Marks 2019, Women in Rebellion, the Case of Sierra Leone by Harvard Kennedy School

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone

Oxford Handbooks Online Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone Zoe Marks The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security Edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True Print Publication Date: Feb 2019 Subject: Political Science, International Relations Online Publication Date: Dec 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190638276.013.37

Abstract and Keywords A key objective for the women, peace, and security agenda going forward is to disaggregate the experiences of women as a group, and to understand how gender functions in conflict contexts. This chapter focuses on the diverse roles of female combatants in rebel groups to gain insight into how power is distributed, not only between men and women, or combatants and civilians, but within groups. Rebel groups are characterized by military and political apparatuses that are built side by side and often entangled. Organizational power structures are often dominated by men, but not exclusively so. Using interviews and archival data from the Sierra Leone Civil War case study, this chapter delivers an analysis of women’s experiences in rebel movements. It explores the individual trajectories of mobilization and victimization in Sierra Leone. Next, it examines the unique experiences of female combatants, before situating them in the broader political context. Finally, the chapter considers cases of sexual violence, intimate partnerships, conflict among women, and the political entrepreneurship of elite women to understand female participation in rebellion in its entirety. Keywords: rebellion, agency, female combatants, Sierra Leone, empirical research, interviews

THE Sierra Leone civil war was one of the conflicts at the forefront of policymakers’ minds when the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325. The war raged erratically and destructively across the small West African country of 5 million people from 1991 to 2002, and has become a paradigmatic case for understanding atrocity and the so-called “new wars” driven by inequality, weak states, and global profiteering (Straus 2012; Kaldor 2003). The primary rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone (RUF), was notorious for deploying child soldiers, amputating civilians’ limbs, and using rape and sexual violence against women and girls of all ages (Guberek et al. 2006). After the war finally ended, Sierra Leone also became a paradigmatic case in liberal peacebuilding. Its post-conflict interventions—peacekeeping; disarmament, demobilization, and Page 1 of 16

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Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone reintegration; security sector reform; and transitional justice—were on the whole, seen as a great success at the time and shaped the formula for other post-conflict reconstruction processes. The country thus served as an incubator for and an experiment in many of the issues that today define the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Since the war’s end, we have learned much more about what actually happened in Sierra Leone and the role of women and girls, and gender relations more broadly, in shaping the conflict (Coulter 2008; 2009). We also understand more clearly the limitations of post-war reconstruction efforts. This chapter focuses our attention on the varied experiences of women and girls in rebellion in order to highlight the practical realities of implementing WPS policies on the ground in conflict settings. Throughout, I primarily refer to “women” for efficiency and as a term inclusive of adolescent girls in Sierra Leone’s cultural context; I specify age where salient, and acknowledge the importance of legal definitions from an advocacy perspective. The overarching research question framing this essay is how does positionality affect women’s conflict experiences in armed groups and their post-conflict needs? Following Alcoff (1988), hooks (1981), Crenshaw (1991), and YuvalDavis (2006), I use positionality to refer to the ways gender identity is both inherently relational, socially constructed, and understood in relation to other women, men, girls, boys, and is intersectional with other social categories including class, religion, ethnicity, age, and so on. This relational and intersectional approach enables us to analyze how gender constrains or shapes individual experiences, institutional and organizational power structures, and patterns of violence, victimization, and (p. 490) survival. It sharpens our understanding of the implications of armed group dynamics for WPS issues. I first examine pathways of mobilization for female participants in the RUF, explaining how being a target of violence and mobilizing for violence were closely interrelated. I then turn to the gender-segregated power structures of the RUF and highlight the importance of the political organizational context for understanding women’s widely varying experiences and access to power. I highlight the strategic importance of women in supporting the war machine and establishing a society in the bush. The final section pays special attention to the practical issues this raises for WPS policies and priorities in light of the fact that revolutionary movements often fail to deliver on their promise to transform gender roles and inequality.

