The Revolutionary United Front: fronting for democracy or fuelling destruction?

Quaker-Dokubo, C.

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Title:	The Revolutionary United Front: fronting for democracy or fuelling destruction?
Author:	Quaker-Dokubo, C.
Year:	2000
Periodical:	Nigerian Journal of International Affairs
Volume:	26
Issue:	2
Pages:	1-19
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Sierra Leone
Subjects:	civil wars guerrilla warfare
Abstract:	The recent history of Sierra Leone is one of lost opportunities. In a search for why so much has been squandered, the author of this article looks at the rise and power of the Revolutionary United Front (RUL). It began as a disaffected student organization with support from Libya, but since then, losing this link, it has Proteus-like defied a true definition. It is a guerrilla organization, but it is neither separatist nor reformist. It does not have the type of leadership which would classify it as a warlord insurgency. It does not have any significant national following or particular ethnic support. It is more like a bandit organization, perhaps because of its 'lumpen' social base (in contradistinction to other such organizations which are firmly elitist) and the absence of an emancipatory programme which would win it wider social support. It is driven primarily by the survivalist needs of its largely undereducated and alienated battle commanders. Despite its student origins, it has won support from neither the students nor the peasants in its years of existence. Military victory, not social transformation, rules supreme. Having cut itself off from wider society, it is desperately trying to win its way back into this society. Hoist with its own petard, it has been seriously losing out to the Kamajor militia. It is now undergoing a measure of change since the exit of Sankoh, but it will have to pay serious attention to the real goals of the disenfranchised and marginalized people. Its history should be heeded by other African countries with restive, youthful populaces. Notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract]