University Place

(applause) So, it is a true honor, and a great pleasure to introduce Thierry Cruvellier, who is an author, a journalist, and a friend. I have known Thierry for close to 20 years, so my introduction shall be part professional and part personal, and I'll start with the professional. Tonight, Thierry shall present his new work on Sierra Leone. This project marks a kind of bookend for Thierry, who began a very long and deep engagement with civil war, reporting on civil war and reporting on atrocities some 25 years ago when he started his career as a journalist in Sierra Leone. He went there, as it turns out-- I recently learned this-- to avoid military service in his country of origin, which was France, which is France. But, very soon, military life, military experience caught up with Thierry in Sierra Leone when civil war broke out in that country in 1991. Thierry continued to work in Sierra Leone on and off in the early 1990s, and his lecture tonight, I believe, shall return to his experiences then and the subsequent research that he has done on the history of civil war in Sierra Leone. Now, in the meantime, Thierry has had an extraordinary two decades of work. In that time, he has become one of the leading experts on international war crimes tribunals, and he has written two remarkable books. The first book, which was published in English by the University of Wisconsin Press five years ago, it's here, it's called the Court of Remorse, on sale outside, and I believe Thierry will sign copies after the talk, is a detailed, fascinating study of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This was the court that the United Nations set up in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the genocide that the United Nations and other international actors failed to prevent, and in the aftermath they set up an international court to try the so-called "big fish", the architects of that genocide. Thierry began reporting on that court in 1997. He would go on to spend five years in Arusha, Tanzania, where the court was located, and he came to know that court better than any journalist and, frankly, any scholar who was writing on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda at that time. The fruit of his reflections became this book, The Court of Remorse, which through remarkable nuance and access describes the inner workings of the court, the sometimes bizarre behavior of the judges, the intrigues and tricks that lawyers played, and the sometimes incredibly disturbing testimony of victims and the behavior of the perpetrators in the dock. Thierry's book, that book, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what international justice means for Rwanda and in Rwanda and what international criminal justice looks like more generally in our contemporary world. But Thierry did not stop there. He has come to jokingly refer to himself as "a tribunal junkie". And he rebuts that I'm a "genocide scholar", so we kind of go back and forth that way, and for good reason. He left Rwanda or he left Tanzania, went back to Sierra Leone, where he began to cover the hybrid court in Sierra Leone, which was a hybrid court between international/national court, and did that for a number of years. And then, in Cambodia, after a long and complicated set of negotiations, the government finally agreed to establish also a hybrid court to try the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Now, this was, Khmer Rouge, this would have been 30 years after the Khmer Rouge ruled, and the Khmer Rouge was one of the most hideously brutal regimes of any of the revolutionary dictatorships of the 20th century. And finally, after 30 years, the remaining leaders were going to be put on trial and are, today, I think the court is still up, yeah, still functioning still today. Thierry would go on to spend four years in Cambodia with a focus on the first of those trials, that of Duch, who was the commander in charge of the famous S-21 torture center in Cambodia, a place where some 17,000 Cambodians were sent, were tortured, were forced to write false confessions, and who almost completely all perished. There are three or four survivors of that incredible institution. That engagement resulted in his second book,