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Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone

Mobilization and Victimization Like all wars, the Sierra Leone civil war began before the first shots were fired, and the RUF’s origins strongly shape how pathways to mobilization unfolded. Foday Sankoh, the founder and leader of the RUF, first recruited “Vanguard” members in neighboring Liberia in 1990 shortly after helping his friend and entrepreneurial counterpart, Charles Taylor, launch his own rebellion. Taylor’s insurgency was rebuffed by the state Armed Forces of Liberia, as well as by the Sierra Leone Armed Forces and other members of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), a regional peacekeeping force. To punish the Sierra Leone government for their intervention in his rebellion, Taylor ordered his troops to kill or capture all Sierra Leoneans residing in Liberia (Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] 2004: 99–100). As a result, Sankoh had fertile ground on which to cajole Sierra Leoneans into joining the RUF Vanguard in Liberia, with many members “rescued” by Sankoh from the hands of Liberian rebels and motivated to join the RUF by their need for protection. These violent origins of the RUF are crucial to understanding the prominent role played by physical insecurity and overt coercion in mobilizing people to fight in the RUF once the war moved into Sierra Leone. The “Vanguard,” recruited in Liberia, numbered less than four hundred troops and had just seventeen women. As one of the female Vanguard members describes, in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, trust-based social networks, a coercive wartime context, and political grievances combined in powerful ways to lead people to join Sankoh’s revolutionary project: [My best friend] is the one that made me to join in this war when we were [studying] in Liberia. We were Sierra Leonean, and she went to me and she said, “Mariatu, if you stay here, people are going to kill you. So, let us go and fight for our country.” I said, “Which fight is that?” She said, “you don’t know that the leader from the Sierra Leone rebel leadership is here?” (Interview: Mariatu Thomas, Vanguard/Women’s Auxiliary Corps, Makeni, 2009; interviewee names are pseudonyms) After nine months of training, the newly minted RUF Vanguard launched a pincer assault to liberate their home country from what they saw as corrupt and plundering one-party rule. They broke through the border and led invasion and recruitment campaigns in rural Southern and Eastern Sierra Leone. It was a fumbling, violent start: communication was (p. 491) soon cut off between the battalions; the military strategy of storming to the capital failed; and Liberian forces ransacked the same towns and villages from which the Sierra Leonean fighters sought to recruit adherents to their nascent revolution. However, decades of misrule, underdevelopment, and political marginalization also made the population sympathetic to their cause, if terrified of the means. The RUF operated an invade-rally-recruit strategy in nearly every village they entered, firing warning shots, corralling people into the local court barrie (where the chief presides), and announcing the arrival of the revolution. Further, although less than 1 percent of Vanguard members Page 3 of 16

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone were women, they took up a gender equitable recruitment strategy after invading Sierra Leone in 1991, seeking to recruit both men and women as fighters and in support roles as medics, radio operators, secretaries, and more. During its first few years, the RUF recruited teenaged and young adult men and women to their training camps through a combination of persuasion and coercion. One male Vanguard member described recruiting “gallant men [who] joined because they were tired of the rotting system” (Interview: Kai Fekkah, Vanguard/S4 Commander, Makeni 2009). But, a schoolboy who joined in the South provides a typical narrative from the perspective of those on the receiving end of recruitment: I was going to school. The rebels captured the town and called everyone in front of their houses, then started picking out the young men and women, and told them to join the movement. There was no resistance because we had heard they were at Zimmi a nearby border town. (Interview: Sylvester Kabbia, Junior commando, Makeni 2009) His description reveals a mix of ambivalent local-level compliance with armed fighters, and resignation to the arrival of a war many saw as inevitable and necessary in Sierra Leone at the time. The enthusiasm with which some communities welcomed the RUF, however, was largely short-lived. It quickly became clear that armed revolution was a violent and resource intensive endeavor, with taxes levied on local communities that were already struggling to survive. There were harsh penalties for noncompliance, and those trying to leave rebel territory risked being victimized by state forces unable to distinguish combatants from civilians. This narrowed the options available to people who found themselves behind RUF lines. At the individual level, women, children, and young people who became involved in the RUF had often been separated from their families. Trapped in a war zone, the group provided them the best chance for accessing food and physical security, albeit at great personal risk. Future fighters were separated from civilians with other transferrable skills, such as teachers, medics, mechanics, and drivers. The military training in the RUF was particularly brutal, and female recruits were subject to the same strenuous and violent practices as male recruits. Recruits endured a litany of abusive drills designed to prepare them for a violent guerrilla existence in the bush. As one Women’s Auxiliary Corps commander describes: [One] training was called “Escape for Survival,” where they took us to the middle of the bush. We couldn’t eat or drink for three days, so that at the frontline we can take hunger. They divided the group into two mock groups, the RUF and the “SLA” (Sierra Leone Army). There were two commanders and they gave us sticks as mock arms. We had to lay ambush while the other group makes like they’re

