierra Leone’s SSR process, little impetus was given to joining up the different programmes – and personalities – that ran programmes in support of the police and judiciary, defence and intelligence agencies. It was not until 2003, one year after the war officially ended in Sierra Leone, that there was a conscious realisation of the fact that the security sector was broader than the police and military. The reason for this realisation was the production of the security sector review, which was coordinated by the ONS, and drew in a wide range of security sector institutions. In parallel to this process, OECD-DAC was, with UK input, developing its own thinking around SSR. Incidentally, Sierra Leone’s security sector review and OECD-DAC’s reference document, Security System Reform and Governance, were both published in 2005. The pull and push between international policy-thinking and justice reform in Sierra Leone can be seen in two crucial developments. When CCSSP and the Law Reform Programme began implementation in the late 1990s, they were very much regarded as separate endeavours. The fact that the CCSSP legacy is very much still debated today is a token of its impact – discussed in detail throughout this book. One of the great criticisms of the CCSSP, however, was that it was too narrowly focused on the police, and neglected crucial links to the governance system, prisons, courts, civil society, etc. The JSDP, much broader in scope, and more explicitly orientated towards better service delivery to the population, reflected both lessons in Sierra Leone and internationally about the need for being more ‘joined up’ and ‘holistic’ in approach. Parallel to this process, the SSR community has been on a steep learning curve with respect to the need for engaging the rather ephemeral layer of ‘non-state’ actors. International thinking on this started before 2005, and was integrated to a limited degree into the JSDP framework. It is, however, only in 2010, with the IASJP that actors at the local level have taken centre stage in policing and justice programming. What the consequences of this for Sierra Leone and for international thinking around SSR-related programming will be remains to be seen. While the process of justice reform began almost exclusively as a state-building project, it has slowly moved away from this agenda, and started to focus

50 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

on security and justice providers that are not directly conditioned by the state. This is a move that most development agencies, who hesitate to engage in intelligence and defence reform, are more comfortable with. There is no doubt also some disillusionment, among donor agencies, with the slow pace of progress made in the security sector by state institutions. Consequently, they are seeking out other organisations, state or non-state, to seek impact.

3 Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict

In the late 1990s and certainly after 1997, the overarching context of security in Sierra Leone was chaotic. The existing interventions and support provided by the UK were provided in a situation characterised by continuing conflict, state collapse, military instability and a lack of political control in many parts of the country. Outside Freetown, the Government was unable to project political power and security for most of the population was fragile. The RUF, along with several additional political groups were proving to be significant political rivals to the legitimate government of President Kabbah, particularly in the countryside. At the same time, the Government of Sierra Leone was facing a succession of crises, not least the exile of the President in Conakry. At the same time, the Government also had a number of external agencies willing to provide support to what was a democratically elected President. It was clear that any long-term development strategy would be dependent on a return of the Government in exile and that this was not possible given the poor security situation. Without security and stability, Sierra Leone could not begin to recover. From the outset, the UK acknowledged that security was central to any recovery, and as one adviser to the Government of Sierra Leone stated: ‘In our [Sierra Leone’s] case the entry point was clearly the police and armed forces. We need to understand that SSR is a political process and the entry point into SSR is based on the circumstances in a country. You don’t need an overarching strategy to start’.1 Early interventions were therefore reactive in that the UK Government was compelled to act quickly in response to events on the ground and without the luxury of a significant planning lead time. In many ways, this was not seen as a problem, except in so far as DfID was relatively short of 51

52 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

experienced staff to put on the ground. As a core DfID adviser stated: ‘the great thing was that we got on with it, supported the Government and avoided obsessions about planning at the expense of actually doing things’.2 In this situation, it became clear that security and development were becoming entwined on the ground. Whilst Sierra Leone at this time was a long way from the later, coherent picture of SSR and even from the close links that have been articulated in relation to security and development, this reactive approach did lead to a situation where security and development became closely associated on the ground. This then sowed the seeds for the later development of Sierra Leonean governance and of SSR as a concept. This chapter deals with the first phase of the intervention in Sierra Leone. It begins with a description of the context of initial support, including the importance of the particular set of circumstances that arose during the latter part of the 1990s. It then goes on to describe the wide range of interventions undertaken by the UK Government in the security sector, including the military intervention, Operation Palliser and the reformation of UNAMSIL. It then goes on to look at the issues entailed in reforming an army that was ostensibly still at war but in reality had fallen apart, a police force that did not exist outside the capital city and the construction of an overarching security architecture with a functioning intelligence wing and civilian oversight.

Reforming the police and legal sector Early work with the police and legal sector was initiated in 1997/78, around the same time as civil service reform. However, these interventions were characterised by a lack of coordination, even if specific sets of reforms became very successful. A key element of these initial reforms was re-establishing a functional SLP, not just to reinstate security for the civilian population, but to re-establish state legitimacy in terms of providing that security. These considerations were behind an earlier Government of Sierra Leone request to DfID in 1996 for total reform of the SLP by the newly-elected President Kabbah.3 Project appraisal activities began in 1997, but were disrupted by the AFRC coup but then reinvigorated when Kabbah returned from exile.4 In August 1998, President Kabbah announced the Sierra Leone Policing Charter, which established the primacy of the police in the provision of security for the people of Sierra Leone and acted as a catalyst for police reform. This charter established a set of general guide-

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 53

lines, almost a contract with the people of Sierra Leone, governing the conduct of the SLP in dealing with the general population. In particular it set down lists of expectations based on primacy of the police, respect for human rights, increased effectiveness of the officers and an anti-corruption message. Significantly, in the same year and at this very early stage of the police reform process, the future policing doctrine of Sierra Leone was first defined as Local Needs Policing (LNP). A development of UK Community policing (but not exactly the same), this approach still governs the ethos of policing in Sierra Leone. In its basic form, LNP was defined as: ‘Policing that meets the expectations and need of the local community and reflects national standards and objectives’.5 The key was to find an approach that provided some simple, key statements on what the Government and the police wanted and valued, and a policing model for the future. Given the need to completely restructure the police service in Sierra Leone, this required far more than just a new organisational structure. In particular, one adviser who is credited with developing this approach stated that it was about ‘alteration in the attitudes and behaviour of all police officers, together with a critical shift in the management culture of the organisation’.6 Critically, whilst several officers had some experience of different models of community policing, these could be significantly different and what was required was not a model from outside but something that could be consistent within the country and also cope with the different demands of different areas of Sierra Leone. The doctrine of LNP was largely based on the establishment of Local Command Units (LCUs) designed to be locally accountable and also responsive to local needs. This was something that was a complete

Table 3.1 Total number

The Image of the SLP7 Is the SLP corrupt?

YES

How do you view the SLP generally?

Do the SLP ask for money in police stations? NO

Should the SLP be more polite to civilians?

BAD

YES

NO

YES

30

30

0

5

25

27

3

30

0

30

0

TOTAL

30

0

5

25

27

27

30

0

30

0

100

0

16.7

83.3

90

10

100

0

100

0

%

NO GOOD

Do the SLP victimise people?

YES

NO

54 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

departure from the experience of policing in Sierra Leone. An important survey conducted by the CPDTF (summarised in Table 3.1) confirmed that the SLP were not well regarded by the public. Although this is a relatively small survey, the lack of public confidence in the SLP at the time, particularly the perception that the SLP were totally corrupt, was pervasive among the people. Attacking institutional corruption, especially prevalent amongst higher ranks of the SLP, became one of the main targets of reform and was one of the central challenges of the new LNP doctrine. Clearly, police reform had a lot to accomplish before the people began to see their police force as their protectors. 1998 was a time where, as one senior DfID advisor noted, ‘the security sector did not exist. Not only did we not tackle the military in DfID generally, or in the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), we also were not considering the legal sector or the police as part of the security sector at that time.’8 Thus, while being vital, developments within the SLP were treated in relative isolation to other security-related programming. This is not to say that regular meetings and informal coordination were not taking place, but programmes were not integrated, and at the time, the need to do so was not clearly articulated. Following the 1999 deployment of the SILSEP team to the MoD and NSA office, by 2000, there was a recognition, at least on paper, that SLP reforms should be linked with reforms under SILSEP as well as the newly developed LDP (see below). It was also accepted that links needed to be established to the Anti-Corruption Programme, the rebuilding of professionalism and efficiency in the civil service, and – because of the complementary role of traditional and customary systems of policing and justice – work conducted to restore civil society and support amongst paramount chiefs and local government. However, without formalised linkages between the different programmes, a joined up approach could not be realised and each programme continued largely in isolation. When rebels invaded Freetown in January 1999, the CPDTF was forced to leave the country and all activities effectively ground to a halt. Only in August that year, following the signing of the Lomé Peace Agreement, was the full CPDTF able to redeploy and recommence work. It was clearly and urgently understood that while the process of transforming the security system initially had been initiated out of concern over the involvement of the armed forces in politics, the brunt of security tasks in a stable Sierra Leone would fall on the SLP. This policy has been followed consistently ever since. At the same time, with respect to the implementation of DDR in 1999 and beyond, it had become clear that the SLP would be instrumental in enabling conflict prevention and providing stability in the resettle-

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 55

ment and rehabilitation process. The task at hand was substantial, not least in logistical terms. For instance, all personnel files had been destroyed and, as recalled by one of the procurement advisors involved at the time, a police force of several thousands existed in name, but with ‘12 working vehicles and no reasonable uniforms’.9 One of the most critical issues was that there was very limited SLP presence outside of Freetown. This meant that apart from the security issue for those living in the countryside, there were also issues in establishing the rule of law and sovereignty of the Government, let alone gathering criminal intelligence and opening lines of communication to the leadership in the capital. The establishment of a working police force in rural areas was therefore regarded as urgently needed. This was important, both in terms of establishing security, but also in terms of establishing the legitimacy of the state as a security provider across the country. In several areas there were also reports of criminal gangs moving into the legal ‘empty space’ where the SLP or the military did not have a real presence. The process of rolling out the SLP picked up from 1999 and accelerated through 2001–2002. Initially this spread to Port Loko, Moyamba, Kenema, Pujehun and Bonthe, areas that were relatively stable at the time, but were unable to roll out to those areas like Kono and Makeni that were less stable. The first push led to DfID support of the SLP through a procurement programme for vehicles and communications equipment to support for civilian policing.10 The CPDTF was transformed into the CCSSP in 2000. Although initially referred to as a ‘Commonwealth Project’, in reality funds for the project were provided entirely by DfID and, after 2001, through additional funding from the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool (ACPP). The main focus of the CCSSP – as had been the case with the CPDTF – was to support operational activities of the SLP, including capacity-building. As part of this process, Operation Phoenix was implemented to introduce ‘effective visible policing’. As the title of the operation suggests, its focus was on re-establishing the SLP’s: …rightful primacy in the maintenance of public tranquillity and law enforcement […]. There is a need for visible targeted policing to be introduced on a twenty-four hour basis every day of the year. Such policing will be essential to the peace process by increasing public confidence in the rule of law and indirectly encouraging inward investment to the country.11 The general breakdown of state institutions and infrastructure during the war had also had a fundamental impact on the SLP. Almost all

