"The people of Sierra Leone will owe a heavy debt of gratitude to Dr Abass Bundu, especially after the crisis that they have lived through for more than nine years will have been resolved. In nine chapters, with the thoroughness of a keen legal mind, he has written a carefully researched account of the important events about which most Sierra Leoneans have only vague memories of, or have read accounts by journalists most of whom were biased..."

This is how Dr John Karefa-Smart, Sierra Leone's veteran politician, introduces Abass Chernor Bundu's new book, Democracy by Force? No foreword to this thought-provoking expose can be more appropriate. The book, no doubt, represents the first conscious attempt by any researcher to give a blow-by-blow analytical account of the important events that have reduced the country to its knees.

Bundu's background is a key factor here. As a former executive secretary of ECOWAS and former foreign minister of Sierra Leone, Bundu was very instrumental in the setting up of ECOMOG, the military wing of ECOWAS, which first intervened in Liberia (1990-97) and in Sierra Leone (1997- 2000).

But Bundu is quick to make clear that the book is neither an account of his personal experience nor "aimed at any particular personna". Neither is it a treatise on the political or constitutional evolution of Sierra Leone. Rather, he says, the book's "central focus is on the internal armed conflict" that has ruined the country, and "on how the search for a peaceful solution was utterly mismanaged".

In truth, it is a detailed study of how Sierra Leone's nightmare was created by a culture of greed, hatred, lack of good governance and, above all, exacerbated by the policy failures of both local and international players.

"The challenge now is how to pull the country back from its trauma, a task that demands extraordinary leadership as well as a spark of renewal," Bundu says.

"This is the central theme of this book. It attempts to address why a once placid and sophisticated nation came to be overtaken by a Dark Age of anarchy, characterised by mindless abuses of human rights?

"How ethnicism so overwhelmed the nation as to rent it apart? How a senseless rebellion squandered the future of a nation by de-humanising and devouring its children, making them into combatants and victims of war? How a government totally failed in its duty to protect its citizens and how it also failed to link their security with its own?

"And [above all] how the international community, notwithstanding the injunctions of the United Nations Charter, relegated human security to the margins of an internal armed conflict.

"It is a study of the conventional and confused mindset of the United Nations. In particular, what is the constructive way forward? What lessons can the rest of Africa and the developing world learn from this tragedy? What lessons are there for the international community as a whole, and the UN in particular?"

According to Bundu, "the conflict has fostered a culture of blame, not of accountability; of hate, not of harmony; and of dependency, not of self-esteem". And he blames successive governments for choosing the military solution over the political "to resolve the quagmire", which, sadly, has not worked.

"The war has generally proved unwinnable by neither side, and far from determining who is right, it has only determined who is left", Bundu argues. "Violence overtook negotiation and human security, and all too frequently it was the beleaguered civilian population that was caught in the middle...And it did not take long before truth, human rights and the nation's diamond fields came to be added to the list of casualties.

"What went wrong?," he asks rhetorically. "What has been the role of regional and international actors? What lessons are there for them? What can foreign governments, international organisations, diplomats, lawyers, politicians and students learn from it? What is the best way out of the quagmire? What can be done to avoid similar conflicts in the world in general and Africa in particular?"

Enter the crisis

Bundu opens the book by tracing the genesis of the Sierra Leone crisis to the very first military coup in the country in 1967, barely six years after gaining independence from Britain.

He takes a swipe at the British for leaving behind autocratic structures in the guise of a so-called Westminster parliamentary democracy. Since the British in particular, and the Europeans in general, administered their colonies "tyrannically", they "certainly did not encourage political pluralism until well into the terminal years of [their] rule".

And so with the absence of "social and political organisation on the scale required for democracy to flourish, the tuition the indigenous politicians received was neither in the theory nor in the practice of local self-government... Instead their tuition was in the theory and practice of authoritarianism, which had largely characterised colonial governance."

Bundu quotes the author Adam Hochschild to support his case. Hochschild has written: "The major legacy Europe left for Africa was not democracy as it is practised today in countries like England, France and Belgium, it was authoritarian rule and plunder."

In the case of Sierra Leone, "as independence drew near," Bundu writes, "new political leaders had suddenly to unlearn, so to speak, this inheritance and imbibe at once a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy with all its integral concepts of human rights, institutionalised opposition, tolerance of dissent, public accountability, probity and transparency and a free press. This was to prove too much of [a] tall order.

"This largely explains why many of the early politicians either ruefully failed to understand the rules of the Westminster game, or if they did at all, deliberately chose not to follow them. "For many, politics was not a game but a battle, just like it had been in the days of old when colonialism flourished. Opposition was thus frowned upon by incumbent regimes as a demonstration of personal enmity, and unfortunately the politics of Sierra Leone has not much changed; it continues to be dogged by that mentality right up to the present."