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Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone passing the road. The commander fired up with a real gun (p. 492) to show the ambush. We would call the password, “commando!” and they had to say “brave, strong, intelligent” (Interview: Naberay Morrison, Women’s Auxiliary Corps Commander, Makeni 2009). From 1994 onward, mobilization patterns shifted as the RUF retreated from towns to guerrilla camps hidden in Sierra Leone’s deepest forests and hills. This so-called jungle phase led to widespread forced recruitment as civilians were forced to carry supplies rebels looted from their villages into the RUF bush camps. The shift to guerrilla warfare also had a particularly pernicious gendered element, bringing intimate relationships and women’s (re)productive labor more closely into the military sphere. From 1994 to 1995, Sankoh and other commanders encouraged male fighters to choose “wives” (also called “bush wives”), who they would keep in the camps to provide some of the logistical support previously provided by civilians living in villages in rebel-controlled territory. The result was twofold: a major increase in the rate of forced marriage, rape, and abduction (see Guberek et al. 2006; Smith et al. 2004; TRC 2004), and a marked shift in gender roles within the group, described in the next section. Within two years, however, the wife recruitment policy inaugurated under “Operation Fine Girl” was withdrawn, because supporting and protecting, as well as guarding, high numbers of untrained civilians drained security and material resources. Later mobilization patterns were characterized by continuity and change. In the second half of the war, from 1997 onward, participant numbers spiked as the RUF was joined by the mutinous SLA and together both fought against the community-mobilized Civil Defense Forces (CDF). Throughout this period, women and girls continued to be forced to join the RUF during raids on farms and villages. Such encounters were often characterized by rape and other forms of violence against family and community members (Marks 2014). Coercion and violence persisted in contested territory and anti-civilian retaliation campaigns increased in response to CDF mobilization. But, recruitment and training declined across the organization. Gradually, as negotiated peace became an increasingly likely prospect, forced recruitment declined and members settled into more ordinary domestic units, often in towns and villages. In controlled territory, the RUF sought to attract followers and curry favor with local businessmen and women eager to tap into their social and economic networks. Mobilization patterns thus became even more stratified according to one’s social station. Young girls and poor rural women had very little with which to bargain and were often at the mercy of diffuse groups of armed combatants they encountered. Yet, large stretches of urban areas and controlled zones saw life unfold day-to-day much as it did in peacetime. These recruitment patterns are important for a few reasons. First, they reveal the close connection between coercion, violence, and mobilization. As decades of feminist security studies research has shown, there is often no bright line between victim and perpetrator (see, for example, Elshtain 1987; Moser and Clark 2001; Utas 2005), and the same was Page 5 of 16

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone true in Sierra Leone (Cohen 2016). Most women who became RUF combatants had also themselves suffered extreme human rights violations in their initial encounter with the group, and as members they were subject to its harsh laws (Marks 2014). Many women and men were also complicit in perpetrating crimes on others that had been perpetrated on them, from forced recruitment and rape, to violent training and punishment within the organization. Second, I have highlighted change over time to underscore the importance of adapting policy solutions to a dynamic and shifting context. Preventing recruitment, whether (p. 493) voluntary or forced, requires understanding the patterns of insurgent mobilization on the ground and decriminalizing the highly constrained choices people are forced to make to survive. Finally, as the next section will explore, women’s varied pathways into the group also shaped their roles and opportunities, and ultimately their experiences, within the RUF. More abject experiences of forced mobilization often translate into prolonged vulnerability.