56 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

police buildings, neglected before the war, suffered further damage by the rebel forces. In fact one of the first actions taken by groups of RUF rebels as they entered almost every settlement was to destroy any infrastructure identifies with authority, including District offices, chief palaver huts and any police station. Lines of command had been cut and pockets of SLP officers worked without guidance from headquarters. Whilst the police force had not been implicated in coups in the direct way that the armed forces had, the SLP had in large measure lost the confidence of the population through a combination of perceptions of corruption and impotence in the face of the rebels. Tasks were, as noted by one of the police officers engaged in reform efforts, performed ‘with blatant disregard for Human Rights […]. The Sierra Leone Police was considered a spent force at the time, with little or no logistical support to enhance its capability […].’12 The police had effectively become a self-enclosed organisation, lacking in openness, proactivity and orientation towards community accountability with no plan and no doctrine. This was the state of affairs in the SLP when the then President, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, appointed expatriate and retired UK Police officer Keith Biddle as Inspector-General of Police (IGP) in November 1999. Biddle was appointed to the position for an initial two-year period (which was extended until June 2003). He had come to Sierra Leone as head of the CPDTF and planned to launch the programme in 1997, but was delayed until 1998 due to the AFRC coup. Biddle’s appointment as IGP was a far less contentious choice than, for example, appointing a UK national as the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). Biddle’s leadership and direction proved vital in a difficult environment. He played a crucial role developing confidence in the rebuilding of the SLP, since all parties viewed him as not subject to political interference and loyalties. This role as an external catalyst helped develop confidence amongst younger officers and was undoubtedly aided by Biddle’s own strong personality and willingness to be both visible and to make decisions on the ground. Biddle’s leadership meant that difficult decisions were made, including restructuring of the rank structure, which had become extremely top-heavy. As one senior SLP officer noted ‘we needed a neutral person to come in. He cleaned up.’13 Another SLP officer noted that ‘If outsiders had not come, there would have been a lot of political pressure on the IGP at the time’.14 The decision to reduce the number of SLP ranks from 22 to 10 provided much needed space to clarify and redefine the roles and responsibilities of police personnel. The ranks of Sub-Inspector and Corporal

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 57

were removed completely; those affected were demoted to Sergeants and Constables, respectively, a move that was extremely sensitive given the SLP’s military-style rank-conscious organisation. One of the key effects of reducing the number of ranks was the shortening of internal lines of communication and flattening of the hierarchy. It also affected the extremely centralised command system in which the Office of the Inspector General controlled virtually all police matters. The situation was summed up by one officer as ‘when the phone rings and the IGP calls, one salutes the phone’.15 Two disciplinary codes existed, reflecting colonial Sierra Leone, one for the lower and senior ranks, respectively. The latter group was exempt from being put on trial before the disciplinary court. Indeed, Brima Acha Kamara recalls: ‘There was the complete lack of communication and there was this tension at work when junior officers saw senior officer – they would run away! The police chief was like a demi-god.’16 Kamara continues: ‘The IGP would take almost all call for every little matter that happened. So the day revolved around him, and that was how he became so powerful – more than ministers.’17 This centralisation within the SLP also narrowed the decisionmaking structure; indeed, Biddle also instituted the development of a strong management team that included, in part, younger officers promoted up the hierarchy. ‘From the outset of the CPDTF we asked DfID to earmark £350,000 for senior management training and development. Well-educated officers with reputations for integrity and hard work were selected for the programme which was centred on a series of special courses delivered at the UK Police Staff College at Bramshill. Some 60 SLP officers went through this training, which produced a mainly young and vibrant senior management cadre. Thus, in order to ensure sustainable, improved SLP management, the traditional seniority system of promotions and appointments was broken.’18 With the formation of what became known as the Executive Management Board, the highest decision-making body in the SLP was put in place and a culture of open debate around decisions and policies was instituted that proved invaluable in creating a sense of community among SLP’s leadership. This further developed confidence amongst the SLP, as expressed by Kadi Fakondo of the SLP: ‘we knew what we wanted, we were advised, mentored, we were very confident at that [senior] level. It could easily have been “yes sir, yes sir, yes sir” if they had come in uniform. The fact that they consulted before taking anything to the Police Council made all the difference. There was this sense that we knew where we wanted to go.’19 This clear management

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structure and more open officer-management communications were crucial in getting SLP officers to buy in to the new service that was being established. One of the key innovations in the immediate aftermath of the conflict was the establishment of Family Support Units (FSUs) within the SLP. They were a direct response to urgently needed public services and were spearheaded by current SLP Assistant Inspector-General Kadi Fakondo, one of the SLP’s key figures in post-conflict Sierra Leone. The FSUs started as a domestic violence unit based in Freetown. As Fakondo states: After the January 6th 1999 invasion of Freetown I was posted as Commander of Kissy Division, which was home to thousands of ex-combatants and their ‘wives’ and other relatives. As their so-called ‘wives’ struggled to regain their freedom (for jungle justice was no longer applicable in the city) there was stiff resistance on the part of the ex-combatants who wanted to retain them. This was what caused the high rise in domestic violence cases, which overwhelmed my personnel, and I decided to create a special unit to handle them.20 By 2000, the CCSSP brought in CID trainers from the UK along with Keith Biddle and the FSU was developed as a specialised unit tasked with handling sexual offences and cruelty towards women and children under CID. There were major sensitisation efforts amongst the population and significant efforts on training and in developing partnerships with other organisations tasked with protecting women and children, including international organisations like the International Rescue Committee (IRU) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which also provided additional funding. Fundamentally, the core requirement of any police force is that it should be able to identify and deal with threats against the state, including violent disorder and armed criminality, regardless of broader democratic concerns of accountability, responsiveness and being representative of society. This, therefore, leads to a recognition that the police needed to work on sensitive issues, including intelligence gathering and armed response. In Sierra Leone this led to the reorganisation of Special Branch (SB) and the somewhat controversial rearming of the Operational Support Group within the Special Security Division (SSD).21 The decision to make substantial investment in the SSD in the late 1990s was very controversial. Up until the 1992 coup, the SSD had more or less been Siaka Stevens personal security force and there was a strong move within the Sierra Leonean hierarchy to dismantle this force because

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 59

of its history. However, when the RUF and elements of the AFRC attacked Freetown in January 1999, the SSD played a significant role in the defence of the city. The display of loyalty led to a shift in perception regarding the SSD and in fact led to a debate surrounding the disbandment of the armed forces, replacing them with an expanded police force with armed capability through the SSD.22 At the same time a series of events was beginning to affect the debate regarding police primacy. In particular, ECOMOG was beginning to withdraw from policing and military activity and Sierra Leone was more or less left without an army, except a small Nigerian residual force. In these circumstances, the ECOMOG commander stated that the SLP needed to start policing immediately given the large number of former combatants turned out on the streets – many of which remained armed. The security situation left by the withdrawal of the military coupled with this influx of former combatants produced an incendiary situation that required a robust police response. Keith Biddle, the senior British policeman stated later: ‘Can any of these people (currently criticising the attention given to the SSD) say that this could have been done without armed police?’.23 Certainly many of the unarmed, uniformed police refused to go on the streets, despite calls from the executive for a police force that was ‘part of the people’. What was required at this point was a robust, armed police force capable of dealing with large groups of armed combatants. As noted in hindsight the issue was that ‘the army was unreliable, therefore from a Government point of view, the SSD was the protection.’24 It was also somewhat limited. Freetown was the initial focus, but it was also acknowledged that the SLP needed to be expanded across the country, partly just to establish security, but also to reinforce the legitimacy of the state. It was not until January 2002 that the SLP finally started to roll out beyond Freetown, establishing a police presence in Bo, Kenema, Makeni and Port Loko, by which time vehicles and communication equipment allowed a centralised and coordinated communication system to be maintained.

The Justice system and the Law Development Programme One of the unintended consequences of the CCSSP programme’s heavy focus on policing was that reforms of other institutions forming part of the justice sector moved forward more slowly. This lag in the development of justice alongside security has been a characteristic of the reform process right from local courts, formal legal systems, prisons and

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Ministerial development. Even by 2008 ‘the police themselves regularly comment that weaker capacity across justice institutions is undermining their own effectiveness’.25 In particular, the SLP regularly complain that they can catch criminals but the judicial system cannot either process them fast enough or obtain a high enough ratio of convictions to arrests. Support to the justice sector can basically be divided into two periods; before and after 2005. After 2005, the development of the JSDP brought together the SLP, the judiciary, the prison service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs in a comprehensive programme across the sector. Before 2005, the main involvement of external donors in the justice sector was the LDP. Started in January 2001, parallel to the CCSSP, the first eighteen months were spent on reconstructing infrastructure and developing logistics including refurbishment of the main court in Freetown and magistrates courts in Bo and Kenema. In 2002, it was noted that this process ‘had a major psychological effect – symbolising the restoration of normality and the rule of law’.26 However, the capacity to use these courts had not necessarily been developed and it was relatively late that training of some twenty registrars and administrators, under-sheriffs and bailiffs began. This was all relatively late, and the legacy of a failing justice system that had built up over several years was still being felt in Sierra Leone as late as 2008. In particular, this manifests itself by a huge backlog of cases, including those awaiting trial, imprisonment or even actioning decisions, poor record keeping and insufficient space in prisons. At the same time, the formal court system has been used sparingly in prosecuting corruption cases, testament not only to the intransigence of corruption within the system, but also the level of evidence and skill required to make successful prosecutions. In common with many countries, particularly in Africa, there have also been issues in incorporating traditional systems within the justice system as a whole. The common, but statistically difficult to verify figure was that around ‘80% of the SL population will only find judicial access and redress from the Customary Courts or from the informal (and presently illegal) alternative dispute resolution mechanisms operated by the Paramount and Lesser Chiefs’.27 In some ways this is surprising and in some ways not. The surprising element o this is that the legitimacy of the chiefs has remained despite their role in the failing governance system that led to the war. The unsurprising element is that ‘traditional’ justice systems are not only present in the countryside, but they are also cheaper than hiring formal lawyers and are understandable to most of the popu-

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 61

lation. In particular there has only been limited use of traditional systems to affect reconciliation and peacebuilding within local communities, although the extent of this remains under-researched.28 Whilst it remains very easy with hindsight to criticise the lack of progress in this area, it should be recognised that the long-term nature of peacebuilding in Sierra Leone is exacerbated within a sector that had such a long decline. Constructing an entire legal system from scratch cannot be done within a five-year planning horizon. For example, by 2008 there were approximately 200 members of the Sierra Leone Bar Association and virtually all of them reside in Freetown. This leaves access to justice extremely difficult for those who live in the countryside. Given the fact that the RUF may be seen as a rural-based organisation, the lack of justice in the countryside must be seen as extremely risky in a fragile country. This is clearly where non-formal justice mechanisms need to play a role.

The Sierra Leone armed forces before and during the war Before the conflict, Sierra Leone’s armed forces consisted of two infantry battalions with no motorised or mechanised capability and without armour or air support. The armed forces could accurately be described as a ‘ceremonial and conservative Army’ and consisted of approximately 3500 personnel. However, one of the indicators of the parlous state of the army at this time is that there are no reliable statistics available for the rate of decline of the army during the war. What is clear is that the 3500 strength was the nominal on paper strength and it is likely that the actual numbers of troops available were far lower and by the end of the war the army had more or less ceased to exist as an effective fighting force.29 In addition, the military itself had become deeply politicised and its operational capability had declined significantly since independence. The APC Government under President Siaka Stevens appointed the Force Commander – and the IGP – as members of Parliament. A recruitment policy based on a ‘card system’ gave powers to the executive and other politicians and powerful individuals to enlist loyal and faithful people into the police and the military who bore allegiance to individuals rather than to institutions. Army as well as police officers of all tribal backgrounds approached politicians to try and influence the IGP and were – for a fee – given a politician’s ‘calling card’. On the reverse side of these cards there was an instruction that the officer was to be appointed to such and such a position or that he or she was to be recruited into the

