Sierra Leone Civil War: Post Genocide Approaches

In 1991, the Sierra Leone Civil War started. Rebels invaded Beah's hometown, Mogbwemo, located in the Southern Province of Sierra Leone, and he was forced to flee. Separated from his family, he spent months wandering south with a group of other boys. At the age of 12, he was forced to become a child soldier. According to Beah's account, he fought for almost three years before being rescued by UNICEF.[1] Beah fought for the government army against the rebels. In 1997, he fled Freetown by the help of the UNICEF due to the increasing violence and found his way to New York City, where he lived with Laura Simms, his foster mother. In New York City, Beah attended the United Nations International School. After high school, he enrolled at Oberlin College and graduated in 2004 with a degree in Political Science.[1]

The Sierra Leone crisis seemed like a far away problem. (Appendix A for more information on the war of Sierra Leone.) Unless one was there in the war, no one understood how drastic and awful the war was. The U.S. did try to get involved by trying to negotiate with the RUF but it was said that they pushed to hard for goals that were very hard to commit to. The U.S. did not do as much, in my opinion, as they could of. I feel like the U.S. could of helped with taking the boy soldiers and help them recover from their brainwashing, just like they did with Ishmael Beah in the end of the book (Beah, 2007), but they should of done it earlier in the war. I feel like the United States could have also helped with looking for all the boys that were

For eleven years, civil war desecrated the infrastructure throughout the small African nation of Sierra Leone. Tens of thousands were killed, and human suffering was widespread. More than a decade of constant fighting between the government and relentless rebels left the country in ruins. Roads were destroyed, bridges burned, buildings left in shambles, and the power supply nearly eliminated. The United Nations intervened, and assisted the government of Sierra Leone in establishing peace and setting up fair and honest, multi-party elections. The new government has since struggled in rebuilding the war-torn nation. More than half of Sierra Leoneans live in poverty, and nearly half are food insecure. Years of food shortages left nearly a third

Throughout the 1600s to the mid 1990s, the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda, and the Hutu tribe of Rwanda have always been arch enemies. Although the Hutus have had a prolonged hate for the Tutsi tribe, this hate was not physically expressed, until 1994. From April to July of 1994, over 80,000 Tutsi people were murdered and tortured for their African heritage. The Rwanda genocide is considered to be one of the worst massacres the world has ever seen since the Holocaust. This paper will touch a few things that occurred after the massacre, and will also answer the questions of why this massacre started, what occurred during this genocide. The Rwandan genocide was a massacre based off of discrimination and hatred for a specific tribal group. This

Many were killed and had to be buried in mass graves due to the corpses in mass amounts (“Genocide”). The few survivors lost their families, homes, friends, and suffered awful health complications. Many survivors already lived in poverty, but now lived in unpropitious poverty. Survivors also had to undergo severe trauma from their horrific experiences. They had to reconstruct their lives as well as the city they knew and loved. These people subsided the awful treachery they had endured and united as a community to rebuild their homeland. Although, ten years after the genocide, ethnic relations in Rwanda remained tense (Genocide & Persecution Rwanda 39). Signs of genocide are still everywhere today and the effects of this tragedy are

Often, there is conflict amongst states that escalates, eventually, into war. With these wars, comes death and immense devastation; devastation that takes form in many ways. The worst of them are the human rights violations that occur, leaving behind a pain that is often rarely treated or addressed. Through the approach, transitional justice, victims of these horrible crimes against humanity have a system that allows them to seek some form of justice. Focus on the Bosnian genocide will allow for one to see how a specific case of transitional justice was played out and the cons, along with pros, of the actions every actor took that either prolonged or stiffened the progression of peace and justice in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and

In the course of a hundred days in 1994, over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in the Rwandan genocide. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. My thesis is that the international community utterly failed to prevent and stop this atrocity. I will focus on numerous interconnected aspects that led to international inaction and also on the main actors, Belgium, the United Nations Secretariat, the United States and France, that knew that there was genocide underway in Rwanda - therefore, they had a responsibility to prevent and stop the genocide, but lacked political will. This led to inaction at the level of the Security Council (SC), where member states