Military, Social, and Political Power The fundamental distinction in armed conflict between combatants and civilians is often blurry and contested in civil war. Civilian neutrality is particularly difficult to protect when insurgents rely on the local population for support or cover, whether enthusiastic or elicited by force. Adding to the confusion, in Sierra Leone the RUF distinguished between “enemy civilians” and “RUF civilians.” Under international humanitarian law, it is illegal to target any civilians with violence. However, in practice, the RUF governed civilian activities and relations within its own territory and camps with tight control, but largely failed to extend protection policies and organizational policing to people residing in government territory, who were seen as potential government collaborators. Falling within the rebels’ sphere of influence was, therefore, a double-edged sword. While it meant protection from certain forms of frontline violence, it also exposed members to abuses that included restrictions on movement, controlled social relations, steep taxes on goods, and military judicial structures with harsh, often lethal, punishment. People’s experiences of vulnerability within the organization, as such, followed internal logics of power. These can be best understood through the organization’s military, social, and political hierarchies. Everyone within the ambit of the RUF was distinguished according to whether or not they had been trained militarily. Most participants who joined in the first phase of the war received military training. In line with the shifting mobilization trajectories, women who joined in the early years were much more likely to be trained to handle weapons and conduct tactical missions than those who joined in the second and third phases of the conflict (1994–2001). Then, civilian numbers ballooned, partly as a result of people joining the RUF in the bush out of fear of being accused of collaborating with the insurgents and, therefore, targeted by pro-government forces. Women and girls who were forcibly recruited as wives or civilians had a more restricted set of options than female Page 6 of 16

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone fighters. Civilian women primarily served in the private or domestic sphere of the organization, which itself was integral to the logistical capacity of the movement. Lastly, some of the more powerful women who opted into the group’s project in the later stages did so as a form of social navigation, seeking to maximize their life chances in a militarily and politically shifting landscape. According to early recruits into the RUF, female fighters suffered more than their male counterparts in battle in the early years of the war. As a result, unlike men, their participation in military operations was made optional, not compulsory, for much of the war. Some female fighters gained a reputation for being particularly fearsome in frontline operations, like “Adama Cut-Hands,” and enjoyed going to fight because it gave them an opportunity to bring back loot and build their reputation. Mid-level female fighters had command over the child soldiers who made up the “small boys” (SBU) and “small girls” (SGU) units, respectively. They would take them on “food finding missions” in territory surrounding the (p. 494) rural bases and manage their labor in the camps. Trained women had their own command chain, the Women’s Army Corps, or Women’s Auxiliary Corps (referred to throughout the war as “WACs”, there is some confusion among members as to what the acronym stood for), the name of which draws on similar structures in British and US military history. The WACs were intended to be a parallel structure with a female counterpart to each male military officer overseeing male troop operations. In practice, however, many WACs command positions went unfilled. After the overall WACs commander died in 1994, for example, the position was not filled again until 1997. Instead, throughout the “jungle” phase of the war, guerrilla military bases each had local WACs commanders who oversaw operations and assignments for trained women. Toward the end of the war, the top-ranked overall training commander was a WACs member, and several of the female Vanguard members had risen in the ranks of the group. Senior WACs commanders presided over the Women’s Task Force, which served as a pseudo-judicial liaison office between civilian women and male combatants. As a civilian wife described: If you have any problems with your man, you go to [the Task Force commander] and she will settle the matter. I went once because my husband was beating me. She talked to him, and he stopped for some time. If she told him, he had to stop. Sometimes she would call meetings for the women to show us how to fight. She would encourage the women and explain about the war. (Interview: Lettitia Ballah, April 2008, Mile 91) The WACs commander and Women’s Task Force thus had status within the maledominated military apparatus of the organization and power over the civilian women’s wing. Civilian women’s affairs were organized around wives’ committees and a political Women’s Wing. Women did most of the cooking, cleaning, fetching water, and laundering in camps. Those who were married, forcibly or voluntarily, to male fighters usually stayed in the camp and cared for their partner and children. Wives’ commanders organized this Page 7 of 16

