Liberian Civil Wars and Sierra Leone Civil War: A Visual History

The First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997) began when Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front invaded from Cote d'Ivoire on Christmas Eve 1989 against Samuel Doe's regime; Doe was tortured to death by Prince Johnson's faction in 1990, ECOWAS peacekeepers held Monrovia, and warlord factions fought until Taylor won the 1997 election. His backing of Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone (1991-2002), which cut off civilians' hands and traded diamonds for arms, brought the war there to Freetown in 1999; British intervention in 2000 helped end it in 2002. The Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003) saw LURD and MODEL rebels besiege Monrovia until Taylor went into exile in August 2003. About 250,000 died in Liberia and 50,000 to 70,000 in Sierra Leone; Taylor was jailed for 50 years by the Special Court in 2012.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Liberian civil wars and Sierra Leone Civil War. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Deaths and mutilations

Timeline of the Liberian civil wars and Sierra Leone Civil War

1. 1989
   Taylor's NPFL invades Liberia24 December.
2. 1990
   Doe killed; ECOMOG deploys
3. 1991
   RUF invades Sierra Leone
4. 1997
   Taylor elected; AFRC coup in Freetown
5. 1999
   RUF attack on Freetown; Lome accord; LURD war begins
6. 2000
   UN hostages; British intervention
7. 2002
   Sierra Leone war declared over
8. 2003
   Siege of Monrovia; Taylor exiled
9. 2012
   Taylor convicted

Liberia's first war

Doe, who had seized power in 1980 and ruled through his Krahn ethnic group, was attacked by Taylor's Gio and Mano fighters, many of them children; the war fragmented into factions killing along ethnic lines. Prince Johnson's men captured Doe in September 1990 and filmed his torture and death. Nigerian-led ECOMOG troops held Monrovia against Taylor's 'Greater Liberia'; the 1996 Monrovia battle and the Abuja accords led to elections in 1997 which Taylor won on the slogan 'He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him'.

Sierra Leone

Sankoh's RUF, trained in Libya and armed by Taylor, invaded from Liberia in March 1991 and preyed on the diamond fields, abducting children as soldiers and hacking off hands and arms in campaigns like 'Operation No Living Thing'. Coups in Freetown, the mercenaries of Executive Outcomes who drove the RUF back in 1995-1996, the Kamajor hunter militia, and the AFRC junta of 1997 that let the RUF into the capital followed. Nigerian ECOMOG troops retook Freetown in 1998; the RUF's January 1999 assault killed 6,000 there. The Lome accord made Sankoh vice-president; when the RUF took 500 UN hostages in May 2000, British paratroopers under Operation Palliser secured Freetown and the RUF collapsed. Sankoh died in custody in 2003.

Taylor's fall and the tribunals

Taylor's Liberia was a pariah under UN sanctions for diamond and arms trafficking; LURD, backed by Guinea, and MODEL, backed by Cote d'Ivoire, fought their way to Monrovia in 2003, whose 'World War' sieges killed a thousand civilians. Under Nigerian, US and ECOWAS pressure Taylor resigned on 11 August 2003 and flew to Nigeria; UN peacekeepers arrived, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa's first elected female president in 2005. Taylor was arrested in 2006 and convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2012 of aiding and abetting war crimes, the first former head of state so convicted since Nuremberg.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Sokoto Caliphate (1804 to 1903)
• United States (1776 to present)
• Third Portuguese Empire (1822 to 1999)
• Second French colonial empire (1830 to 1980)
• Danish colonial empire (1536 to 1953)

Wars of the same era and region

• Nigerian Civil War (Biafra) (1967 to 1970)
• Cold War (1947 to 1991)
• Second Congo War (1998 to 2003)
• Boko Haram insurgency (2009 to present)
• Portuguese Colonial War (1961 to 1974)

8 surprising things about the Liberian civil wars and Sierra Leone Civil War

1. The RUF asked victims whether they wanted 'long sleeves or short sleeves' before amputating at the wrist or elbow.
2. Charles Taylor escaped from a Massachusetts jail in 1985; how he did so was long a mystery.
3. The 2006 film Blood Diamond and the Kimberley Process both grew from Sierra Leone's conflict diamonds.
4. Executive Outcomes' few hundred South African mercenaries did more to defeat the RUF in 1995 than the national army.
5. Britain's 2000 intervention, including the SAS raid to free hostages from the West Side Boys, was cited by Tony Blair as a model of liberal interventionism.
6. Prince Johnson, who killed Doe, later became a Liberian senator.
7. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, whose women's peace movement helped end the war, shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
8. Taylor's daughter and son had links to the child soldiers' 'Small Boys Unit'; his son 'Chuckie' was later convicted of torture in the US.

Sources

• First Liberian Civil War Wikipedia
• Sierra Leone Civil War Wikipedia
• Sierra Leone: Civil war Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia (1999) Hurst

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