Ali's World Literature Blog

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The Sierra Leone Civil War

The Sierra Leone Civil War began on March 23, 1991. This was the day that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) tried to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone. This started an 11-year process of combat and struggling. Some children as young as seven years old, they were forced to become shields, spies, and soldiers, among other things.

This war was a terrible fight. “Sierra Leone has been ravaged by a civil war that lasted from 1991 to 2002, and resulted in some 70,000 casualties and 2.6 million displaced people,” (United Nations Development Programme). This shows that the war made a serious impact on Sierra Leone and its people.

Many children were used on both the government’s and the RUF’s sides during this war. “Of those fighting with Sierra Leone government forces, a quarter are children below the age of 18,” (globalissues.org). It is estimated that 10,000 children were used in this war. Furthermore, their treatment was nearly unfathomable. “Children were abducted to fight on all sides, and injected with drugs or given alcohol to give them courage,” (United Nations Development Programme). Youth literacy rates were also very weak at the time, even as low as 43%.

Another one of the worst parts of the war was the recklessness of the rebels. They cut people’s hands off so that they couldn’t vote, and “by early 1995 the RUF had commandeered nearly all the country’s economic resources, and it had kidnapped and enlisted hundreds of young men against their will,” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The government also ended up giving the rebels governmental roles, in exchange for peace. The RUF continued to fight, attack, and kill civilians.

In conclusion, the Sierra Leone Civil War was an 11-year war that used many children, had many casualties, displaced over half of the population of the country, and had very reckless and untrustworthy sides, especially in the perspective of how the child soldiers were treated, including being kidnapped, drugged, and used as human shields.

Works Cited

Goodwin, Jan. “Sierra Leone Is No Place to Be Young.” New York Times Magazine, 14 Feb. 1999.

Kaldor, Mary, and James Vincent. “Case Study Sierra Leone.” Web.undp.org, web.undp.org/evaluation/documents/thematic/conflict/SierraLeone.pdf.

McHugh, Richard. “Revolutionary United Front.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1 May 2016, http://www.britannica.com/topic/Revolutionary-United-Front.

Shah, Anup. “Sierra Leone.” – Global Issues, 23 July 2001, http://www.globalissues.org/article/88/sierra-leone.

“Statistics.” UNICEF, 27 Dec. 2013, http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/sierraleone_statistics.html.