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone female labor in a militarized fashion and delegated tasks on a daily basis. Women often delegated their tasks, in turn, to children or junior wives. Slivers of social hierarchy were thus sharpened in the labor intensive environment of low-budget insurgency. Competition, harassment, and abuse were common between senior and junior wives where commanders had multiple female partners, and between trained and untrained women in the RUF. There were thus multiple gendered hierarchies at play. For trained women, their military skills garnered a level of legitimacy and cachet within the organization. They could access typically masculine militarized power by distinguishing themselves from the feminized “wife” role. There was value in being seen as brave and strong “as a man” at the frontlines, and good military performance underpinned promotion in the group. Moreover, within the camps, the ability to use violence curried respect and served as a source of protection in a highly insecure environment. The incorporation of untrained women and girls into rebel camps threatened to destabilize the precarious security of female fighters and led to divisions between women. To avoid losing their status as equal to men, trained women fiercely differentiated themselves from untrained women. Within the wives’ sphere, many women and girls described facing physical and verbal threats and intimidation from female fighters. Early female recruits saw themselves as original members and viewed later joiners with suspicion as less authentic or (p. 495) freeriding rather than fighting for the revolution. This internal cleavage was exacerbated by the fact that early joiners were overwhelmingly Mende-speaking, and subsequent recruitment waves incorporated more participants from other ethno-linguistic groups in the North of the country as the group expanded its territorial reach. Because late joiners were less likely to be trained and more likely to be partnered or “married” to male combatants, they drew on different sources of social capital to secure their position in the organization. Many young women and girls were in an abject position of almost total insecurity and vulnerability (Marks 2014). Separated from their home communities and families and forced to join a violent organization with polyglot membership, the girls’ primary source of security was often their “husband,” the man who claimed responsibility for them at the G-5, the civilian governance branch of the RUF. Women’s status thus varied in relation to that of their husbands or boyfriends. Unmarried and untrained women and girls were most susceptible to abuse by men and by commanders’ wives. Those partnered with commanders, on the other hand, had privileged access to food and other supplies. They had bodyguards who controlled their movements but also protected them from others’ advances or hostility. And they frequently looked after orphaned children who they fostered, and who they could also use (or abuse) as servants. As one of the top commanders’ wives describes it: Because I was Superman’s wife, I did not have to go on raids . . . Other girls who were not commanders’ wives were not treated as well. They were flogged, abused, and had to go on ambushes and raids for food

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Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone (Margaret Kanneh, quoted in Marks 2008: 35). There was thus a social hierarchy within the RUF according to whether female members were married and if that marriage came with protections (see Marks 2014). In interviews, women often referred to their political and military credentials to assert greater power and legitimacy than other women. Nowhere was the contentious relationship between trained and untrained women more apparent in the RUF than at the top, where WACs commanders resented the sudden political power wielded by senior male commanders’ wives. Toward the end of the war, a group of civilian women within the RUF formed the Revolutionary United Sisters’ Organization. Founded by a few senior civilian women and commanders’ wives to unify RUF and SLA women, the group sought to provide medical care, food, and other services to wounded soldiers, and to create a social and political space for women in the male dominated organization. However, Vanguard women refused to join, saying they had not been properly consulted: They came to Freetown to ask me to join under [Alice] but I said I would never join because they did not consult the founder women. [A top commander] just fell in love with her; she didn’t even join the revolution. She was just with a commander and had two pikin (children). If you are willing and you accept the ideology of the revolution you can be part of the revolution. (Interview: Fatu Tucker, Freetown, April 2008; also quoted in Marks 2014) The formation of wives’ committees and political groups by women who had not been part of the revolution from the beginning was seen as undermining the power and influence female fighters had fought hard to achieve. When it came time for peace talks at Lomé in 1999, both WACs and civilian women were tapped to attend. In the end, however, they were left behind due to military instability at the airfield where they were to be collected.