published last year in English under the title

The Master

of Confessions

The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. In contrast to the book on the ICTR, which was a portrait of a flawed experiment in international criminal justice, this book is really a portrait of a man who oversaw a system of torture and brutality and who later confessed to his crimes. The book is as fascinating as it is disturbing. It leaves one with a picture of a man who did horrible things, and who oscillates between contrition and also a certain professional pride in what he was able to do in his job. It is a really disturbing, truly unforgettable book. Let me pause there to say a word about what I consider some hallmarks of Thierry's work. For one, his method is deeply grounded. He spends years, years, living and breathing these courts and the characters that inhabit them. He has the persistence of an ethnographer and the patience of an ethnographer, but an eye for detail and for ambiguity that, to me, are the hallmarks of great magazine journalism. The product, the writing, has an incredibly light touch, and this is something that I admire about the work. Thierry is dealing with some of the great instances of mass atrocity of the 20th century, the Khmer Rouge regime, the Rwandan genocide, and yet, as one student in a class today put it, the work is "poetic". It's not aesthetic. He does not make the ugly and the horrible beautiful. Rather, he approaches mass violence with a deft, subtle, light touch. Therein lies a choice about to represent terrible violence in places that are often very far away and foreign to those who will read about it. It is a rare approach. It, to me, smacks of a fundamentally ethical approach to violence, one that distinguishes his work from most who write on the subject. The work as a result is challenging. It's rich. He does not provide us with easy answers, with sounds bites about what we should do and what we should think. It's complex and it's nuanced. It's great. So, let me end on a personal note. That's the professional part, and a short personal part. There are times in life when we are thrust into intense circumstances that change our lives and that we experience alongside others. This can be starting college, it can be playing on a sports team, joining the military, or in my case, reporting on the Rwandan genocide. Whatever the experience, we don't usually get to choose whom we share those experiences with, whom we share those journeys with, but we often form lifelong bonds with those whom we do share those experiences because they are so intense. In my case, I am incredibly lucky that among my cohort was a man of the caliber of Thierry Cruvellier. He is not only kind, probing, smart, eloquent and good looking. (laughter) But he is also fundamentally a man who has the strength of character to approach his awful subject with clarity, with dignity, with honesty, with empathy, with loyalty, and at times with a sense of humor. In that sense, we are all lucky to have Thierry Cruvellier as the chronicler of some of the worst atrocities of our time. Please join me in welcoming him here. Thank you. (applause) I should have never allowed him to speak. (laughter) Thank you, really, very much, and I want to thank Sara for organizing this, and Megan Katz, that I finally met with up here, and who has done such a good job behind the scenes to make it so comfortable for me. I hope you're going to have to bear with me because I'm doing a bit of an exercise with you tonight, to be honest, because I'm talking for the first time about my work on Sierra Leone. So it's not as well processed in my mind as Cambodian or Rwanda may be. So I might need my notes a bit more than what is pleasant for you. In January 1977, on graduation day at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, the all-powerful president of the country, a man named Siaka Stevens took the floor, and at the moment he started to speak, a whole bunch of students rose with, do you say placards? Placards, in Creole, which is the language in Sierra Leone, they say "pla-cards". Anyway, and banners that denounced the mismanagement of the economy, the corruption in the state, and the lack of political freedoms, and they booed the president. This had never happened before in the history, in the political history of independent Sierra Leone. Never before the president had been challenged that way, and Siaka Stevens had to leave the university in humiliation. In the following days, all schools and colleges in the country closed down. The whole country pretty much came to a halt. And that was also the first time the country witnessed that form of spontaneous popular uprising. It didn't last long. Probably only a couple of weeks it took before Siaka Stevens decided to send his troops out, crushed the students leadership, and imposed actually a one-party system to the country. And in the following three decades, Sierra Leone is going to go through an incredible economic decline, then 10 years of war, civil war, and what we can call reconstruction or post-conflict decade until it got struck a year ago by the Ebola outbreak. However, even today the uprising of 1977 is still remembered by many Sierra Leoneans as that moment where there has been some hope for change, and that was followed by an incredible period of great despair. As Scott said, I have been covering these war crimes tribunals since the late 90s, and I guess what I was trying to grasp was how we human beings behave in exceptional circumstances, when we have to make choices that are impossible to basically make because they may also include the decision to die. And so it's been a bit of mystery for me to know how do we behave in such kind of situations. Which is why war crimes, trials, and tribunals has appeared to me as incredibly rich territory for writers or journalists. We can work on it and think about it in so many different ways, political, psychological, historical, legal of course. It provides us, also, an extraordinary range of characters. These courts attract all sorts of people, and they're all blocked in that very small space, which is so convenient for us. We don't even have to run after them. They're all there. And you really find victims and perpetrators, of course, but businessmen as well as farmers, passionate lawyers as well as complete opportunists, career driven bureaucrats as well as human rights idealists, you name it. And all this makes it, of course, a very rich story to tell as long, as long, which I sometimes say as well, as long as you can bear the boredom. As you say, it can be boring. The mediocrity and all the disillusions that come with covering war crimes tribunals. So after I was, I had finished my work in Cambodia, I honestly didn't want to keep being a tribunal junkie. I wanted to stop, and I did so far. And that's also why I felt that it was high time I wrote about Sierra Leone. I arrived in Sierra Leone in July 1990. So it's almost 25 years ago. It was my first assignment, and I was asked to run a small local magazine in French, which is completely absurd. It's an English-speaking country. It's a former British colony. (audience laughs) But some crazy French cultural attache had a dream of being a journalist and he never was, and he find the money to make that magazine, and so I was asked to run that one for a year and a half, which was, of course, great because then I avoided to go to the barracks. And so I did that for a year and a half, and then I kept trying to go back, as Scott said. So he's already written my resume of my life there. The first Sierra Leonean I met when I arrived was a man called Dennis Bright. And we're going to hear about him quite a bit tonight. He became my closest friend, by far, and I learned a lot, a lot of things. I think he's one of the key persons in my life. I was young; he was older. He was from that country, and he helped me tremendously to understand a bit better where I was. But what I didn't fully realize at the time, and honestly it took me a long time before I got it, years, that Dennis was the number two of the student uprising in 1977. And that's why, of course, now that I've been working on that book, Dennis, my friend, became probably the main character of the book. When I finished my work in Cambodia, I realized that Dennis was almost turning 60, and his generation was turning 60, and so it was high time I sort of write that story before they get too old. You know, in Africa, you have, in most places, I think I know and Scott knows, you have these private minibuses that are the main transport, means of transportation for most people. And they love to have these mottos written on top of the windshield. You guys might have seen some of them, and they have a lot of sense of humor. In general, I find them very creative. And in the mid-90s, I remember I saw one where it was written, "No condition is permanent". You had these terrible roads, you had this run-down minibus with that saying on top of it. I found that it captured what life is in Sierra Leone, where nothing is guaranteed, when whoever you are, you're going to go through incredible ups and downs during your lifetime and will not be able to escape that. And it also captured the fantastic sense of humor that Sierra Leoneans have kept and that has often seemed to me to be their best protection against all the forms of abuses they have suffered. Few people, I would say, have experienced living in extreme circumstances as Sierra Leoneans have over that period of time. And I may quote Dennis at this point to have an idea of what it is to live in Sierra Leone. He said, "The experience that Sierra Leone provides you "is like putting you in a trial chamber for life." "You are on trial to know who you are. "How low can you descend? "The below zero side of you, how deep is it?" Then he laughed at that point, because you always laugh, and then he continued, "Sierra Leone can bring this out "by plunging you into serious situations "where you have to make choices." "So this time, we're talking about "no condition is permanent, "this thing we're talking about, no condition is permanent, "is very true. "How you begin is not how you end. "You probably start with the mind and end with the belly. "It brings you down to Earth, face to face with yourself." Freetown used to be called the, Athens, how do you pronounce? Athens of West Africa. Because Fourah Bay College was the first university ever established in that region. All the West African English-speaking elites in the 19th century and up until the end of the Second World War were going to Freetown to get their best education. And, yet, when I arrived in 1990, Freetown was no longer called that way. It was called the city of darkness. It was, we said, I've never checked it, but we said at the time it was the only capital city in the world without electricity. It gives you an idea of what the country has gone through in the space of 10 years. In the 80s, Sierra Leoneans lost pretty much everything that you can consider as

