During the 1900’s two deadly wars were raging on, the civil war in Sierra Leone and the genocide in Rwanda. The civil war in Sierra Leone began in March 1991, while the genocide began in 1994. Combined these two wars killed upward of 1,050,000 people, and affected the lives of all the people that lived there. The conflicts in Sierra Leone and Rwanda occurred for different major reasons, but many little aspects were similar. Politics and Ethnicity were the two main conflicts, but despite the different moments rebellions and the murder of innocent people occurred in both places.
Politics was the factor that caused the Sierra Leone Civil War, while ethnicity and years of oppression fueled the genocide in Rwanda. These two causes are vastly different, and caused for two different results. The Sierra Leone Civil War was caused by political corruption, years before the war started in 1991 Sierra Leone’s government and economy was rapidly declining. In 1968 Siaka Stevens was elected into the presidential position and when he stepped down 17 years later, 1985, the country was completely ...
Being located in the west coast of Africa and between Guinea and Liberia, “Sierra Leone has an abundance of easily extractable diamonds”(BBC News). The diamonds had brought “encouragement” for violence in the country in 1991. Attacks of the Revolutionary “United Front (RUF) ,led by former army corporal Foday Sankoh”(Encyclopedia Britannica), were on government military and civilians. In response to a corrupt government, the RUF performed violent and terrorist acts that scarred many. “The RUF captured civilians and forced them to work”(Analyzing the Causes) in their army to gain control over Sierra Leone. The savages went a...
The analysis of the genocides that took place both in Rwanda and Sudan’s Darfur region exhibit some similarities as well as differences. The character of violence was similar in both cases, but in Rwanda the violence was more intense, participatory, and extraordinary. The violence in these two places took place in an environment that had experienced civil wars. It was a period of political transition which was further aggravated by ethnic nationalism and a conflict of ethnic populations that were living in close proximity. However, in the Rwandan genocide, the state is more centralized, compact, and effective. This is what explains the intensity and variation. The international response to these genocides through observers emphasized on using the genocide label to create domestic constituencies especially in the Rwandan case.
The Sierra Leone Civil War was a savage conflict that would rage for over a decade, claiming the lives of 300,000 and displacing 2.5 million civilians. The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier are firsthand accounts of children affected by the war. Mariatu Kamara had her hands severed and was left for dead. Ishmael Beah was conscripted by the government army to fight the rebel forces. Ishmael and Mariatu were both victims of the bloody Sierra Leone civil war, however their journeys to safety were vastly different.
In the early 1990s, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, led by former military agents invaded Sierra Leone from Liberia. The RUF initially said they were leading a political movement. Their main goals were to promote liberation, democracy, and freedom. They said they wanted justice and equality for all civilians living in Sierra Leone. In spite of what the RUF said they were doing, they were forceful and left trails of murder in their path. When civilians lacked support for the “political revolution”, the RUF started a decade long war that ravaged the country as a whole. The RUF developed a sense of structured, militarized violence. It created a climate of opportunities for average civilians to obtain cheap weapons. With the greater access to weapons for civilians and the RUF, the politics became more militarized also. As the war waged on, poverty rose and people began to resort to looting of national resources. Laws diminished and seemed to lack any strength against the brute force of the RUF and their civilian followers (Denov, 2010).
The genocides of the 20th century which occurred in Rwanda and Germany had striking similarities, something that should have alerted the world to stop them. At the core of these two massacres, patterns existed that outlined how similar thinking and reasoning could lead to something as horrible as these two events. One can see how both groups used their command of knowledge as a way to control the people, how the rest of the world refused to step up to stop the killings, and how the people were thought of as less than humans to provide a just cause for such terrible acts.
Africa has been an interesting location of conflicts. From the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea to the revolutionary conflict in Libya and Egypt, one of the greatest conflicts is the Rwandan Genocide. The Rwandan Genocide included two tribes in Rwanda: Tutsis and Hutus. Upon revenge, the Hutus massacred many Tutsis and other Hutus that supported the Tutsis. This gruesome war lasted for a 100 days. Up to this date, there have been many devastating effects on Rwanda and the global community. In addition, many people have not had many acknowledgements for the genocide but from this genocide many lessons have been learned around the world.