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security forces. Merit mattered, but not nearly as much as personal loyalty and conformity.30 Furthermore, prior to the first RUF attacks in the early 1990s, International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities prevented Momoh from expanding the army in an ordered manner. Kellie Conteh recalls from this period: ‘He [Momoh] needed more people and IMF is saying: “you can’t recruit.” So that was the situation until the [NPRC] coup itself happened. And when they came in, obviously they wanted to recruit quickly; grabbed every Tom, Dick and Harry in the streets without proper screening – brought them onboard.’31 The haphazard way in which recruitment took place, specifically under NPRC, affected the basic effectiveness of the army and also the motivation of those who were at the higher levels of the structure. What the RUF exposed was the whole sorry edifice and the inability of the army to devise an effective counter-insurgency strategy. The army was ill-equipped, badly led and had no real intelligence capability. As alluded to above, this state of affairs also dominated prior to NPRC taking over. The way information was gathered, collated and the presented as intelligence was genuinely pacifying and created mistrust within and between the security agencies. Indeed, as one actor close to the events in the early 1990s has noted: You know, the NPRC coup perhaps would not have succeeded if our house was in order. In other words, if we had had the right commander and headquarters was doing the right thing by referring issues to the appropriate departments, this would have made the whole difference. For instance, the G Branch [in the military headquarters] is in charge of operations and intelligence assessments – all information should be passed through that branch to be factored into the planning of operations. None of that happened because they had a political hierarchy to serve; structures for reporting intelligence, which usually meant going straight to the President. This is where you need the assessment team which we now have, they didn’t have it, it was just a single source something they picked up – and because they had direct linkages to the President they could just go and say Peter did that, and Peter will be grabbed and taken to prison. The G branch, the operations branch, was starved of vital intelligence reports to run their operations. All plans in the G branch were based on what they received directly from the front, not from any

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 63

intelligence unit. So the MIB [Military Intelligence Branch] was simply there supporting, you know, serving the political regime, the President, the Government – not the country. The argument has been put forward that the coup was in fact not planned, but happened as an afterthought to protests by junior officers to their conditions. However, ‘that’s completely rubbish; they planned it’, it has later been argued, ‘they planned it fully and executed it. I don’t know whether it was supposed to be on the day that it happened, but it was planned, and they were successful because of lapses in the security architecture of the day.’ The frustration with Momoh and ineffectiveness of the country’s security institutions was further compounded by a tribal dimension. Momoh was a Limba by a tribe, and he gathered advisers of his own tribe around him. In fact, true to tradition in Sierra Leone, he was, in the late 1980s and early 1990s building up Limba-dominated parallel decision-making structures. As a consequence of the fractures that were occurring, the army was unable to respond effectively to RUF incursions across the border from Liberia. The APC Government had deliberately used appalling conditions of service to undermine the capability of the armed forces in recognition of it being a political threat, something that, paradoxically, increased the likelihood of coups in general and led directly to an NPRC coup amongst others. The NPRC, however, failed to stop the further collapse of the armed forces. Most card bearers deserted the army, the majority of which remained in the Western Area and in Freetown. The rapid haemorrhaging of personnel led to a rapid recruitment campaign that led to a swelling of numbers to around 15,000 minimally trained armed personnel, who, despite their raw training, were then thrown in to battle with the RUF. With frequent political arguments amongst senior officers and no criteria recruitment or promotion for other ranks, the net result was often the recruitment of criminals, no operational control and deteriorating conditions of service. Inevitably, this led to increased lawlessness, looting and attacks on civilians, development of the ‘Sobel’ (‘soldiers by day rebels by night’) and the total collapse in discipline that finally destroyed any remnants of trust between the army and the civilian population.32 The infantry battalions had only platoon level support weapons, there was no artillery, no intelligence capability, no mobile capability and a complete lack of engineering or signals capability and the lack of logistical support effectively meant that they had to prey on the civilian population.

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The lack of a meaningful command structure effectively meant that during the latter days of the war centralised control of the military became very difficult. The MoD itself, as the apex institution had suffered from a history of neglect over a long period of time. From the antAPC Government coup in 1971 through to the NPRC coup in 1992 the Ministry was effectively neglected, and then post-1992 this was compounded by militarisation by an increasingly ineffectual military. This completely undermined any accountability within the armed forces and during the war itself it became increasingly obvious that the institutional structures supporting the collapsing military needed urgent attention. The MoD in particular required complete reconstruction. Following the expulsion of the AFRC/RUF from Freetown in January 1999, the UK’s Brigadier David Richards33 arrived at the head of the Operation Basilica Operational Liaison Team. Brigadier Richards initially came to Sierra Leone to assess what UK assistance was required and to establish relations with key players in the Government of Sierra Leone, including President Kabbah. It is a common, and frequently held, misconception that his main task in 1999 was to prepare for evacuation procedures of UK citizens in the country, unlike in 2000 when he returned to Sierra Leone.34 In this capacity, Brigadier Richards was instrumental in resurrecting the original concept of SILSEP, which he saw as a critical complement to the military reforms that he was supporting. Around £10 million was secured to reboot military reform activities in Sierra Leone, when it was on the brink of collapse in 1999. Mike Dent, one of the advisors who was part of the initial UK team sent to establish SILSEP describes the atmosphere in Freetown at the time as follows: On our arrival we found Freetown in complete disarray and still in a state of virtual war. The functions of state were practically collapsed, with ministries in confusion and officials lacking clear aims and direction. Most businesses and government offices had been looted and vandalized during the January 1999 RUF/AFRC attack and had not been repaired. Much of the city’s infrastructure had been destroyed or badly damaged. We were taken by car to the MoD in Freetown to meet the Deputy Minister of Defence. On the journey from our accommodation we passed through seven checkpoints manned by various groups of armed persons. From their dress it was difficult to ascertain if they were military, civilian or police. The rule of law and order appeared to have broken down completely.35 During this period, as part of Operation Basilica, the UK Government had agreed to provide some military training for new Sierra Leone Army (SLA)

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recruits and trainee officers and in the late spring of 1999, a six-man UK military training team began working with the SLA. The UK also provided some vehicles, weapons and other materiel that were handed over initially to ECOMOG and the SLA respectively, with the proviso that they would be passed on to the SLA when ECOMOG departed. Training was provided for a wide spectrum of personnel and positions, from physical training instructors to platoon commanders’ courses for young officers. The initial deployment of DfID’s SILSEP in June 1999 took place during a ceasefire. It consisted of three people. Two advisers, one military and one civilian, were tasked with designing and implementing the plan to restructure and reorganise the MoD. The third adviser was charged with advising on the restructuring of the office of the NSA. The MoD-based elements designated themselves as the MoD Advisory Team (MODAT). After undertaking fact-finding visits to government ministries, civil society organisations and the SLA, MODAT concluded that root-and-branch reform would be required to ensure the introduction of accountability, transparency and civilian control across the defence sector.36 It argued that the transformation of the MoD could not be undertaken in isolation and recommended to the Government of Sierra Leone and the UK that a complete review of the roles, functions and organisation of the armed forces be conducted. The proposal was accepted by the Government of Sierra Leone; MODAT was subsequently given the responsibility to conduct a mini-Strategic Defence Review. The signing of the Lomé Peace Accord in July 1999 formalised the ceasefire and brought the civil war to an end. There was widespread jubilation in Freetown. At this stage, the core MoD staff consisted of four employees and its office was little more than a ‘post box’. There were two executive officers whose main function was to sign cheques for the CDS, along with around 20 support staff, some of which were employed to support the CDF. CDS Khobe was supported by a small team of senior Nigerian officers and commanded the armed forces. There was no budgeting or financial planning in place and the system largely consisted of the CDS going to the President for money and being directed to the Ministry of Finance (MoF), where he was given cash. The armed forces themselves were in a terrible state, with no personnel records and little or no equipment. The full picture was not initially available to MODAT, as the CDS and support staff were reluctant to discuss any military issues with them. The Minister of Defence was the President, as constitutionally prescribed; the Deputy Minister of Defence,

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Captain (Retired) Sam Hinga Norman, who was also the leader of the CDF and therefore ‘double-hatted’ also occupied offices in the MoD. By October 1999 MODAT had completed the Strategic Defence Review; by December it had finished the project definition stage and initial design. This work produced a set of recommendations, including an outline Defence Policy with Defence Missions and Military Tasks, new defence structures and a detailed organisation for the MoD and armed forces. To implement these new structures, MODAT proposed the establishment of a BMATT to support planning and restructuring of the armed forces and MoD. It was also proposed that BMATT should fill some key staff and command appointments that were required to ensure effective implementation. As MODAT emphasised in October 1999: ‘[I]n our view, deployment of BMATT is key to the sustainable implementation of SILSEP reforms.’37 It was observed that to avoid a dependency culture, the period of BMATT support ‘should not be more than 3 years’.38 Even if this was true at the time, that dependency could only be avoided with a relatively short period of deployment; it is difficult to envisage three years as a realistic length of time given the amount of work to be done to reconstruct the entire army. And, indeed, it was a political suggestion by MODAT, advised by UK MoD and FCO supporters, that to propose anything of a longer duration would cause ‘flutters’ back in London. Nonetheless, it was the integration of hard security, public administration and civil service reform that broke new ground in terms of cooperation between DfID, FCO and the MoD. Funding for a conventional BMATT would come from FCO and MoD and, given that the BMATT was to not only advise and train, but also to implement the SILSEP-designed reforms, it effectively became engaged in institutionbuilding. In other words, the governance components of the reform process at the programme design level were joined up on the ground when the UK funding pools came into being institutionalising ties between the UK Government departments. As part of defence reform activities, a proposal initially suggested that the UK should provide the CDS (double-hatting as Commander BMATT). The idea was eventually discarded, despite its coming from President Kabbah, on the basis of his personal distrust of the armed forces. However, the Commander, a British officer, was to be designated ‘Military Adviser to the Government of Sierra Leone’. This was deemed important in terms of presentation, particularly from a UK perspective, and also operationally important from the point of view of building confidence and developing a sustainable defence establishment in-country.

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These initiatives were explicitly referred to in MODAT’s Future UK military commitment in support of DfID’s security sector reform programme (SILSEP) produced in November 1999.39 BMATT was to be viewed as the ‘logical extension of the SILSEP MoD Project,’ as the detailed implementation phase. DfID’s SILSEP Mission Statement at the time – agreed to by the Programme Steering Group was: To work with the Government, national and local institutions of Sierra Leone to design and implement a sustainable policy, institutional and legal framework for the creation of acceptable National Security and Defence Strategies enshrining the principles of civilian control, accountability and transparency.40 MODAT also produced a Military Reintegration Plan (MRP) to reintegrate ex-combatants from all former warring factions into the new armed forces. Due to manpower constraints and a desire to internationalise the solution, the UK decided to solicit support from other nations for what was to subsequently to become International MATT (IMATT). In January 2000, the UK MoD arranged a conference in London to brief Commonwealth and Overseas Defence Attachés and Advisers on the IMATT project. Attendees were invited to participate in the project by providing personnel to fill command and staff appointments.41 Apart from staffing concerns, the UK also concluded that the involvement of the ex-colonial power on its own was morally contestable, Commonwealth countries, including Canada and Australia, contributed staff, as did the United States. At the core, however, the formalisation of the internationalised MATT was, in the words of one of its commanders, ‘very much a “we are now stable, let’s think longer-term” initiative’. In December 1999 relations between the armed forces and the police took a downturn, as did relations between CCSSP and MODAT. The two sides were vying for the old Paramount Hotel in Freedom to house the new Sierra Leone MoD whilst CCSSP wanted to place the CID headquarters in the same building. Adding to this tension was that, since January 1999, following the destruction of the headquarters of both the CID and the SSD, the two police organisations had been housed at the Paramount due to lack of viable alternatives.42 In the end the MoD won the argument and was allocated the building, which was then just a shell and had to be completely refurbished.43 There is no doubt that significant progress was made within the MoD at this time. In June 1999 Government forces were linked to the executive effectively by a post box. Two years later civilian staff had

68 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

been trained to take up key positions in the Ministry. By 2001 the MoD was regarded as leading the way in public service reform, setting standards and providing a role model for other ministries. In addition, whilst this was happening conflict had again broken out and then intensified during 2000. Immediate decisions were again needed that overtook some of the reforms aimed to achieve national planning, ownership and long-term sustainability. The proposals for the restructuring of the MoD HQ and armed forces were submitted to government and subsequently endorsed by President Kabbah in March 2000. The endorsement immediately preceded a visit from the UK Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, who had been a key player in the establishment of the UK’s Security Sector Reform Policy and SILSEP. However, funding for restructuring became a potential ‘show-stopper’. It was clear from the outset that the expectations of the Sierra Leone government, civil servants and military were far in excess of the funding available for the SILSEP restructuring process. Additional funds were eventually made available by DfID for the refurbishment of the old Paramount Hotel building, but only after personal appeals by MODAT directly to Ms Short. Restructuring was planned to take place over a 2- to 3-year period. First was refurbishment of the new MoD, at the Paramount Hotel. This was to be followed by the establishment of the Joint Support Command (JSC) and the Joint Force Command (JFC), replacing the Defence Headquarters. Concurrently, it was planned that all SLA soldiers, together with CDF and RUF ex-combatants, were to have joined the DDR programme and possibly entered into the MRP. Once the MRP process had been completed, personnel selected for the new RSLAF would have been trained and inducted into the Armed Forces. It was anticipated at the time that this process would be undertaken in a benign environment and that there would be no pressure of time on the selection, training of individuals and implementation of unit establishments. The issue of funding and in particular equipping the new RSLAF was anticipated to be well within the capability of the Government of Sierra Leone to manage.44 Involvement with the armed forces grew quickly from this initial position and was further consolidated with UK military intervention in May 2000. In mid-April, the RUF progressively started taking UN detachments hostage and seizing their vehicles and weapons. In late April of that year, exploiting ECOMOG’s (effectively Nigeria’s) departure and UNAMSIL’s unwillingness to confront the RUF, rebels took 500 hostages at Makeni and started advancing on two axes, one towards Freetown, one towards Lunghi. By early May, the RUF was reportedly in the area to the east of Waterloo, some 40 miles from Freetown.

