The 1999 Lomé Peace Accord and Child Combatants

Abstract

Approximately twenty thousand child soldiers were used during the civil war in Sierra Leone from 1991 through 2002 (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers 2006). All sides recruited children—the Sierra Leone Army (SLA), the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), and the Civil Defense Force (CDF). Children, some as young as seven, were forced to fight and commit acts of brutality, and numerous girls were raped and turned into “sex slaves” (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers 2001). The 1999 Lome Peace Accord acknowledged the role that children played in the civil war and dedicated a paragraph—“Article XXX: Child Combatants”—to the issue of demobilizing and reintegrating child combatants back into Sierra Leonean society. Even though the accord provided legal recognition of the problems caused by the war, the agreement between the Sierra Leonean government and the RUF was generally deemed a failure. Problems with the accord included giving away too much power to an untrustworthy RUF (Abraham 2004), a weak central government that lacked the leverage to implement the agreement (Alao and Ero 2001), too little attention paid to civil society needs and desires (Jusu-Sheriff 2004), and not enough recognition of the numerous factions and social institutions involved in the decade-long civil war (Bangura 2000).