The Legacy of the Tank: The Violence of Peace

In 1997, after weeks of watching skirmishes between soldiers and Kamajoh militia, and weeks of being startled during my fieldwork by dead bodies appearing on Kenema's streets, a Guinean tank rolled through town. You could hear it minutes before it arrived—its engines were roaring and thunderous; it seemed everyone stopped whatever they were doing and watched it roll by, speechless. The tank never stopped, continuing right through the middle of town, but its passing sent a clear message to all of us: ECOMOG had arrived.

In fact, foreign troops had been involved in Sierra Leone since the beginning of the conflict. In 1991, mercenaries came from neighboring countries like Liberia and Burkina Faso to fight with the rebels. More soon arrived from Southern Africa and Europe. Some of these provided logistical support for the United Nations and humanitarian groups; some assisted the state and state militias with military support; others provided security for diamond mining operations (Reno 1997, Wilkinson 2000). Many more foreign troops, especially from Nigeria, entered Sierra Leone under ECOMOG auspices in 1997, reinstalled the President, took back the capital from rebel control, and paved the way for UN peacekeepers. By 1999, the UN began setting up a peacekeeping mission (UNAMSIL) of several thousand; by January 2002, this mission had swelled to 17,500 troops, including peacekeepers, military observers, and civilian police from 38 different countries around the world. UNAMSIL has since begun downsizing, though as of spring 2004 maintain a force of 11,527. The UN Security Council, concerned that "gaps" remain in the peace process, has voted to extend UNAMSIL's mandate for another six months into 2005.

It's now just before Christmas, 2003. I'm sitting at a beach bar in Sierra Leone's capital talking with "Estelle," a Liberian sex worker. Christmas lights are twinkling all around, and the sound of Silent Night threaded through a reggae mix pulsates on the sound system, competing with the noise of a Premier league soccer match on the TV. Sitting all around us at the bar are Estelle's real reason for being here—UN peacekeepers, the legacy of the Guinean tank I'd seen pass through Kenema years before, are crowded in elbow to elbow. Some are silently nursing whiskeys; others are raucously pouring down beers, slapping their friends high fives with one hand while pinching the arm of an accompanying sex worker with the other. Estelle seems unsure of what to make of me, and skeptical of how much time to invest- after all, I'm not obviously a peacekeeper, and I keep switching the conversation to unexpected things like her home life, her living situation, and what she thinks about all the soldiers milling about. On the first two items she's initially reluctant to talk; on the last, she's an enthusiastic conversationalist. They are, after all, her bread and butter. Suddenly, I remember a news brief I'd seen on Freetown's TV station the night before.

Randall Tobias, the Bush administration's Global AIDS Coordinator, just returning to the U.S. from a week-long, five-nation trip to Africa, wasn't coming to Sierra Leone. The trip, with an 80 member delegation of business leaders, lawmakers, and AIDS policy-makers, was called a "historic undertaking" by the administration, a "photo op" by its critics. Delegates visited Zambia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and Cameroon. In Kenya, the delegation launched a joint program of 9 multinational businesses to provide anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs to people living with AIDS. "The magnitude of the challenge we face is almost unimaginable," said Tobias. "The people of the United States are honored to be a partner with public-private partnerships, faith-based and community-based organizations, universities, foundations, international organizations, other donor governments, and many others to battle the AIDS epidemic in Zambia and elsewhere."

I stop to listen, and begin pondering the nexus event that didn'...