The Other Susan Rice File
How to embrace psychotic murderers and alienate a continent.
ˇ By BRET STEPHENS
* December 11, 2012, 12:15 a.m. ET
The trouble with a newspaper column lies in the word limit. Last week, I
wrote about some of <
http://topics.wsj.com/person/r/susan-rice/7113> Susan
Rice's diplomatic misadventures in Africa during her years in the Clinton
administration: Rwanda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo. But
there wasn't enough space to get to them all.
And Sierra Leone deserves a column of its own.
On June 8, 1999, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ms. Rice,
then the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, delivered
testimony on a range of issues, and little Sierra Leone was high on the
list. An elected civilian government led by a former British barrister named
Ahmad Kabbah had been under siege for years by a rebel group known as the
Revolutionary United Front, led by a Libyan-trained guerrilla named Foday
Sankoh. Events were coming to a head.
Even by the standards of Africa in the 1990s, the RUF set a high bar for
brutality. Its soldiers were mostly children, abducted from their parents,
fed on a diet of cocaine and speed. Its funding came from blood diamonds. It
was internationally famous for chopping off the limbs of its victims. Its
military campaigns bore such names as "Operation No Living Thing."
In January 1999, six months before Ms. Rice's Senate testimony, the RUF laid
siege to the capital city of Freetown. "The RUF burned down houses with
their occupants still inside, hacked off limbs, gouged out eyes with knives,
raped children, and gunned down scores of people in the street," wrote Ryan
Lizza in the New Republic. "In three weeks, the RUF killed some 6,000
people, mostly civilians."
What to do with a group like this? The Clinton administration had an idea.
Initiate a peace process.
It didn't seem to matter that Sankoh was demonstrably evil and probably
psychotic. It didn't seem to matter, either, that he had violated previous
agreements to end the war. "If you treat Sankoh like a statesman, he'll be
one," was the operative theory at the State Department, according to one
congressional staffer cited by Mr. Lizza. Instead of treating Sankoh as part
of the problem, if not the problem itself, State would treat him as part of
the solution. An RUF representative was invited to Washington for talks.
Jesse Jackson was appointed to the position of President Clinton's special
envoy.
It would be tempting to blame Rev. Jackson for the debacle that would soon
follow. But as Ms. Rice was keen to insist in her Senate testimony that
June, it was the Africa hands at the State Department who were doing most of
the heavy lifting.
"It's been through active U.S. diplomacy behind the scenes," she explained.
"It hasn't gotten a great deal of press coverage, that we and others saw the
rebels and the government of Sierra Leone come to the negotiating table just
a couple of weeks ago, in the context of a negotiated cease-fire, in which
the United States played an important role."
A month later, Ms. Rice got her wish with the signing of the Lomé Peace
Accord. It was an extraordinary document. In the name of reconciliation, RUF
fighters were given amnesty. Sankoh was made Sierra Leone's vice president.
To sweeten the deal, he was also put in charge of the commission overseeing
the country's diamond trade. All this was foisted on President Kabbah.
In September 1999, Ms. Rice praised the "hands-on efforts" of Rev. Jackson,
U.S. Ambassador Joe Melrose "and many others" for helping bring about the
Lomé agreement.
For months thereafter, Ms. Rice cheered the accords at every opportunity.
Rev. Jackson, she said, had "played a particularly valuable role," as had
Howard Jeter, her deputy at State. In a Feb. 16, 2000, Q&A session with
African journalists, she defended Sankoh's participation in the government,
noting that "there are many instances where peace agreements around the
world have contemplated rebel movements converting themselves into political
parties."
What was more, the U.S. was even prepared to lend Sankoh a helping hand,
provided he behaved himself. "Among the institutions of government that we
are prepared to assist," she said, "is of coursethe Commission on Resources
which Mr. Sankoh heads." Of course.
Three months later, the RUF took 500 U.N. peacekeepers as hostages and was
again threatening Freetown. Lomé had become a dead letter. The State
Department sought to send Rev. Jackson again to the region, but he was so
detested that his trip had to be canceled. The U.N.'s Kofi Annan begged for
Britain's help. Tony Blair obliged him.
"Over a number of weeks," Mr. Blair recalls in his memoirs, British troops
"did indeed sort out the RUF. . . . The RUF leader Foday Sankoh was
arrested, and during the following months there was a buildup of the
international presence, a collapse of the rebels and over time a program of
comprehensive disarmament. . . . The country's democracy was saved."
Today Mr. Blair is a national hero in Sierra Leone. As for Ms. Rice and the
administration she represented, history will deliver its own verdict.
Write to bstephens_at_wsj.com
image
Associated Press
A victim of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front.
------------[ Sent via the dehai-wn mailing list by dehai.org]--------------
Received on Tue Dec 11 2012 - 12:16:39 EST