This is the background, he says, to the dramatic events that followed the death in 1964 of Sierra Leone's first prime minister, Sir Milton Margai. The events include the power struggle between Dr John Karefa-Smart and Albert Margai; the split of the ruling Sierra Leone Peoples Party, the beginning of tribal and patron-clientelism in favour of the Mendes in the military and public service; the emergence of the All Peoples Congress (APC) led by Siaka Stevens as a formidable opposition, and the beat goes on..."

Of particular interest - in this opening chapter of the book - is Bundu's well- researched discussion of the events leading to Major Johnny Paul Koroma's coup of 25 May 1997.

Bundu says the widening rift between the national army under Kabbah's government and the Kamajor militia (which became the darling of the government), the government's own role in derailing the Abidjan Peace Accord of November 1996 signed by the government and the RUF, and wide-spread allegations of vote-rigging in the 1996 elections that brought Kabbah to power, were the fundamental reasons for Johnny Paul's coup.

The "rogue" elections, as Bundu calls it, looms large in his statistical analysis of the number of votes cast against the number of registered voters, and how the electoral commission manipulated the votes to give victory to Kabbah.

"Almost every coup d'etat in the country has had roots either in electoral fraud or in the unwillingness of the incumbent to accept defeat and give up power," Bundu says. "[And] for every such coup, the main victims have been freedom, democracy and human security."

Nigerian intervention

Bundu is scathing about the Nigerian "intervention by invitation" (as he calls it) in Sierra Leone's internal conflict.

He argues that "unlike [the] ECOWAS interventions in Liberia and Guinea Bissau, which were designated as ECOMOG (Ecowas Ceasefire Monitoring Group), Ecowas, for good measure, withheld that designation from the 'sub-regional forces' it authorised for Sierra Leone. The mandates of these two forces were quite different in terms of both operation and jurisdiction...

"While, therefore, Nigeria alone is responsible for its military intervention in Sierra Leone, the same cannot be said for the Ecomog operations in Liberia and Guinea-Bissau. The latter operations were eminently veritable undertakings by the organisation as a whole and have been generally accepted as Africa's first successful flagship in international peace-enforcement, peacekeeping, peace-making and peace-building".

General Sanni Abacha, then Nigeria's head of state and a good friend of President Kabbah's, sent his troops into Freetown on 2 June 1997 in an attempt to save his beleaguered friend and his government from possible defeat at the hands of the RUF.

"True to Abacha's penchant for unilateralism," Bundu says, "there had been neither consultation with other Ecowas leaders nor any vestige of evidence of an Ecowas decision in favour of military intervention. Some countries clearly broke ranks."

Thus, the characterisation of the Nigerian intervention force in Sierra Leone as "Ecomog" was "done in order to clothe it with some international or regional legitimacy. The question was whether this was not a mis-charaterisation."

Bundu criticises the Ecowas so-called "sub-regional forces" for exceeding their mandate in Sierra Leone, and also lampoons the international community for adopting the "counterproductive strategy of see no evil, speak no evil, thus making itself an accessory to [the] transgressions [of the Nigerian troops]. Indeed it provides a classical example of how not to delegate enforcement powers to a regional agency involved in an internal armed conflict", he says.

He has equally harsh words for the United Nations, which claimed to have acted in Sierra Leone to protect democracy, constitutional governance and human rights. Though the UN delivered a robust pro-democracy message to Johnny Paul's military junta, Bundu says the world body, nonetheless, made it quite clear that its "objective was to be achieved by peaceful means only."

Yet, notwithstanding its new distaste for military regimes, "the UN seemed deliberately blind to the excesses of [the] intervention forces in Sierra Leone."

He asks whether the UN action was consistent with its charter, or "whether its activism is not nowadays, especially after the end of the Cold War, defined by factors such as geography, race, natural endowment and national interest."

Bundu is at his best when analysing the violation of human rights by Kabbah's government. "The focus here is particularly on the treason trials that followed Kabbah's restoration to power and the manner in which they were conducted," he says.

In many respects, the trials looked like a chrysalis of triumph, and revenge was the driving force of justice. Over 4,000 detainees were crammed into the small cells of Pendemba Road prison that was originally meant for 400. And their rights were routinely abused, Bundu says.

The way forward

Bundu finishes the book by looking at "what should be done in plural societies to promote and guarantee domestic peace and security."

"If there is, at least, one object lesson that the internal conflict in Sierra Leone provides, it is that foreign military interventions in such conflicts seldom yield durable peace and security," he says.

"On the other hand, peaceful...solutions, however protracted the negotiations might be, have generally proved more enduring. This is because while the former is generally viewed as imposed from outside with all attendant constrains, the latter enjoys the intrinsic merits of local ownership, public confidence and public trust."

In conclusion, Bundu submits that: "Unless and until the crisis of public confidence in the independence and impartiality of national electoral and judicial systems is halted and reversed, responsibility for electoral supervision, not mere monitoring, should be vested in an impartial international agency, be it at continental or regional level.

"It would ensure that the elections are not only fair but are seen to be fair, in order to elicit unqualified public acceptance of their verdict. For countries emerging from the throes of civil war, this strategy could be made an essential part of any integrated conflict prevention or post-conflict peace-building support structures."

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