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 69

Operation Palliser The UK military intervention became designated as Operation Palliser. As David Richards recalled at the time: On Thursday 4 May 2000, I was looking forward to flying to an exercise in Ghana the next day, when I learnt that the RUF in Sierra Leone was once more on the offensive. ECOMOG, the Nigeriandominated regional force, had left Sierra Leone a few weeks earlier. UN forces there – UNAMSIL – were under considerable pressure, with hundreds of troops detained by the RUF. The SLA was very weak, having mostly disarmed and begun disbandment under the terms of the Lomé Peace Accord. As the situation deteriorated, I found myself bound for Sierra Leone within 24 hours, on orders to find out what was happening and to prepare to conduct a noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO), should it be necessary. […] What started as a NEO developed into something that had all the characteristics of a small- to medium-scale war-fighting operation. Whilst we came under fire on only a few occasions, over the following six weeks we found ourselves de facto closely involved with the direction of a campaign at the operational level.45 These developments were not directed by London – in fact orders had been to do an evacuation exercise and get out quickly. Indicative for a highly political and tense context such as Sierra Leone at the time, it was individuals on the ground that transformed the rules of engagement and gained support of political leaders back in London, ‘cutting out all the layers in between’.46 Support came from the highest level of Government, including Number 10, the Foreign Office, and DfID. This rather ad hoc twin-track operation (support to the UN on the one hand and assistance to the Government of Sierra Leone and its loyal armed groupings on the other) rapidly supplanted the evacuation exercise and soon became official UK strategy.47 David Richards added later that: On Saturday 6 May, we requested that a Special Forces detachment and the Lead Company of the Spearhead Land Element (SLE) be deployed immediately. Whilst the lead elements were en route the following day, there was a real danger that, in addition to the RUF advance, an incident in Freetown between the factions could have triggered a spiralling level of violence ending in a coup. Accordingly,

70 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

I went to great lengths to meet the faction leaders and attempt to bring them together, with a view to maintaining their support for the SL Government and boosting their confidence in the ability of UNAMSIL to defend Freetown. To support this, we dispatched some UK liaison officers (LOs) to advise the UN troops around Hastings and Waterloo to adopt a more defensive posture. Meanwhile, the Lead Company quickly helped secure those areas that we assessed to be vital ground for any NEO: Lunghi airfield and the Aberdeen Peninsula. Simultaneously, the Operational Liaison and Reconnaissance Team (OLRT) became a Joint Task Force Headquarters (JTFHQ) (Fwd), and I was appointed Joint Task Force Commander (JTFC).48 In the context of genuine fears that the Government of Sierra Leone as well as UNAMSIL would collapse, UK Forces coordinated and sustained the efforts of disparate groupings of loyal Sierra Leoneans. This group of Government Forces included the SLA and what came to be known as the ‘Unholy Alliance’, which began to form after the arrival of UK troops in May 2000 in response to a call to arms by [Johnny Paul] Koroma. Scaled-down and disarmed under the Lomé Accord, the SLA numbered 2000–3000 personnel with a further 3000 being trained at that time by a UK Short Term Training Team (STTT) as part of Operation Basilica. The force was re-organised into three brigades, each including three battalions. The so-called ‘Unholy Alliance’ consisted of a loose coalition of SLA, ex-SLA, AFRC and CDF combatants, but also elements of the West Side Boys, a group of ex-combatants and criminals operating near Freetown.49 Together, these different force units were directed by a Government Joint Force Operations and Support Committees with representation from the factions and chaired by British officers.50 Unholy they may have been but, guided as they were at every level by British officers and Non-commissioned Officers (NCOs), over the next few weeks they succeeded in securing much of the inland road route between Freetown and Lunghi, relieving the military and, of course, political pressure on Freetown and its beleaguered government. This twin-track operation rapidly supplanted the NEO and soon became official Her Majesty’s Government – UK (HMG-UK) strategy.51 By late May, events had taken a turn for the better: the last of the RUF’s detainees was in the process of being released; and Government Forces were not only poised to take Lunsar, they were raiding RUF Lines of Communication in the East and pushing towards Mange. Sankoh was

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 71

isolated in custody, and – in his absence – Liberia’s President Taylor was trying to exert increasing political influence over the RUF. Militarily, the RUF was on the back foot, with numerous reports of low morale and desertion and an ever-widening split between the Eastern and Northern Commands. By mid-June 2000, the security situation had been sufficiently stabilised to allow Operation Palliser to be terminated. Following visits by the UK CDS and the Foreign Secretary, the UK agreed to provide additional military support in the form of financial and training assistance to the SLA. The UK agreed to commit a total of £21.27 million to reequip the SLA and deployed a UK infantry battalion to implement a retraining programme that became known as the STTT package.52 The decline in the security situation that led to robust international engagement in security reform was critical in reinforcing the idea that development could not be possible in Sierra Leone without transformation of Sierra Leone’s security system. As one Senior DfID Adviser noted: ‘That’s how it started…DfID’s involvement in security sector reform’.53 Along similar lines, as recalled by Ms Short: Some people say that Britain had a war there and was victorious, this is all false. What happened was: there is some sort of deal amongst European countries about who will do evacuations in crises. And it seems to be that the former colonial power often takes the lead for all Europeans in terms of emergency responsibility. Obviously, in Sierra Leone it would be Britain. So when the British troops went in, it was to evacuate Europeans. That’s how it was triggered.54 IMATT deployment had started in June 2000 as part of the UK’s response to the re-emergence of the RUF and the need to deliver training and staff support to the SLA, which at that stage was in a state of virtual collapse. By early 2001, 65 personnel staffed IMATT, operating in parallel with STTTs and, as planned, filling key appointments in the MoD and command appointments in the armed forces. One of the drawbacks of the rapid deployment of IMATT, effectively an emergency response, was that many of the personnel were shortterm assignees. Some had completed six-month tours, some even less. This led to a lack of continuity and ‘short-termism’, where staff wanted to complete a task and see results rapidly, a circumstance which has characterised perceptions of some of IMATT’s work in Sierra Leone. In addition, at this stage, because not all IMATT posts were filled, there was also a lack of oversight, which resulted in the implementation of

72 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

only partial solutions for some difficult issues. Kellie Conteh, a leading figure in Sierra Leone’s security system transformation process and head of the Sierra Leonean ONS throughout the period states: Sometimes when officers are appointed it’s there first time ever out of the UK, and they do not understand the culture. There are things that go slowly, that’s how they see it, but they need to understand why things are going slowly. The fact that they didn’t understand the ‘why’ led to a lot of things in the MoD that were unacceptable. There was a lot of wasted time and effort in the two first years of SILSEP. UK officers who were supposed to be advisers took up command roles. I don’t know how the transfer of knowledge (from advisers to the advised) could have been done in the first years. Consultants were shooting themselves in the foot, giving different names to structures that previous consultants had already set up. Quite a number of consultants wanted to design the wheel from scratch. The police had Sierra Leonean officers encouraged by the IGP and CCSSP to start changing things themselves. In the army and the MoD they categorized all above Lieutenant Colonel as bad, and below as right. I saw clearly that senior officers were pushed aside; that didn’t go down well.55 By early October 2000 the security situation was deteriorating again. The RUF remained in control of over half the country and were strengthening their grip on key areas, including Makeni and the diamondiferous areas needed to finance their operations. They showed no sign of returning to negotiations, and indeed were expanding their operations into Guinea. President Charles Taylor continued to actively support the RUF and seemed impervious to ill-coordinated attempts by the international community to bring him into line. The UK decided to bolster IMATT once again with the JFHQ from Northwood charged with developing a coherent plan that would ensure the RUF’s defeat while protecting and building on the MODAT’s vision of a long-term solution that would ensure stability for the future. The JFHQ returned to Freetown in mid-October; shortly thereafter the Commander IMATT departed and his function was subsumed by the recently-arrived JTFC. The primary purpose was to bring the RUF back to the negotiating table, having been convinced of the ‘inevitability of their defeat’. Together with UNAMSIL, the mission proved successful and RUF restarted talks in Abuja. A new agreement was signed in November.

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 73

UNAMSIL and UK support The emerging role of the UN in Sierra Leone was encouraged and supported by the UK and was based on UN Security Council Resolution 1270, adopted on 22 October 1999, established United UNAMSIL to oversee implementation of the Lomé Peace Agreement signed in July 1999, and relieve ECOMOG, deployed since 1997. One of the senior British commanders deployed at the time, Brigadier Barry Le Grys, observed: ‘The troubles experienced by the ECOWAS force were passed onto the UN, whose blue helmet troops came under attack on the official handover day […]. With the UN Mission in severe jeopardy, UK support became vital.’56 As RUF hostilities came to an end in 2000–2001, UNAMSIL was regaining confidence, rebalancing and building strength after earlier, almost catastrophic setbacks. A large part of the country remained out of the Government’s control, which hampered UNAMSIL access and Makeni, Kabala and Koidu were all under the control of RUF. The UN accepted a UK offer of seven military officers to serve with the UN Force HQ in Freetown. Their primary task was to give UNAMSIL planning capability that hitherto had been lacking. Their secondary task was to ensure that coordination with the UK Joint Task Force (JTF) was seamless. The result of this infusion was a far better collaborative effort to roll out security across the country. The ties between UNAMSIL’s provision of wider ‘area’ security and support, the UK-led SLA and the SLP were greatly strengthened. The most significant stride forward for UNAMSIL was the implementation of a plan to put a coherent, one-nation combined arms brigade into the east of the country, centred on Koidu. After a tremendous diplomatic effort involving Freetown, New York, Washington, London and Islamabad, Pakistan provided the required brigade.57 Subsequently, the deployment of UK’s JTF to provide support to UNAMSIL while they were in the process of stabilising took place. In parallel, the UK provided military and operational planning and logistical support to the SLA.58 The psychological effect on the RUF of a UK-sponsored SLA advancing from the west and a robust UN brigade in the heart of their revenue source was hugely positive. Violent confrontation was no longer an option for the RUF.59 Eventually, the presence of UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone with its 17,000 peacekeepers helped provide time and space to begin reconstructing the security forces and build up governance structures. The major logistical task and tactical challenge involved deploying what at the time

