Sierra Leone Shows the Way for Security Sector Reform

The country’s rebirth after its civil war sets a new standard for reconstitution of the military

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When Sierra Leone’s civil war ended in January 2002, the country was in shambles. Some 50,000 people had died, and more than 2 million people — a third of the population — were refugees. There had been atrocities. Buildings and roads were destroyed. The country’s records were gone. There was no intelligence and no security system. The level of infrastructure destruction was unprecedented; almost everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.

The war, which began in 1991, also left the country awash in ex-combatants, unresolved political tensions, high unemployment and small arms.

Five years after the war’s end, for the first time in 20 years, Sierra Leone conducted peaceful national elections with no peacekeeping help. When no presidential candidate received the majority necessary to win, a runoff election was held the next month. The Economic Community of West African States declared the elections to be “free, fair and credible.”

The country has since demonstrated that those elections were not an anomaly. In November 2012, the country had its third general election since the end of the civil war. Despite having 10 political parties, Sierra Leone conducted peaceful, successful elections at the presidential, parliamentary and local levels.

A 2009 report commissioned by the United Kingdom Global Conflict Prevention Pool credited the United Nations and the United Kingdom with intervening in the civil war and restoring order, but went on to say that successful elections were the work of the Sierra Leonean people.

The report said that the elections were evidence of the country’s successful security sector reforms.

“The key to this security transformation has been, and continues to be, the leadership provided by a core of Sierra Leonean Government officials who have sustained the security reform effort over an extended period of time, often in difficult circumstances,” the report said. The country’s security sector reform (SSR) was praised as a prototype for other countries to follow.

Sierra Leonean policymakers, the report said, “were making extremely difficult decisions on short notice, in the field and within dysfunctional, at times nonexistent, state institutions.”

Researchers have concluded that the word “reform” does not go far enough in explaining what the country went through. One researcher referred to the process as a “comprehensive transformation of security structures” spread over a decade. The 2009 U.K. report said the transformation “reached deep into internal and external security institutions, altered command structures, provided top-to-bottom training, and established staffing policies, procedures and behavior.”

In December 2013, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies hosted a workshop of security sector leaders from 10 Central African countries. Speaker Ismail Tarawali of the Sierra Leone Office of National Security said his country’s SSR began with the recognition that all citizens had to be involved.

“Sierra Leoneans were dissatisfied with what they saw as a corrupt definition of security, a concept of security which focused almost exclusively on regime survival,” Tarawali said. “Equally problematic was the traditional approach to security, which is state-centric. Sierra Leoneans instead embraced a holistic understanding of security, a vision which placed the citizen at the center of the national security-making process.”

To that end, the country created a civilian Office of National Security. The office established standards for the restructuring of the police, the Armed Forces and the intelligence network. Tarawali said the restructuring extended from the village level to the national level.

“To be frank, there was a very serious and popular push by Sierra Leoneans to follow the Liberian model of disbanding the entire military and building it anew,” Tarawali said. “That, in and of itself, convinced the military and police of the need to embrace reform, if only to restore their badly damaged prestige in the eyes of their compatriots.”

Sierra Leone is not an easy place to promote peace. The country has about 16 ethnic groups, each with its own customs and language. English is the country’s official language, but it is not widely spoken. The country also has some cultural advantages. Although it is mostly Muslim, it has a significant Christian population, and a reputation throughout Africa for the two groups peacefully co-existing.

With so much ethnic diversity in Sierra Leone, Tarawali said it was imperative to include virtually everyone in the security sector reforms — reforms that are planned out well into the next decade.

“We brought representatives from police, military, local and international nongovernment organizations, traditional rulers, and broader structures of civil society together into a National Working Group to develop a strategic security vision for Sierra Leone out of which our new defense and national security policy framework was created,” he said. “The national security assessments that emerged from this process were tied to Vision 2025, a guiding document which creates a vision for where the country should be in 2025.”