When the Rwandan Hutu majority betrayed the Tutsi minority, a destructive mass murdering broke out where neighbor turned on neighbor and teachers killed their students; this was the start of a genocide. In this paper I will tell you about the horrors the people of Rwanda had to face while genocide destroyed their homes, and I will also tell you about the mental trauma they still face today.
The Sierra Leone Civil War lasted eleven years and left Sierra Leone scared and unconstructed. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) bombarded the country but faced constant resistance from the Sierra Leone Military. Both sides relied heavily on child soldiers throughout the war and a projected 5,000 to 10,000 child soldiers were collectively used by both the Sierra Leone government and the RUF. These children forcibly entered into a life of violence and oppression, and they have since struggled to reintegrate back into society. Child soldiers have returned home with no family or future and many still face severe complications.
April 7th 1994 marks the start of on of the worst things ever to happen to human beings, The Rwandan Genocide. It is known that over 800’000 Rwandans were massacred, 800’000 is 20% of the countries population, over 70% of the tutsis were brutally murdered within the 100 day genocide of Rwanda. Both Hutus and tutsis were killed and murdered at the hands of their neighbours machetes. During this compare and contrast essay I will discuss the long and short term causes of both the Rwandan and Congolese Conflicts. I will also discuss how the natives of these two countries were forced to leave their homes and migrate in seek of aid. The genocide was between April 7th and July 15th 1994, therefore it is known as the 100 day war. The genocide or in context the Rwandan Civil War was fought between the Hutus and the Tutsis. Ongoing conflicts began in 1990 between the hutu-led government and the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front). The RPF was created in 1987 by the Tutsi refugee diaspora in Uganda. The first Tutsi refugees fled to Uganda to escape ethnic purges in the beginning of 1959.
"Rwanda Genocide." Global Issues in Context Online Collection. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Global Issues In Context. Web. 12 Apr. 2010.
When someone hears the word genocide, they usually think of the holocaust, where millions of Jews were tortured, experimented on, and executed simply because of their religious beliefs. However, there is more than one example of that word, eight genocides have occurred alone in the 20th century. (An estimated 170 million men, women and children have lost their lives to mass killings) Among those killed, Sierra Leone contributed over 50,000 of them. The terror, pain, and displacement caused by Sierra Leone and the Holocaust are unforgivable and unforgettable. Although Sierra Leone and the Holocaust are both genocides, the targets, goals, and leaders were polar opposites.
Although all of the difficulties and struggles mentioned in the previous section are still important, it is also important to look at the causes and the discourses of specific past events that potentially led to this disastrous mudslide. In Lansana Gberie’s article “Sierra Leone’s Disaster Was Caused by Neglect, Not Nature,” the author describes how corrupt political influences led to the devastating mudslide that recently happened. The author states, “the Freetown mudslide was caused by a more deliberate human activity than is usually associated with climate change and similar
There have been more than 220 armed conflicts all over the world from 1946 to 2001. In general it includes about more than 140 civil wars, causing the death of about 20 million people and displacing about 67 million (Panić, n.d.) . As a result of combine interstates the number is even higher today; internal wars are in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. Because civil wars are not the only form of systematized violence and aggregation, the human costs of armed conflicts are better than data suggestion. Violence, organized crime, coup and even genocide has taken place in many countries such as Rwanda and Afghanistan.
Sierra Leone, located on the west coast of the African continent is a young nation, having acquired independence in 1961 recently emerged from a decade long civil war in 2002 (BBC, 2015). The nation is bordered by Guinea, Liberia, and the Atlantic Ocean, a tropical climate harboring diverse rainforests. Sierra Leone’s largest city, Freetown, also the nation’s capital and political and economic center is populated by approximately 700,000 inhabitants, over the estimated national population of just over 6 million people. Sierra Leone is divided into sixteen ethnic groups, however, the nation is predominately Muslim. Religious violence is quite rare, however animosity sparked the civil war through government corruption and economic strife established
Compounding difficulties erupted in Sierra Leone in March 1991 when conflict in neighboring country Liberia fell across borderlines. (Fyfe, 2013) Joseph Momoh responded by deploying troops to the border region to repel the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). Sierra Leone’s army would also come under attack by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), led by former Sierra Leone army corporal Foday Sankoh. Both the NPFL and RUF would work together to overthrow the Sierra Leone government and would drag out a long brutal civil war. (Fyfe, 2013)