74 Reconstructing Security after Conflict

was the biggest ever UN peacekeeping mission. This meant that UNAMSIL had no interest in reforming or building the internal security institutions. In sum, ‘the UN was looking inwards; it wasn’t until 2001 that it started to look out, and when it did, it was very much with a focus on the 2002 elections’.60

Parallel developments within the MoD By this time, the process of establishing a functioning MoD, which had begun in late 1999, was well underway. In order to ensure transparency and civilian oversight of the armed forces, a modified basic UK MoD organisational structure, designed by MODAT, was used as a template. New management practices based on UK/Western models, but reflecting local requirements, were introduced. This model was subsequently amended in late 2000 and early 2001 by new members of IMATT from UK who represented ‘the latest Western thinking’.61 Throughout 2001, reviews of the roles and deployment of the armed forces were undertaken. It was decided that there was a need to increase the size of the proposed future RSLAF to deal with additional security tasks and to apply lessons learnt from recent and ongoing operations. These decisions were directly linked to the May 2000 events. With the implementation of the military reintegration plan, the RSLAF was anticipated to expand in size to just under 15,000 military personnel. Whilst there were a number of control mechanisms that could be implemented, such as the discharge of unfit and over-age personnel, there was a need to manage these in a sensitive manner. It was planned that by 2005 RSLAF, through the imposition of retirements and other initiatives, would have reduced to around 10,600 personnel. At the time this was perceived to be the optimum size for the Sierra Leone armed forces.62 The construction of the MoD HQ building and implementation of its military and civilian organisation was led by UK military advisers who were members of the IMATT. IMATT, in turn, had been mobilised quickly as a result of the return to hostilities in May 2000. Some of the officers coming in were not very mindful of cultural issues or the need for sustainability and national ownership. As one British Officer on the ground, serving in Sierra Leone during 2003, stated later: You design an MoD on the basis that you’ve got fifty British officers running it, and then the next week there is going to be four British officers. And you say: what? They haven’t got the capacity for that? And arguably, do they need that? Do they need something as com-

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 75

plicated as that? So you have to be careful not to take the blueprint that was written in London, change the date and time and reproduce the model. You’ve actually got to design the model for what they require, and we had an MoD where we made exactly that mistake.63 The complexity of the context in which these operations were taking place was daunting. First, there were pressures of operational expediency, as the war was ongoing. Second, at the time, there was a perceived need to put in place appropriate levels of civilian oversight as quickly as possible. Third, corruption, especially in the procurement area, was a major concern. In addition to these immediate concerns, there were also organisational issues between MODAT and IMATT. The UK civil advisers working in the MoD were not part of IMATT; they were reporting directly to DfID and living in separate, private accommodation. While, at an informal level, some mixed socially, some did not. This personal and professional distance resulted in poor coordination and communication. During restructuring of the MoD and RSLAF and their operational and management processes, there were occasional clashes with other branches of government and within the Sierra Leone public services. Isolating one Ministry and developing it along specific lines with a lead by external advisers meant that MoD reforms, strictly speaking, were not operating within the regulations, rules and constraints of Sierra Leone public service. Whilst Sierra Leonean counterparts would frequently accept that IMATT procedures were more efficient, they also felt that many changes were introduced without proper consultation. This was undoubtedly necessary in the emergency of 2000. However, once the security situation had been stabilised and peacebuilding efforts began to overtake fire-fighting by the end of 2001, this became more of a concern to Sierra Leonean civil servants and military staff in the MoD and to overall sustainability and ownership of the process. At the same time, recruiting and sustaining the presence of UK civilian advisers to the MoD proved to be extremely difficult, effectively leaving armed forces reform under an IMATT lead. The formation of the new MoD was therefore being driven by the military through the placement of IMATT officers in key staff appointments. Coupled with the need for IMATT officers in key operational command positions within the armed forces, this created an ‘informal’ command structure from IMATT officers, through Commander IMATT and directly to the President, as his designated military adviser. There is no question that such a structure helped to speed up decision-making at critical times, but it also had the effect of undermining the overall project purpose

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through bypassing the formal chain of command and the MoD civilian staff. This circumstance was fortified by the fact that there was lack of representation of armed forces issues at the ministerial and cabinet level. Over the entire period of this study, but addressed by the APC Government elected in August 2007, the President was also the Minister of Defence and there was no additional defence representation at cabinet level or in the National Security Council Coordinating Group (NSCCG) by his deputy. Consequently, senior MoD staff lacked direct leadership and representation at the top level. In times of emergency or civil war, the role of the President as Minister of Defence, had major advantages. In peacetime, it was becoming increasingly clear that the lack of separation of these two positions was weakened the democratic process in Sierra Leone broke links between the armed forces and civilian oversight at a strategic level. It was clear, however, that continued fear of a coup at the highest executive level stalled the hand-over of control of the armed forces to a separate minister of defence. From June 2000 to early 2001, the substantial deployment of international military personnel in Sierra Leone led to an imbalance in power between Defence Headquarters and the MoD, with the IMATTsupported Defence Headquarters carrying out tasks that fell under the MoD’s remit. Negotiations in early 2000 over a pay rise for soldiers to bring them to police and civil service salary levels, for example, took place between the MoF and Defence Headquarters, rather than the MoD. Because the appropriate channels were not used, this caused tension with the police and civil service, who felt that the military had ignored appropriate procedures and any general policy of restraint on pay increases. By early 2001, there was a perception amongst some civil servants that this imbalance had recreated conditions of the 1980s and early 1990s, when pay and other financial management issues were subject to private deals between the Force Commander and the MoF or the President. Equally, the Director of Estates was only peripherally involved in the refurbishment of the Paramount Hotel and the Director of Procurement was excluded from purchases of uniforms and equipment. The comparatively entrenched tradition of the military dealing directly with the President and with the MoF over their budgetary and off-budgetary financial needs was taking considerable time to overcome.64 Virtually everywhere across the public service (not just in Sierra Leone) the pay of public servants is a key source of friction. Despite the new

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pay structures devised in 1998, by 2001, Director-level personnel earned Le160,000 (around $80 per month). This was the same salary as an officer cadet after the recent military pay rises. Understandably, this discrepancy between civilian and military staff salaries caused significant tension between the civilian and military MoD staff and remains a concern. Whilst salary increases in isolation from the rest of the civil service were not seen as helpful, there were attempts made to recompense staff within the MoD in different ways, particularly through refurbishment of the State House and improvements in conditions of service.65

The Civil Defence Force As important as the Government forces at the time were the nonregular forces, the CDF. This was a combat group comprising a mix of civilian hunter groups dedicated to protecting their communities from enemy attacks. Its founder and leader, Sam Hinga Norman, was also the Deputy Minister of Defence from 1998–2002, which undoubtedly underlined the importance of the CDF. Although no official numbers existed, the Government estimated their complement at around 50,000 combatants, though they were only lightly armed, had limited logistical support, and did not fit into one organisational framework. Their command structure, based in Freetown, was headed by the CDF Central Coordinating Committee, chaired by the Vice-President and including directors for major functions such as logistics, communications and public relations. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were considerable concerns expressed about the CDF and their potentially destabilising role. Equally strong was a political recognition of the importance of CDF in supporting the Government and also of their crucial role in fighting the RUF.66 While Sam Hinga Norman was Deputy Minister of Defence at the time, recognition of the CDF’s pivotal role cut across the whole political spectrum of Sierra Leone was acknowledged by the Government. In the Government of Sierra Leone’s National Security Policy – Proposals and Recommendations, there was serious consideration of the establishment of a reserve force that should fall ‘within the holistic approach of the security sector and […] complement the requirements of the fulltime units of both the Armed Forces, the Police and Civil Authority generally.’67 The document was produced about the same time as MODAT’s proposals for restructuring the MoD and the armed forces. The idea was for a Territorial Defence Force (TDF) to constitute a reserve force (not unlike the UK’s Territorial Army). Its mission would be in the spirit of

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the CDF’s role during the conflict constituting a civil militia and contribute to local area security for villages and chiefdoms. Different scenarios were envisioned, including TDF provision of first-level response, and, with their local knowledge, intelligence and support, assistance to the armed forces. In times of crisis, the civil militia was viewed as potentially supporting the regular armed forces in territorial defence. In 1999 and early 2000, an 8,500 person armed force was recommended and the additional TDF option which was seen as relatively cost-free. The issue, however, became politicised with the question of which Ministry – defence or interior – the CDF would be responsible to developing into a major obstacle. As the MRP gathered momentum, with no budget for the existing RSLMF forces and the resumption of hostilities, the idea of the TDF faltered. During the hostilities of 2000, the CDF were integrated under full military command through an interim command structure. When fighting stopped and the DDR process was initiated, the CDF were officially recognised as combatants, technically alongside RUF fighters. Those who chose to do so could apply to join the emerging armed forces through the MRP. Following this, the idea of a TDF was effectively mothballed due to lack of funding and other, more pressing, considerations such as accommodation and equipment for the regular army. No formal decision was ever made, but the reality in late 2001 was that the resources available simply did not allow for a TDF to be formed and the CDF eventually melted away.68

Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration In Abuja in early May 2001, an agreement was finally reached to implement the accord of November 2000. At the time of the signing of ‘Abuja 2’, as it became known, the RUF were continuing to be resupplied by Liberia and actively involved in offensive operations in Guinea with the aim of destabilising the government of President Lansana Conte. The Guinean Armed Forces (GAF) undertook an aggressive defence of Guinea’s territory in the areas to the north of Kambia and to the east of Kailahun, using newly acquired Mi-24 helicopter gunships and indirect fire weapons, including artillery. The RUF paid dearly for its actions and, following a GAF offensive into Sierra Leone, the RUF were subsequently forced to retreat back into Kambia where they came under pressure from Government Forces. As already noted, this forced the RUF to review their position and to agree to observe the terms of the ceasefire and start instructing their combatants to disarm through the DDR

Security and Sierra Leone Up Until the End of the Conflict 79

Programme. At the same time members of the CDF joined the DDR process. In late 2001, the DDR process throughout Sierra Leone was, if not finalised, then assessed to be making good progress, particularly regarding disarmament and demobilisation. The National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (NCDDR) was supported by a CHAD Operations team that established an effective registration system, oversaw the payment of reinsertion benefits and performed technical aspects of the process. By November 2001, 35,700 ex-combatants had been disarmed; 24,800 of these were discharged and nearly 24,000 paid reinsertion benefits. Reintegration was the weak link of the DDR process, primarily because of lack of private sector income-generating opportunities for excombatants. But reintegration also rankled the civilian population, which had suffered at the hands of these ex-combatants and was now expected to welcome them back into their communities. It also suffered from a lack of suitable implementing partners and, due to institutional issues, the inability of the NCDDR to implement reintegration proposals. A delayed European Community (EC) contribution through the Multi-Donor Trust Fund69 also led to further delays. Potential threats that are still raised as universal weaknesses of DDR processes were identified early on in Sierra Leone by NCDDR, including the potential for tension in the future if the large pool of unoccupied youth and ex-combatants in the country reacts violently to disappointments or the lack of reintegration, including education and employment opportunities. At the same time, political campaigning proved divisive in processes of reconciliation and the absence of substantial and sustained foreign investment to kick-start the economy in Sierra Leone and consolidate the benefits of reintegration programmes into progress and ultimately, sustainable economic development, created a large pool of unemployed former combatants. Whilst these points were all identified in the early 2000s, they continue to be important issues in some parts of the country today, reaching into broader issues of sustainable economic development.