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Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone

Implications for Women, Peace, and Security (p. 496)

The overarching lesson for the WPS agenda is that, even across diverse mobilization pathways, women’s participation in armed groups cannot be conflated with empowerment. As we know from decades of research and dashed optimism, women’s inclusion in revolutionary movements, insurgencies, state militaries, or local militias does not equate inherently with gender equality or emancipation. Women in armed groups often reinforce masculine militarism; they are not given equal leadership opportunities and decision-making power; they experience disproportionately high levels of harassment and oppression; and upon demobilization their contributions are often erased from the historical record or remembered for their exceptionalism. This disconnect between participation and empowerment is underscored in other chapters in this collection, particularly those on conflict prevention, feminist anti-militarism, and disarmament. Moreover, in patriarchal societies, the premise of equal opportunity often serves to occlude formal and informal power structures that continue to limit women’s options, agency, and influence. The RUF was no exception. Women’s vulnerability, and conversely their power and influence, was moderated by many of the same social factors that stratified society in peacetime Sierra Leone. Age, education, and social ties were important attributes for gaining even small amounts of respect in the RUF’s society in the bush. Yet, the key factors influencing women’s power and security were their military status—training, rank, and facility with violence—and their marital status, whether they were partnered with a powerful man. These gendered dimensions of rebellion dramatically shaped women’s experiences of violence, protection, and participation.

Participation A clear lesson from Sierra Leone is that rebel groups and other military organizations may have large numbers of female participants and often have dedicated leadership positions for women. Organizations like the RUF, which have a political wing and military wing, should have both wings represented at peace talks and other negotiations. Moreover, participation quotas should require women’s inclusion from both branches. Women should not be included only as victims and civil society representatives in WPS. For the agenda to truly achieve its transformative potential, it must demand inclusion and representation from belligerents themselves. Including at peace talks representatives of the Women’s Wing, the Women’s Task Force, and the RUF’s Ministry of Gender, for example, would have brought better representation of the range of women’s issues within the RUF. It would also help transform gender equitable participation at the highest levels of rebel governance. Many of the female leaders within the RUF were involved in expanding education and medical care within the group’s territory; their inclusion would have highlighted these issues. Conversely, some women were complicit in war crimes and Page 10 of 16

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone abuse; their inclusion would also help strengthen accountability and help us better understand the gender dynamics of within-group impunity. Finally, low-ranked women must also be explicitly included in the structures and processes that broker peace. Often the political settlement agreed to by elites does little to redistribute power and resources to those who have been victimized and oppressed in civil war. This suggests we may need to identify space between track one and (p. 497) track two diplomacy, wherein stakeholder groups are given protected space to lobby for their needs as part of formal peace processes.

Protection and Prevention From a prevention perspective, the RUF record for within-group policing was a ghastly failure. Women and girls (and men and boys) were victimized and abused at every stage of the conflict. Civilians were targeted for food and other material supplies, and were retaliated against when local communities mobilized in self-defense. Forced recruitment campaigns dragged women and girls into the rebellion against their will and often after suffering rape and other violent encounters with armed fighters. It is all the more worrying that many of these practices were not the official policy or strategy of the RUF, nor of many state and non-state armed groups elsewhere (Marks 2013). This widespread abuse, and the fact abuses were also carried out in large numbers by other parties to the conflict, raises serious questions for the WPS agenda about impunity and prevention. Rape was outlawed in the code of conduct and was punishable by execution in the organization. Young girls, in particular, were supposed to be protected because they were considered too young for sexual relations. Yet, 25 percent of rape victims documented by the TRC were under the age of 13 (Conibere et al. 2004: 16) and many female combatants interviewed for this research described being raped upon capture. There is ample interview and archival evidence that the RUF did indeed also execute perpetrators of rape. However, it is undisputed that the organization continued to perpetrate rape throughout the war. How can we effectively disrupt cultures of violence and impunity within non-state armed groups? One possibility is to lean more heavily on armed groups’ own codes of conduct and internal laws. Where there are internal oversight and enforcement mechanisms, the international community and peace mediators can push for organizations to respect international humanitarian law by aligning and enforcing their own legal framework. A further lesson learned is that many of the worst abuses may happen within groups rather than between them, as women and girls are exposed to sustained violence and exploitation with only internal organizational rules and institutions for protection. Understanding the interwoven nature of victimization and perpetration of violence requires not criminalizing all members of insurgent organizations, but rather, recognizing the complex interplay between choice and coercion. A related lesson is the ambiguous commitment many participants had to the “revolution.” Both men and women mobilized for violence in situations of extreme uncertainty and precarity, wherein generalized Page 11 of 16

