The Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a truth commission created as part of the Lomé Peace Accord, which ended the 11-year civil war conflict in Sierra Leone in July 1999.
The Sierra Leone Civil War began on March 23, 1991. The Revolutionary United Front, supported by the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, attempted to overthrow the Joseph Momoh government. This attempt resulted in the Sierra Leone Civil War, that lasted 11 years, leaving over 50,000 dead.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created as part of the Lomé Peace Accord, signed on July 7, 1999, which was intended to end the civil war in Sierra Leone. This accord was signed by then President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and the leader of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) Foday Sankoh.[1]
The aims of the commission were to establish "an impartial historical record of violations and abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law related to the armed conflict in Sierra Leone from the beginning of the Conflict in 1991 to the signing of the Lomé Peace Agreement; to address impunity, to respond to the needs of the victims, to promote healing and reconciliation and to prevent a repetition of the violations and abuses suffered." The commission was chaired by Bishop Joseph Christian Humper. It operated from 2002 to 2004, with a final report being presented to the United Nations Security Council on October 5, 2004.
The commission's mandate was to "provide a degree of accountability for human rights abuses committed during the conflict." Below is a brief summary of its mandate.
The commission also strove to give special attention to victims of sexual abuse and to children who were either victims or perpetrators.[2]
The commissioners were:[3]
The executive secretary was the lawyer Yasmin Jusu-Sheriff.[4]
A major task of the TRC was to interview victims on both sides of the conflict and report on what they found. The commission reported a number of findings, including:
The Reparations section of the Truth Commission is aimed at creating a reparations program for the victims of the Sierra Leonean conflict. Such a program is difficult to create as there are a number of victims on both sides of the conflict, as well as a number of different crimes committed by both sides. Because of this, the commission had to determine who would benefit from a reparations program.
In designing a reparations programme for the victims of the Sierra Leonean conflict, the Commission had to take into account a number of factors. It would have been gratifying if all victims of the conflict could benefit from a reparations programme but such a programme would be totally impossible for the country to implement. The Commission therefore had to determine who would benefit from a reparations programme. The Commission determined the category of beneficiaries by considering those victims who were particularly vulnerable because of the human rights violations they had suffered and the harm that they continued to live with.It is important to note that the TRC Act did not explicitly use the term "reparations". Instead, they were instructed to "address the needs of the victims," and restore the human dignity of victims" as well as "promote healing and reconciliation."
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act of 2000 requires any commission to make recommendations concerning the reforms and measures needed to achieve the object of the commission. These recommendations are crucial in order to promote the healing process for the nation after the conflict. In the case of the Sierra Leone commission, the reparations are aimed at the "building of a new Sierra Leone based on the values of human dignity, tolerance and respect for the rights of all persons." The main recommendations of the commission were:
In her book Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions, Priscilla B. Hayner examines various truth commissions, one of which is the commission for Sierra Leone. One of her main criticisms of the report was the government's inability to enact many of the commission's recommendations. The "government was required to submit public quarterly reports on the actions it had taken to fulfill the recommendations." The government made slow but eventual progress in the implementation of the commission's recommendations.
Hayner also points out a common criticism facing many truth commissions; the need for "social forgetting". Many citizens in Sierra Leone felt that social forgetting was crucial to the process of healing and reconciliation. Unfortunately, many citizens were not able to simply forget, as they were pressured into making official statements to the commission regarding their experiences during the Civil War.