The military reintegration programme The Lomé Peace Accord of July 1999 required a plan for the integration of all ex-combatant groups, including the Armed Forces of Sierra Leone (AFRSL), into a single military force for Sierra Leone. The MRP was originally produced by MODAT in April 2000 in response to a formal

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request from the Government of Sierra Leone and the NCDDR to conform to this agreement. However, the MRP sparked controversy. In 2000, a collaboration between the Sierra Leonean NGO Campaign for Good Governance, the SLP, the Ministry of Defence, and the Office of National Security Advisor (ONS was not yet established at the time) provided the opportunity for civil society to engage in discussions on how best to take the MRP forward. An obvious public concern was raised around the implication of reintegrating ex-combatants into the military and the future role of the CDFs who, like the army, were accused of committing human rights abuses during the war.70 The new cease-fire, signed in May 2001, revitalised the DDR programme. Planning for the implementation of the previously endorsed MRP, which had been held in abeyance since April 2000, became a high priority. The MRP was reviewed, amended, endorsed and formally initiated in early June 2001 with the opening of the Temporary Holding Centre (THC) at Kabatha Junction. The formal MRP selection process started at the newly established Personnel Screening Centre (PSC) at Lunghi in mid-June. The first of the successful ex-combatants arrived at the Holding and Basic Training Centre (HBTC), which had been built by SLA Engineers, at Mape on a few days later. The reintegration plan itself was carried out in six phases, listed below: • Stage 1 – Disarmament and demobilisation: a country-wide process, recommenced in Kambia and Port Loko in May 2001 and closed in Pujehun, Kenema and Kailahun in January 2002. At this stage all excombatants were briefed on the military reintegration programme as part of the pre-discharge orientation process. Despite wide publicity, many ex-combatants missed the deadline to disarm in their own region. • Stage 2 – Potential recruit decision: temporary holding camps opened in June 2001 and closed in March 2002. Potential recruits were brought into a military environment. They were placed in syndicates of 30 to undergo drills and formal screening based on their medical and marital status and age. Background checks were also conducted by both SLP and RSLAF intelligence agencies. • Stage 3 – Individual assessment: a personnel selection centre opened at Lunghi in early June 2001; the final Selection Tribunal was held in early March 2002. Potential recruits completed a full medical to existing RSLAF entry standards, plus physical, education and military experience tests. At culmination of the personnel selection centre all potential recruits attended a selection tribunal. This

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was normally chaired by a UNAMSIL Colonel and included RUF and CDF liaison officers employed by NCDDR. IMATT officers provided the secretariat, acted as impartial observers and indeed Chairman on several occasions. Successful applicants were offered entry to RSLAF. • Stage 4 – Holding and basic training group: opened in mid-June 2001 and closed in March 2002. Recruits were put in platoons. Now formally soldiers and paid as such, they were subjected to military discipline and undertook basic military training. • Stage 5 – Integrated bridging training: the first ex-combatant recruits started training in late July 2001; and the last passed training in mid-May 2002. Recruits were now issued with uniform, weapons and equipment for the first time. A subsequent 9-week programme delivered basic infantry training within a platoon framework. • Stage 6 – Posting to first RSLAF unit: trained soldiers joined units as individual reinforcements, posted as manning priorities dictated. Subject to satisfactory performance and recommendation in their first report at the 6-month point, their temporary rank was substantiated. The military reintegration plan aimed to implement an RSLAF recruit selection process from ex-combatant groups. It was to provide a credible alternative to the civilian reintegration plan and in the process establish apolitical professional armed forces. It was assumed that a maximum of 3000 ex-combatants from RUF, CDF and AFRC would enter the RSLAF via the programme. A total of 2091 ex-combatants had graduated from the IMATT-supported Armed Forces Training Centre in May 2002 as the last basic intake. A commissioning parade for platoon commanders in

Table 3.2

Headline Statistics of the Military Reintegration Programme

Number entering the military reintegration programme (processed by temporary holding camps and personal selection centres)

2982

Overall pass rate at personal selection centres (varied from 55% to 90%)

80%

Numbers starting formal military training

2385

Overall RUF/CDF ratio joining RSLAF (varied from 51:49 to 79:22)

65:35

Total passing basic training

2349

Overall pass rate in training

98%

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August brought the programme to a close with a total of 2600 trained. Headline statistics for the MRP are provided in Table 3.2. Due to the long-term developmental implications of reintegration into civilian life, entering the new armed force of Sierra Leone became one of the most viable reintegration opportunities, not least because it proved to be relatively successful. It provided one meaningful form of vocational training for those disarmed and demobilised who wanted to pursue a military career. Furthermore, while numbers were fairly modest, the programme was significant as it lent credence to the notion of the future RSLAF as an army of reconciliation. A number of concerns were raised about the rigorousness of the screening of candidates, including their human rights record, psychological suitability to hold arms and willingness to abide by the concept of civilian management and oversight of the armed forces. Screening processes appeared to focus primarily on physical health and criminal record. It should be noted here that the process was taking place in a framework of generally very few records existing at all, let alone dating from period of the war. Given that down-sizing of the armed forces was such a key issue, there were concerns about entrants to the programme only being offered one-year contracts with little prospect of alternative employment. Because there was no detailed long-term strategy in place setting out the overall objectives for the security system transformation process, including in the MRP, there was no plan for the end goal of a down-sizing exercise either. In the early 2000s, no one was willing to make the politically sensitive decision of a complete overhaul of the armed forces, not least IMATT, which held an executive mandate during this period. While making this decision certainly did not become easier later on, it remains an issue which Sierra Leone needs to address, including out of affordability concerns. It has been said that the number of RUF, AFRC and CDF combatants integrated into RSLAF was small and thus insignificant. Yet, as noted above, the symbolic value of the Military Reintegration Programme was critical. All soldiers were mixed up in their various units and subunits; thus, no elements of the RSLAF that ended up exclusively ‘ex-SLA’, ‘ex-RUF’ or ‘ex-CDF’.

The Office of National Security (ONS) and the Central Intelligence and Security Unit (CISU) The key feature of the cluster of reform measures that eventually became known as SSR, or security system transformation in Sierra Leone was that

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reforms were implemented during a conflict. In the case of ONS and CISU, the challenge also included the building of new institutions. A visitor noted, plainly, after a visit in September 1999: ‘Sierra Leone does not currently have a Security or Intelligence Service. Responsibility for security (counter-espionage, counter-terrorism and counter-subversion), as well as for public order, rests with the SB of the Sierra Leone Police Service.’71 At this point in time, however, the information gathered focused mostly on monitoring opposition political parties, student organisations and trade unions. Nonetheless, the demands from Sierra Leone’s intelligence services and national security coordination organisation were immediate. There was an urgent need for intelligence to be made available, assessments to be made and policy advice to be submitted. The intelligence community, such as it was, was therefore going to have to transform itself whilst also providing intelligence material to inform policy and actions – which it did. Therefore, despite extremely trying circumstances, progress was made during 1999–2000 in establishing a number of key platforms on which later success was built. SILSEP began to contribute towards a functioning National Security Council (NSC), the outline of a National Security Act and the drafting of a National Security Policy. In 2000 a draft Sierra Leone National Security Policy Paper was circulated. The process of producing this document was initiated in 1997 and, at that time, it was seen as a strong statement that the Government is serious about planning for the future in this area. Notably there was limited, if any buy-in from the Defence Headquarters.72 The aim of the National Security Policy Paper – as with the future Security Sector Review – was to establish a basis for a National Security Policy that would provide an overarching framework within which more detailed policy papers relating to the main security agencies, including military, police and intelligence services, could fit. There was also an expectation, which was never realised, that the National Security Policy would lead to a White Paper on National Security, outlining government policy and any legislation necessary to support it. The paper itself defines security and sets the context for national security policy development. It considers key security issues, including geographical, political and economic factors, historical causes of instability, including previous security lapses, and the security forces and agencies available to the Government of Sierra. It then considers internal and external threats to national security, leading to a set of policy recommendations.

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The paper takes a holistic approach to security, covering ‘traditional’ security issues such as the integrity of the state and sovereignty. It also guarantees of democratic rights and freedom of the civilian population from threats to persons and property. In addition, it states a commitment to freedom from war, poverty and social injustice. Security was viewed as integral to wider governance issues; inclusion of other government agencies was seen as key to this comprehensive security strategy. In practice, this was difficult to realise, partly because of the different pace of reform undertaken by different Ministries and because the overarching controlling Committee, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), did not include several Ministries, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as permanent members. In operations, CISU and other intelligence agencies supported the defeat of the RUF and the establishment of security in post-conflict Sierra Leone. CISU, despite its small size, was able to make a substantial contribution to understanding the intentions and capacities of RUF leadership and to have an impact on the will of that leadership to maintain armed conflict. CISU and its partners were also able to contribute to an understanding and tracking of the other hostile and destabilising forces in Sierra Leone as well as in neighbouring countries. This intelligence was shared with Sierra Leone’s allies and considered to be of good value.73 Also of considerable value was the new ability of the reformed security sector to evaluate outside sources of information for the Government, in particular, for the Office of the President. CISU was now able to clearly evaluate external sources as peddling disinformation or rumour, and communicate this clearly to the relevant authorities. In early 2001, there were officially three intelligence collecting agencies: SLP’s SB; the Force Intelligence and Security Unit (FISU) and CISU, formerly known as the National Intelligence Unit. Of these, CISU was the newest creation and existed largely only on paper. (In addition, in 1999–2000, an intelligence branch of the CDF existed). The first meetings of the JIC in 2001 indicated that it would be necessary to carry out radical restructuring of all three collecting agencies in order to achieve a workable level of intelligence production, which in turn would be able to provide the JIC with a minimum of reliable and actionable intelligence. Such a process had already begun in FISU under the guidance of British Army Intelligence Corps advisors, but was not part of a wider strategy for restructuring and integrating Sierra Leone’s intelligence machinery. This meant that a new and substantial task had already emerged, but it was equally clear that there was no point in building

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capacity in the JIC and a Joint Assessment Centre if there was no usable intelligence to action. This immediately caused problems for programme management, since the original timetable and resource allocation had not foreseen the need to develop intelligence collection capacity. Moreover, DfID did not believe that developing such ‘operational’ capacity was part of its charter. In the event, it was agreed that the British intelligence community would support the development of operational capability in parallel with SILSEP by developing analytical ‘non-operational’ capacities. Early thinking on state security had been focused around a centralised system with power concentrated in the Office of the President that covered everything from military intelligence to organised crime.74 The SLP would lose its SB and the military its intelligence unit. However, the President dismissed this idea in favour of the creation of a central coordinating mechanism – later to become the ONS – that responded to the notion that ‘there were elementary things that were missing’ in terms of intelligence coordination.75 As the first, and still serving, National Security Coordinator recalled about this period: …we started from a clean slate, I had a view on coordinating the security sector. Basically, I was recommending a structure at the national level, coordinating the security sector. [Previously, the] military were given political power, there was no leadership from the political class. I was finally, with ONS, given a chance to put coordination in place.76 The ONS, a state security agency, was seen as having the benefit of being a ‘new start’. It would be a government institution which, due to the new selection process and security vetting of recruits, had a good chance of maintaining standards of incorrupt and apolitical behaviour in its staff. Indeed, it was regarded as having the potential to become a flagship model for other government and public sector departments. Certainly, it represented an improvement on previous intelligence organisations and coordination of responses by the security sector. Prior to the rebel attacks on Freetown in January 1999, information on the incursions had been available to the executive, but without an effective system of tasking, coordination, analysis and assessment. It was not ‘intelligence’ and it failed to influence the actions of policymakers. There had been many reports, often rumours, but they were not processed and policy-makers therefore had no means of deciding

