Written By: Kakuna Kerina, Matthew Leone & David Tam-Baryoh

Media Coverage of Sierra Leone and its Impact

The international media's coverage of Africa has generally presented the region's crises as sporadic outbreaks of chaos, with violence appearing to be random and anarchic, rather than actual premeditated terror campaigns waged against innocent citizens in numerous countries including Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Liberia. Simultaneously, in war-torn countries the local independent press is usually targeted by all parties involved in conflicts, who understand that local coverage can generate international scrutiny when human rights violations and atrocities escalate. This combination of underreporting in the international media and silencing of the local media has fostered an environment where the international community, through the absence of the international outcry that often results when citizens worldwide are informed, could easily retreat from the region's complicated crises.

This is the case in Sierra Leone where Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels under the leadership of Corporal Foday Sankoh, have committed calculated widespread killings and amputations to deliberately terrorize civilians and render the country ungovernable. The conflict in Sierra Leone was not drawn along ethnic or tribal lines, despite numerous outside efforts to portray it as such. Nor is the country a typical "failed state" in disintegration, but rather a nation that has survived significant externally initiated and supported destabilization and social dislocation, as well as attempts by numerous parties to exploit the country's mineral resources.

Local journalists who reported on the war and related issues were targeted by all parties in the country's eight-year war. They were attacked by the democratically elected government of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, that retaliated by censoring non-compliant reporters and charging them with treason, and they were brutalized by the RUF, as well as the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) and Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) military regimes. But the importance of a free media was underscored when the State's policy of justified censorship during wartime in order to protect troops and maintain national security was shot full of holes in the January 1999 RUF invasion of Freetown. The Kabbah government's control over unfavorable war coverage backfired as the RUF advanced towards Freetown and ultimately took the capitol's population, the government, and the Nigerian-led West African Peacekeeping Forces (ECOMOG) by surprise, resulting in the loss of over 5,000 civilian lives. Local journalists staunchly believe that if they had been allowed to report freely, many deaths could have been prevented because civilians may have had sufficient time to escape to safer areas of the city.

The international media has largely failed to inform the world about the circumstances, parties involved, and the severe repercussions on society of this 8 _ year war, and for much of its duration, have simply let the story go unreported. And since the January 6, 1999, RUF invasion that turned Freetown into a war zone, to the July 7, 1999, signing of the Lome Peace Accord that granted amnesty for the perpetrators of human rights atrocities and war crimes, the international media has focused almost exclusively on the war's amputee victims.

The result of this simultaneous restriction of the local press and limited and predominantly sensationalist international coverage, devoid of the desperately needed analysis that routinely informs and influences international policy, is that almost four months after the Peace Accord was signed, little has changed. Few of the Peace Accord's critical provisions such as disarmament of combatants, have yet to be implemented. Nor has the majority of the promised financial support necessary to rebuild the country materialized. The "momentum" that all parties involved in the peace process promised to seize is rapidly dissipating, and the international community appears to have moved on to other crises.

The International League for Human Rights believes that if information about the strategic orchestration of gross violations of human, and related atrocities in Sierra Leone had been available to the public, international obligations to prevent and stop those abuses could have been acted upon. An estimated 150,000 lives could have been saved, and surviving citizens could have been spared the brutal trauma inflicted upon them.

Today, Sierra Leone leads the continent with approximately 400,000 refugees, and an additional 1,000,000 internally displaced persons. The League believes that an opportunity currently exists, where with adequate and immediate resources committed to rebuilding civil society, supporting the media, restoring the infrastructure, and addressing the needs of countless victims of war-related trauma, the peace could be sustained and Sierra Leone's citizens could realize their hopes for the nation's future.