The Sierra Leone Civil War began in 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) began an uprising against the Sierra Leone government, citing long-term corruption and crimes as their major reason for overthrowing the government. There was also conflicting in neighboring Liberia that started in 1989 and is thought to have triggering turmoil in Sierra Leone as it stretched over its borders. Much of the fighting caused by the RUF was funded and perpetuated by the prosperous diamond mines, later to be called Blood Diamonds because of the destruction they caused, located in the southeastern part of the country. By 1999, the United Nations sent a mission to Sierra Leone to end the “Blood Diamonds” conflict by disarming soldiers and building

Africa has been an interesting location of conflicts. From the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea to the revolutionary conflict in Libya and Egypt, one of the greatest conflicts is the Rwandan Genocide. The Rwandan Genocide included two tribes in Rwanda: Tutsis and Hutus. Upon revenge, the Hutus massacred many Tutsis and other Hutus that supported the Tutsis. This gruesome war lasted for a 100 days. Up to this date, there have been many devastating effects on Rwanda and the global community. In addition, many people have not had many acknowledgements for the genocide but from this genocide many lessons have been learned around the world.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in the best model for a global scale for restorative

“Never again”; after the holocaust killed 6 million Jews, 2 million ethnic poles, 250,000 gypsies, and many others, we say “never again”. But, how true is that statement? Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur… and many others occurred post WWII; we as American’s, and as citizens as the global community, owe it to the world to stop this from happening.

Over 62,587,797 and counting innocent people have lost their lives due to past and ongoing acts of genocide. Throughout this research paper you will learn about past genocides, genocide today, and what needs to be done to stop it. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people. Genocide in Darfur today has claimed over 400,000 lives and displaced over 2,500,000 people. More than 100 people die each day; 5 thousand die every month. It is an unpleasant situation, that has gone on for over 100 years in numerous countries. 5,290,000 people died in the Holocaust death camps, due to Adolf Hitler believing that the Jews were the cause of Germany’s economic crisis and began what was called the “ Final Solution”. Genocide is unacceptable,

We have seen that the key question to understand the conflict in Rwanda is to remember that both Hutus and Tutsis are political identities imposed by the state. During 1994 some were killed because they 'looked like Tutsis' and others killed because 'they thought they would probably be Hutus'. Conflicts such as those in Rwanda, which result from the weakening of state power, which is responsible for preserving laws and guaranteeing justice, occur in the midst of failed states. This situation is the perfect incubator of generalized internal violence, both prior to conflicts and during and after them. It is in events like these where international humanitarian law plays a preponderant role. However, there are no safe ways to

The author shows how catastrophic the killings were by comparing it to other murders experienced in the past. It is evident that it was difficult to find the Tutsis who were alive unlike the dead. Even though, Rwanda’s killings were less compared to Cambodia’s, the former was genocide because it was planned while the later seemed amateurish. Furthermore, Yugoslavia’s was similar to a riot. Rwanda’s dead also accumulated around three times the Jewish Holocaust rate (Gourevitch, 1995). The article further illustrates how worse it is when one community massively kills fellow men. The perpetrators will soon appear before Rwanda’s Tribunal court for judgment. Overall, the article was informative as it addressed the genocide concept using Rwanda as illustration for better

Genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, ethnic, political, or cultural group”. In Rwanda for example, the Hutu-led government embraced a new program that called for the country’s Hutu people to murder anyone that was a Tutsi (Gourevitch, 6). This new policy of one ethnic group (Hutu) that was called upon to murder another ethnic group (Tutsi) occurred during April through June of 1994 and resulted in the genocide of approximately 800,000 innocent people that even included women and children of all ages. In this paper I will first analyze the origins/historical context regarding the discontent amongst the Hutu and Tutsi people as well as the historical context as to why major players in the international