Revolutionary United Front Effects

When the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) started their attacks on the Liberian border in 1991, one of the bloodiest civil wars in the past 20 years was initiated” (Breher). 1991 was the start of the civil war in Sierra Leone between the Revolutionary united front and the government forces. The war started when the revolutionary united front, or RUF, began campaigning against president Momon. The RUF began taking control of villages, taking food and other supplies, killing anyone who was did not escape quick enough and burning down what was left of the villages. Many civilians suffered from the signature rebel atrocity of limb amputation while thousands of girls and women were subjected to sexual violence. Both the rebel forces and the government
The first gruesome effect the civil war had was the amount of people who were killed or misplaced. For example, Anup Shah, a writer on social, political, and economic issues, states the amount of people who have been killed. Shah states, over 50,000 people have been killed to date, with over one million people having been displaced” (Shah). Both the Ruf and Government forces killed babies, young children, and adults. The civilians who did not die, underwent seriosus amputations, where the forces would cut off limbs of them so they could be branded. The population of Sierra Leone in 1999 when the war started was just above 4.03 million. More than one million of the population went missing never to be seen again. Another example of the awful effects the war had on Sierra Leone was the aftermath of the children who fought in the war. Furthermore, Shah talks about the number of soldiers who were under 18. Shah states, the UN estimates that of those fighting with Sierra Leone government forces, a quarter are children below the age of 18”. Many of the kids who fought are still alive today, and they are left to struggle with the knowledge of what they were forced to do. Not all of the soldiers were as lucky as Ishmael and had people who helped him process what happened. Many of the soldiers had no one to help them, and they still hold onto the guilt of what they did. A final example of the
The events that led up to the war ending was when Foday Sankoh, political leader of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), was taken away by the Sierra Leone army. Soon after Sankoh was captured, the United Nations began to regain peace back into Sierra Leone. Throughout the war, over 50,000 people died and hundreds of thousands of people were affected by it. In A Long Way Gone, the author, Ishmael Beah, experienced firsthand what the Sierra Leone civil war was like. In November of 2002, “the United Nations Missions in Sierra Leone began a gradual reduction in personnel, from a peak level of 17,500” (235). The reduction of military personnel was necessary because the President knew that the war was slowly coming to an end. However, the Sierra Leone government asked the UN to help set up a special Court. The new court implemented in the government would allow those who “bear the greatest responsibility or the commission of crimes against humanity” (225). With that being said, the government would convict perpetrators of human rights violations and throw them in jail. Now that the war was over, Beah ended the book by gathering his friends around a fire and telling stories to one another. Pa Sesay began by telling an important story to everyone about whether or not it was worth killing the monkey. If you did kill the monkey your parents would also die. He asked Beah whether or not he would be the hunter and kill the