A ‘FAILED STATE’

Sierra Leone native Dr. Abu Bakarr Bah, an associate professor at Northern Illinois University in the United States, said that at the end of the civil war, his homeland was “a failed state.”

“I often tell people that Sierra Leone reached rock bottom,” Bah said. “And once you hit rock bottom, you can only shoot up.”

Bah said the military had “disappeared” by the end of the war. Its rebirth, he said, began with the demobilization of the combatants. “Those who gave up their weapons and agreed to peace — a group of them were actually accepted into the new force.”

Next came training the new Army. “The training had two components,” Bah said. “One was the technical, the military skills, such as shooting. The other was what they call the professionalism, instilling a vision of a force that is disciplined, controlled — that is, democratic and civilian controlled. They were trained in the basic management of a bureaucracy — how you handle promotions, how you handle salaries.”

The country created the Sierra Leone Anti-Corruption Commission to deal with the very problems that led to the civil war.

“In practical terms, corruption really comes down to three kinds of activities,” Bah said. “One is bribery — someone will ask you to pay them money for doing a job they are supposed to provide for free. I want to get my passport from the immigration office, and the immigration officer will say that you have to give me money before I give you your passport on time.

“Another type of corruption is discrimination,” he said. “Two people will apply for a job. One is more qualified, but the less-qualified person gets the job because you know the person’s uncle or because of your tribal ethnic background.

“The third type is actual embezzlement. For example, there’s a fund with $10,000 to build a school, and they spend $3,000 on the school and then they find all kinds of accounting gimmicks to take the other $7,000.” Bah said the Anti-Corruption Commission is devoting most of its energies to embezzlement.

“The strategy is to actually drag people to court, but do settlements instead of actually litigating the cases,” he said. “The strategy is to actually recover money. The thinking is that litigating does not always lead to people paying money back.”

Before the civil war, the Sierra Leonean Army was considered to be nothing more than the preserver of a corrupt regime. That, in part, led to the war.

“In a sense, it’s the military’s job to preserve the state,” Bah said. “The problem is, what is the character of the regime? In the prewar, they had to preserve a regime that was one party, corrupt. Now their job should be to actually preserve a democratic regime. If they are to protect the institutions of democracy, the system of elections, that’s fine.”

MORE THAN THE ARMY

SSR involves more than just the Army. In the later stages of Sierra Leone’s reforms, the country began examining its Ministry of Internal Affairs and its prison services. Enough time has passed that observers are now documenting what worked and what didn’t during the country’s reform process. The 2009 U.K. report includes these findings:

• Getting the right people in place and taking action “is more valuable than detailed, extensive and time-consuming planning.” Give the right people the power to make decisions, and then let them do their jobs.
• National ownership is critical, even at the beginning of the process, when the government is in pieces. Outside help, such as the United Nations, should be as advisors, not implementers.
• Turnover is “chronically high” among outside advisors. Therefore, the establishment of a good national team that can weather a steady parade of advisors is critical. Building and retaining such a national team is among the most difficult parts of security reform.
• The national team and outsiders must develop a good exit strategy for the advisors. Any reform plan must include a “late-stage” strategy.
• If the national team is too small, it can be misused if the country becomes unstable. The national team must reach a size of “critical mass” to sustain itself in the inevitable problem periods.

Bah points to Sierra Leone sending peacekeepers to other countries as proof of how far its reformed Army has come. The country has 850 Soldiers, including about 65 women, deployed in the African Union Mission in Somalia.

As of 2014, Sierra Leone had achieved stunning results in security reform. But the country still faced major problems. As the U.N. pulled out of the country in March 2014 after 15 years of peace operations, officials warned that Sierra Leone still had to deal with poverty, unemployment, lingering corruption and upholding the rule of law.  But hope remains.

In an April 2014 speech, Sierra Leonean President Ernest Bai Koroma said his country’s reforms were an example for the rest of the world. “Today we are not only amongst the most peaceful of nations in the world, we are also exporting peace and security to other countries through their participation in peacekeeping operations in Somalia, Darfur and other parts of the world.”