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between useful information and gossip, just as had been the case when rebel attacks on Sierra Leone began in the early 1990s. The main concern identified, which remains valid to this date, was whether building up an efficient ONS could tempt the executive (or opposition leaders) to put pressure on the organisation to use confidential information to discredit political opponents. However, ONS has, since its establishment, been able to guard against political interference into its affairs, largely due to the robustness and persuasiveness of the personalities guiding the organisation. Poor intelligence systems had early on in SILSEP led to the formal creation of a JIC that met weekly and included representatives of the existing intelligence agencies and appropriate Ministries; it was chaired by the National Security Coordinator. The breakdown of the security forces during the war was similar to that of the rest of the public service and, like the military, many intelligence operatives had become politicised and, as noted above, carried out by the SLP’s SB. Individual officers were poorly trained and resourced and the quality of gathering, coordinating, collating and managing intelligence suffered as a consequence. In 1999–2000, their focus was primarily on opposition political parties, student organisations and trade unions on behalf of Government. Most intelligence consisted of little more than gossip; there was virtually no meaningful intelligence on key security threats, including criminal activity and the RUF. In addition, several intelligence agencies were frequently involved in parallel intelligence gathering with virtually no coordination of their activities. Because there was no SSR blueprint in 2001, a National Security Architecture and the ONS were established before any formal strategy or supporting legislation was produced. In fact, the legislation was first developed in embryonic form to incorporate the key elements of limitations, transparency, accountability, oversight and responsibilities and then developed further in response to events on the ground. An example of this was the late inclusion of paragraphs relating to the control and licensing of private security companies in drafts of the National Intelligence and Security Act. In particular, the ONS began a programme of engagement with key stakeholders with the aim of identifying answers to critical questions, including definitions or perceptions of the nature of the ‘security sector’, but also consideration of which components should be incorporated into it. From these initial discussions it became clear that there was the need for a central coordinating function of Sierra Leone’s system of security actors. The establishment of the ONS also drove the

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development of a national security policy and a national security doctrine. However, the process of engaging with a wide range of stakeholders itself was relatively ad hoc, at least partly because this was not really about reforming an existing institution, but more about designing a new architecture on a blank sheet of paper.77 Robert Ashington-Pickett, one of the key advisers to the ONS and CISU in the early 2000s, recalls the process of separating intelligence gathering and assessment: The beginning of 2001 saw the clear division between the MoD and ONS/CISU elements of SILSEP and the arrival of intelligence specialists from the UK (the latter event reflecting a greater sense of acceptance within DfID to draw on UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) expertise). The split in SILSEP was echoed in the departure of the former National Security Advisor, Sheka Mansary, and his replacement by Kellie Conteh. Two days after this changeover, the National Security Adviser title was replaced by that of National Security Coordinator. This was significant, as it marked the departure from the traditional personality-based system in which the National Security Advisor had been a personal advisor to the President. Kellie Conteh, on the other hand, as National Security Coordinator, was first and foremost the head of a government agency, not a personal advisor. This move took national security and intelligence out of the realm of intimate, personal chats at ‘the Palace’ and into the process of pro fessionalising an arm of government. Working relations between ONS and the Office of the President have been characterized as such ever since. It is worth noting that the transition from intimate personal adviser to professional government agency is a critical issue for Intelligence and Security Service (ISS) components of SSR, but has elsewhere been avoided as being too politically difficult, with subsequent negative consequences for the SSR process as a whole. The timeline of establishing the ONS was not neat. The organization inherited a group of senior political figures who were part of the former personality-based arrangements of the Office of the National Security Adviser. This caused some initial confusion over the role of the ONS, since these legacy figures were still in the former mode of rumour peddling and, as such, apparently in competition with CISU. However, this was more apparent than real, since CISU was about to be made into a secret intelligence service, whose methods would be on a different scale and level of sophistication.

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By early 2002, ONS and CISU had clearly separate roles. There was no overlap or conflict of roles during my tenure. One of Kellie Conteh’s strengths was that he grasped the significance of clear separation between ONS and CISU immediately and gave it his full support, despite the cultural-political challenges this would bring with it.78 As the ONS progressed, it became clear that there were strong political interests opposing the establishment of security sector coordination. Since such a process is fundamentally about the distribution of power, Sierra Leone’s sector coordination process included many perceived threats to power and actual threats to people who were threatening that power79. There remained a legacy of politicising intelligence and reliance on an intelligence service that existed to carry out internal political security rather than any technical intelligence function. Senior political players at the executive level at the time relied on their own trusted informants, people who, in turn, relied on questionable and unevaluated sources, were unable to collate and assess different sources effectively and often reluctant to give bad news. The political establishment simply pursued traditional highly-personalised security assessment – they felt more comfortable sitting in a room and making decisions in a thoroughly non-transparent and dysfunctional way.80 These entrenched patterns of behaviour had to be overcome to move forward. In particular, it was crucial that the ONS and CISU, and newly recruited staff to these institutions, be able to build trust and support from the highest executive level. As one high-level representative in Sierra Leone noted, ‘the Government had its own perception in the beginning – gradually, it got rid of a politicized approach to the security sector’81 Creating the ever-elusive political space for ONS to perform its task became crucial. The fact that intelligence experts were recruited to support the process of building up CISU and the ONS was an important watershed in the use of DfID resources, even though DfID shied away from operational matters. SILSEP’s security coordination and intelligence components remain the only really significant intelligence capacity-building programme in any DfID programme, and yet it created a politically neutral space for the further development of security and governance institutions. These sensitivities were all the more significant since the ONS (in its strategy coordination role) and CISU (in its operational role) came to play an important role in the final phase of the war by supporting counter-insurgency activities, obtaining reliable intelligence from inside

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the RUF organisation and by assisting in breaking down the RUF from within. There were perceptions from outside the two organisations that ONS and CISU rivalries were emerging, not least due to perceived overlaps between them. However, it never was the function of the ONS to collect secret or covert intelligence. Later, as it became more sophisticated, ONS did gather ‘open source intelligence’ and ‘confidential information’, including information from Provincial Security Committees (PROSECs) and District Security Committees (DISECs) that functioned effectively. However, this was not an example of overlap but a central part of the emerging design of the National Security Architecture. Secret intelligence collection was the function of CISU; open source intelligence gathering fell to the ONS. In turn, CISU also undertook surveillance, psychological operations (psyops) and disruption operations, and did so successfully. An entirely new intelligence agency concept was emerging beyond anything that ONS or, previously, the Office of the National Security Advisor or the National Intelligence Unit, ever attempted or, indeed, aspired to. While CISU had a low profile and purposefully hid behind the ONS, CISU’s operational successes provided ‘proof of concept’ for the Intelligence and Security Service model as a whole.82 Thus, the different forms of intelligence and information gathering were meant to complement each other. Their fusion into the Joint Assessments Group would over time lead to a more balanced and rounded intelligence product. At first, as mentioned above, this process was not well understood by outsiders (or indeed by early ONS staff members). It was made more confusing by the overlap that had existed pre-2001 between the Office of the NSA and the National Intelligence Unit. But by late 2001 the differences were clear to those inside the intelligence agencies. Moreover, they were becoming better understood and appreciated by the President’s Office and wider government. At the same time, the idea of CISU was to create a politically neutral civilian intelligence collection organisation to work alongside the FISU and the SB of the SLP, all reporting to the JIC. This created tensions, not only with ONS, which was seen to have too many tasks, but also between SB and CISU. Some clear definitions of responsibility were required to allow proper and effective coordination of intelligence agencies. The draft National Security and Central Intelligence Bill provided these high-level definitions. By 2002, the ONS had gone very far very quickly, which generated a number of challenges in terms of institutional memory, organisational culture and procedures. Meeting such challenges is part of building

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institutional confidence; it is not possible to cut corners in this process. Substantial achievements, such as establishing political space for ONS, a legislative framework and ONS and CISU operating procedures were all vital in establishing a basis for the organisations to operate effectively.

Decentralising security coordination – Provincial and District Security Committees (PROSECs and DISECs) Within the new national security architecture in-the-making the development of PROSECs and DISECs became critical in developing an architecture that functioned beyond Freetown. Having been a District Security Officer before the war, President Kabbah’s memories of ‘how security operated in his youth’ became critical in achieving buy-in from the highest political level. The President’s familiarity with a system that functioned at local level helped secure his direct support. Thus, PROSECs and DISECs became a means to decentralise the security apparatus. One UK adviser close to the events noted that, in fact Kabbah in particular had a tendency to ‘go back to the colonial era when things were perceived to have worked…I suppose we quite unashamedly capitalized on that’.83 At the same time it was generally noted that: …conflicts start out in rural areas where a person has a grievance that can’t be addressed. It will start by him hoping that the native police and courts will help; if they don’t work, he will go to the magistrate courts. By the time it [the grievance] comes to Freetown, if ever, you’ve almost lost the opportunity to quell problems arising. Sankoh could come and feed on these problems: ‘you’re not getting justice, come and join me.’ It is way before military coups become an issue.84 Clearly one of the lessons learned in the latter stages of the war and in transforming Sierra Leone’s security system was that establishing a workable security structure outside Freetown was critical in order to prevent any new rural-based insurgency or border issue with either Guinea or Liberia. In 2000 security committees were set up with basic functions in Bo and Kenema with the expectation of establishing them in every province and district. The institutional set-up of the PROSECs/DISECs is not drawn from an international blueprint outside Sierra Leone, but from previous colonial models in the country and also experiences in Ghana. ‘We would literally sit around the table, and one thing that we did realize

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was that we could not simply import a model from the UK or anywhere else, and say: here we are, let’s slap this one in and see if it works’.85 In addition, the emphasis on strong links between central and local government institutions provided a critical element to the intelligence structure which had been non-existent up to this point. (Remember, one of the key deficiencies of the security architecture before the war was the lack of structured early warning mechanisms. Given their origin, the PROSECs/DISECs represent one of the more novel approaches of the Sierra Leone experience. They were a pragmatic response to the reality that security and intelligence coordination at provincial and district levels were needed to counter internal threats to security (which predominantly originated from the provinces). A key element of the development of this system was that these district and provincial committees represented a shift away from the idea of ‘security’ as a purely national concern towards security as a fundamental community issue. There was a very early recognition within the security system transformation process in Sierra Leone that security and intelligence coordination at the provincial and local levels, along with local data collection, could be decisive. Clearly the idea of ‘holistic national security’ had taken root. What this meant by 2001, as the conflict was coming to an end, was that if national security was to work in Sierra Leone, it had to have buy-in by the people at the grassroots level. In retrospect, district and provincial involvement in security not only satisfied accountability and transparency standards, but also helped to consolidate democratic national security institutions.86

SILSEP, security and the rivalry of security agencies The original idea of SILSEP had been to build ‘something that could oversee the armed forces. The Office of the President, including the NSC, was not being given reports. The original idea behind SILSEP was improvement in those two areas. Very soon, the programme mutated slightly into reforming the intelligence services as well.’87 The SILSEP delineation between ‘security’ and ‘defence’ at a conceptual level produced practical implications. The understanding of ‘security’ called for a holistic, multi-agency approach to national security that included the NSC, the NSA, relations between the contributing agencies and incorporation of the military, police and intelligence agencies. ‘Defence,’ on the other hand, was limited to the MoD and armed forces, including military and militia groups. This distinction was made in July

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1999, one month after the three-member SILSEP team arrived in Freetown for an initial 12-month period. The definitional exercise between ‘security’, linked to the NSA and ‘defence’ linked to the MoD led to discussions about splitting the SILSEP programme components rather than managing them as seamlessly as possible. (The former approach opposes current good SSR practices.) Ultimately, this differentiation between the defence and intelligence components also papered over a fall-out amongst the international military advisers involved. ‘Rank might not matter in DfID’, an observer noted at the time, ‘but it does in the military’.88 Indeed, it proved of great significance that the first SILSEP team included both serving and retired UK officers. Similarly, it was a reflection of the circumstances that there was very little in the way of a clear reform strategy that substantiated the importance of linking all UK security-related programmes together in anything that could recognisably be called SSR. Eventually this conceptual differentiation led to a paper that constructed two separate scoping statements for the ‘security project’ and the ‘defence project,’ respectively. Within the former, a National Security Policy Paper, the NSA, the National Intelligence Unit, human resource and training requirements and other developmental management requirements were outlined. The latter ‘defence’ paper concentrated on the creation of a National Defence Policy for Sierra Leone. This paper also addressed the establishing a system for higher management of Defence, including training requirements, legislative reform requirements and operational frameworks. In addition, SILSEP also ‘…left out key institutions such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The international community did not want to touch the military. They paid a lot of attention to the police. Ancillary ministries should have been covered as well but weren’t.’89 This comment should be seen in the context of debates at that time about holistic concepts of and approaches to SSR, which were neither clearly understood nor employed internationally in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, the point does speak to the important issue of integrating programming. Furthermore, as noted by a key player involved in the security transformation process in Sierra Leone at the early stages, ‘you can only do what the climate allows you to do. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was not seen as SSR. The development of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was included in the CCSSP with the Permanent Secretary as Project Director. However, due to the political dynamics at the time, work with the MIA wasn’t taken forward, it just didn’t happen.’90 Consequently, from late 2000 until 2002, the political interface between the SLP and the Executive was through the

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Vice President (who is the Chairman of the Police Council), as well as the President directly, rather than being mediated by the MIA. While this may not reflect democratic ideals, it was a methodology that reflected current Constitutional arrangements on police management. At the time, it was hoped, and expected, that this Constitutional anomaly would be dealt with, as it effectively gave the Minister of Internal Affairs no power over the direction of police policy.