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone insecurity made joining the rebels one of the “least worst” options. More attention needs to be given to how conflict structures limit individual choices and actions. Treating combatants as people who may prefer to find themselves in different circumstances, rather than as militant ideologues, or lacking moral purpose, opens more avenues for demobilization.

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Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone

Relief and Recovery In the aforementioned context of widespread insecurity and coercive recruitment, women and girls may be the most vulnerable participants in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) campaigns. The Sierra Leone DDR process was at the time seen as a great success, with over seventy thousand fighters disarming. However, (p. 498)

shortcomings were soon revealed. Only 6.5 percent of participants were women, despite an estimated 30 percent of RUF being female (Solomon and Ginifer 2008). There are a number of reasons DDR systematically excluded women and girls. First, and most simply, the process underestimated the number of female participants in the war, and as a result did not prepare adequate facilities to support their inclusion. For example, DDR camps rarely had gender segregated sleeping and bathing facilities. Second, the entry requirement of turning in a weapon excluded women and girls whose male partners or commanders largely controlled their access to weapons. Male commanders frequently distributed weapons as a form of “patronage” to ensure their male fighters’ inclusion in DDR programs that were seen as a benefit, not a right. Third, many women and girls feared being labeled a rebel and potentially prosecuted if they participated in DDR. Much of the DDR process occurred amidst high levels of uncertainty and insecurity, and women who had already been harassed within the RUF may not have felt they would have adequate protection either from group members or other ex-combatants in the camps. Women who participated either in DDR or in other post-conflict rehabilitative programs were largely shunted back into the restrictive gender roles of peacetime Sierra Leonean society. Megan MacKenzie (2009) describes the peace-building process as one of gendered reordering, where women and girls who were seen as violating social norms by participating in violence and rebellion were taught to be hairdressers, seamstresses, and other typically feminine vocations. A premium was put on reintegrating women into their families and home communities, though material resources focused on individual responsibility and independence recreating a post-conflict gender gap. Future programming needs to address lost social capital and social ties if reconstruction is going to successfully support reintegration. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) began tracking temporary employment and livelihoods disbursements to women in 2013; however, the figures hover around one-third of economic benefits going to women (UN Women 2015: 9–10). Further limiting women’s ability to secure sustainable livelihoods and personal wellbeing is a lack of mental and physical healthcare in the aftermath of war. Sierra Leone had a paucity of mental health professionals trained or qualified to work with victims of trauma. As a result, mental and emotional recovery often became lumped in with inappropriate community activities like reconciliation and transitional justice. There has been little to no sustained effort to help ex-combatants and other victims of the war intellectually and emotionally process the violence they have witnessed and experienced, which has knock-on effects on core personal and social functions. Stress and post-trauma leads to disrupted sleep, anxiety and stress management problems, damaged trust and communication, and problems with long-term planning that are compounded by Sierra Leone’s extreme poverty. Moreover, women’s health and the Page 13 of 16

Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone broader care economy are not prioritized after war, despite the increased importance of social cohesion in facilitating peace-building and post-conflict recovery. Many women I have interviewed complain of physical manifestations of this neglect, including pain associated with sexual violence, infections, or unattended births. It was not until 2010, eight years after the war ended, that pregnant and lactating women could access free medical care, and there is still no public provision for victims of violence and abuse during the war to receive treatment. As a result, people say in the local Krio language that they are “managing,” but it is difficult, with poverty and lack of social protection the great equalizer between former combatants and civilians.

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Yuval-Davis, Nira. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13, no. 3 (2006): 193–209. Zoe Marks

Zoe Marks is Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

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