Conclusions This chapter has given an overview of the breadth of initiatives taken and programmes implemented in support of security sector institutions from the late 1990s until 2002. The context in which these initiatives took place was open conflict and the all but complete collapse of Sierra Leone’s state institutions and the actions taken should be assessed in that light. It was a period when events frequently overtook the desires of longer-term planning horizons and individuals on the ground had to take quick decisions in the light of, for example, the reanimation of the RUF. What started out as a routine NEO by the UK in 2000 developed into a small-to-medium scale war-fighting operation in support of and in collaboration with the Government. Subsequently, support to training, indeed, support to re-establishing the armed forces was given under the slogan ‘serving the nation’. As Clare Short noted about this period: ‘We are trying to build the state and it doesn’t have any armed forces, so that was the obvious role for the British then, to help train the new Sierra Leonean army.’ At the same time, ‘there was a whole issue of conflict in Africa. We were in that phase after the Cold War where there was a massive growth in conflict within and between countries, causing enormous suffering and preventing development. I mean, you couldn’t be intelligently interested in development in Africa and not be focused on how you bring all these conflicts to an end.’91 Development and security were coming together as a means of making, keeping and consolidating peace – an entirely different context in which to operate that existed before 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘The possibility of absolutely merging commitments to development with all your other instruments of foreign policy, including the military, which was conceivable in those days, is now sort of lost.’92 The general state of emergency in Sierra Leone at the time left no space for sitting back and developing a strategy; the country was in urgent need of support. Thus, prior to 2002, when the war and accompanying

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disarmament and demobilisation were declared over, collaborative UKGovernment of Sierra Leone programmes were very much shaped as responses to consecutive crises. The lack of any capacity to oversee the armed forces, which had staged two coups since 1992, was addressed by SILSEP. So was the inability to properly coordinate responses to the security situation and to collect coherent intelligence. Police primacy had been the priority of President Kabbah early on; in fact, from 1996 establishing a police force had been given priority. The SLP was given a new ethos, LNP, gender-based violence was responded to through FSUs, and vehicles, communication equipment and uniforms were procured. Finally, the judiciary was supported through the LDP. At the time, predominantly as a result of the context in which operations began, but also partly because of the personalities involved, integration of these various security-related programmes did not take place. However, it was also a time with no coherent concept of the security sector, and thus no real sense of which institutions to be reform. This was emerging, however, particularly during the period from 2002 until 2005. Thus, in many ways, SSR came to shape Sierra Leone just as Sierra Leone came to shape SSR – as a concept, a set of policies and an integrated set of programmatic approaches.

4 The Development of an SSR Concept, 2002–2005

This chapter moves on to look at the specific example of Sierra Leone and the period immediately after 2002 when the peace had finally been signed. In particular it looks in detail at the effect of this on the programmes that were run on the ground and addresses the issue of differences between reforms undertaken during war and just after conflict. It looks specifically at the re-establishment of the police force, the rebuilding of a military, expansion of civilian control and the development of a Security Sector Review to involve civil society in security issues following the advent of peace in 2002 and maps the development of the concept of security sector reform and the linkages between security and development activities that began to form throughout this period. The year 2002 was pivotal for Sierra Leone. Officially the conflict ended in January, but it would be misleading to say that peace had descended over the entire country. There were still significant areas of the countryside where conflict continued and many areas remained beyond the direct control of the government in Freetown. To all intents and purposes Sierra Leone was still engaged in a conflict and the troops of UNAMSIL, supported by the British military viewed themselves as existing in a conflict situation. Despite the uncertain situation in the countryside, Sierra Leone managed to hold presidential and parliamentary elections, which the SLPP won comfortably. The margin of around 70% of the vote gave President Kabbah an electoral triumph and also a powerful political mandate to enact much of the planning that had been taking place in exile in Conakry. In short, Kabbah was seen as the man who had brought peace to the country and had managed to persuade the international authorities, particularly the UK and the UN, to intervene in 95

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the conflict. Indeed, the election itself took place within the context of a deployment of the biggest UN peacekeeping force in history (some 17,000 international troops). However, within this overall context, the day to day policing of the elections was carried out by the revamped SLP. The set of agencies and programmes that had started before or during the war were something of a hotchpotch of different activities with some part completed and some ongoing. The uncertainty around the end of the war, the limitation of control in some areas and the difficult security situation in the countryside produced a set of challenges beyond the emergency planning that had already taken place in 2002. The rivalry between some agencies and ministries, the balance between command and advising faced by the UK military, the lack of development of many security agencies, including a non-functioning military and a partially developed SLP, were all exacerbated by continuing uncertainty and also the arrival of large numbers of armed former combatants. By early 2004, findings of the Security Sector Review being produced at the time noted that the economy – as opposed to more traditional security threats – was a key threat to achieving the future vision for the country.1 This is still true today. As the outgoing Commander IMATT noted in late 2003: Within Sierra Leone, although the current situation is calm, the failure of the Government to stimulate the economy and address the resultant levels of unemployment and under-employment are of great concern […] Without this, and despite security sector reforms, neither long-term stability for the country nor the foreign investment necessary for economic recovery can be assured.2 Even at this early stage, therefore, it was becoming obvious that the key issue that would affect long-term security was the lack of economic development. In particular, the lack of economic alternatives available to former combatants and to large numbers of disaffected youth posed a significant security threat even if the security agencies could be developed into effective organisations. In addition, the only available agency capable of developing economic planning on that scale was the state, hence direct budgetary support and a programme of rehabilitation of the economic infrastructure supported by the international community was integral to the development of security in the long term.

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The Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and Sierra Leone In 2002, the UK Government made an unusual, far-reaching decision, spearheaded by then UK Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short. The UK agreed to a ten-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government of Sierra Leone binding both parties to a series of commitments until 2012. It is important to point out here that this is extremely unusual within UK development policy, even if it is periodically used by some Scandinavian aid agencies to provide long-term frameworks and to signal a long-term commitment to the development of Sierra Leone. The agreement itself was a consequence of the alignment of UK national and development interests. It was also part of a broader geopolitical UK commitment to demonstrate that a joined-up defence, diplomatic and development effort could deliver stability. This was also backed up by the creation of a UK government funding system constructed around the Global Conflict Prevention Pool and the African Conflict Prevention Pool that brought finance and expertise from across DfID, the FCO and MoD. In other words, paraphrasing Aristotle, the pools could demonstrate that UK Government intervention could amount to more than the sum of its parts.3 One CCSSP adviser involved with the pools at the time remarked that it was: something that helped us enormously, at least you knew that you had the support. In ’98–’99 real, serious risks were taken. Also some very serious personal decisions – this is the reality. If somebody is going to commit to a change process, my horizon is 15–20 years.4 The MoU was constructed around a series of key principles along with the long-term perspective. In particular, the core of the MoU, which is rarely pointed out, is the issue of national ownership. The UK Government presented all of the proposed UK Government activities within the country to the Sierra Leonean Government in writing in advance, together with details of the UK sectoral and financial commitments required to deliver them. At the same time, in signing the document, the Government of Sierra Leone demonstrated buy-in at the very highest political level to a stra-tegy that included objectives on reshaping the military, the police and other security agencies, along with implementing a national anticorruption strategy. It amounted, in many ways, to a form of benevolent

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donor conditionality, with the Government of Sierra Leone being provided with a series of political and financial guarantees deemed necessary to lay the foundations for a comprehensive post-conflict development programme. The MoU also provided a mechanism for conditionality in the form of performance-related budget support, another usual aspect of a development programme in a country with as high fiduciary risk as Sierra Leone. Despite the potential carrot-and-stick of the risk of up to £5 million per year being either provided or withheld based on Government performance, this mechanism of conditionality was ultimately not used as effectively as it could have been. Departments responsible for delivering against the benchmarks contained within the MoU often were not aware of their deliverables. In addition, at least with respect to the MoD that was only coming into being, the MoU was signed without its involvement. With the added weakness of not having a Minister of Defence involved in the daily business of the ministry, the political guidance on how to implement the aspects of the MoU relevant to RSLAF, such as producing a long-term plan for down-sizing, simply was not there. Since decisions made regarding the allocation of the performance tranche were in-year, they were never incorporated into the document. Moreover, deliverables were often not clear. Eventually, this form of strategic engagement gave way to crisis management, and the urgent overcame the important.5 Despite this, it is difficult to overestimate the impact of the MoU in providing a long-term commitment to Sierra Leone that went way beyond the usual programming horizons of three to five years. Despite its shortcomings, those involved with the construction of programming on the ground always had this overarching framework to draw on and for the local partners in particular, they were able to take confidence in the fact that the UK was going to be around for some time. This was particularly important in providing impetus to the development of other programming and development objectives in the 2002–2005 period. The PRSP and Security Sector Review were being prepared in this period, and Justice sector programming, which had largely focused on enhancing police capacity under the CCSSP, was broadened into a more holistic approach to encompass the courts and prison services under JSDP, which was being planned during these years. Thus, a recognisable SSR approach began to be developed and linkages that had been formed in the prior period began to be operationalised. Serious issues of the geographical reach of security forces and their lack of capacity began to be addressed.

The Development of an SSR Concept, 2002–2005 99

Establishing the SLP outside Freetown and the western area Prior to 2002, police reform and consequent security had largely been defined to Freetown and to the development of a strategic framework, largely because it was very difficult to move outside the capital. One of the core themes at this stage was the emphasis on building capacity amongst the senior levels of the SLP, including training at the UK police college at Bramshill. The emphasis on Freetown at the time was also precipitated by the security situation, particularly the high number of internally displaced people occupying any large building that was available, including areas such as the derelict factory area and railway shed area in the East end of Freetown. The context changed around 2002 following the end of the war. It became possible to deploy the SLP beyond Freetown and to operationalise some of the strategic concepts that had been developed by the senior management. One key actor pointed out: The context changed dramatically right about 2002. From then on we were able to access Makeni, Kabala, Koidu, Kailahun, etc. We were able to go into these places and start re-establishing policing. The context changed from maintaining law and order in Freetown to having to do it throughout the country. That in itself presented a whole lot of new challenges in terms of communications, mobility and so forth. Because it was the police that got in first, there was very little in terms of infrastructure – they had completely ruined all our premises. In Kambia there was nothing, Makeni, everything was wrecked. In Kono they dug [for diamonds] under the police stations. We needed money to rebuild the infrastructure, which we didn’t have much of because, at the time, we expected other donors to come in to support. Alan Doss came into his own as the DSRSG (Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General). He started to mobilize UNDP (United Nations Development Programme); we went through a period of building makeshift barracks. That was the immediate pressure, establishing some kind of effective policing. We had to take well-armed and professionally-trained OSD personnel with us to enable us to keep these places under control.6 Deployment across the country, however, would not have been possible without a massive investment in a