a basic need

electricity, water supply, good education, healthcare, roads. Their living standards literally plummeted. If you were in the middle class, you descended into poverty. If you were in poverty, and the masses just came to live in abject poverty. This process of decline, I wanted to try in my work because it was so important, so obvious when I arrived, that I wanted to try to see how we can talk about this. What is it to lose everything? And I have to say that it's not been an easy thing to catch. Honestly, the majority, the vast majority of people I've interviewed and asked, "So how was it?" They would come up with very, very banal statements, ideas, and that's when I realized that it's a process that's so incremental, even though it was fast, it was incremental, and it's only by the time they woke up one day and everything was gone that they realized it, but that at that moment they were already in survival mode. And it was hard for them to sort of catch a moment where they realized that the whole country was going down. Once again, I think Dennis provided me with one of the best examples, at least that's how I felt, because when I asked him, what came to his mind is the story of there were constant gas shortages. You could never find gas for your car. So there were these incredible lines, and you could only get a very tiny amount of gas at a time. So that's what he remembered, and I'm going to quote him again. "I quite remember once carrying an empty gallon for fuel, "and I had wrangled my way to get a sheet for two gallons, "and I came down to the petrol station at Cotton Tree", which is that enormous cotton tree in the center of Freetown, "and I stood there waiting for my gallons, "and there's this guy called "Makole". "A black, tough pump attendant "who insulted not only me but some other professors "and doctors who were there. "Because he was the powerful the man, he had the pump." The guy really, really told them off in a pretty nasty way. I'm not going to make that quote because I want to remain polite, but in a way I should. Because Sierra Leoneans very rarely use the F word. And so when they do, it's significant. And the pump attendant, that's how he sort of told these professors to go away. Dennis again, "There were tears in my eyes. "It was the humiliation. "I was sleeping in the streets in my car waiting for fuel." In 1991, the United Nations published their Human Development Index, which you may know is that classifications on human development, and Sierra Leone was last. On 160 countries that were studied, Sierra Leone was last. Pretty much what the UN was saying was that by world standards, Sierra Leone was the worst place to be. And without going into details, what was a bit strange to me at the time was also to say that's not how it felt, because the Sierra Leone society was a very pleasant society to be in, but that's obviously what the life... The difficulty of life was. So the civil war that started in '91, in that year, of course did not come out of nothing, and of course was not about diamonds, as many have written, or would say later when the tribunal was established. It was much more the result of that destructive process that I have tried to quickly mention here. The political oppression and intolerance, the corruption, the gross mismanagement of natural resources, the economy decayed, lack of access to education that left an enormous young population with no hope whatsoever and no perspective other than poverty. Poverty, that's another thing that I wanted to try to work on and write on in that book. And that's an impossible thing for us to write on because we don't know. We don't know what it is. We don't experience it. Even if we see it, it's nothing to do with living it. And so that again was a bit difficult to try to find ways to write about it and to try to understand what it feels like when you are really living in poverty. Dennis again provided me with incredible remarks on what that was. And... Some of them, to me, were so difficult to listen to, in a way, for what they meant, that I just wish you to keep in mind that this is a man who loves his country and loves his people who is talking. And so there is no disrespect whatsoever in what is being said.

But this is what he said about poverty

"Poverty is an inability to realize one's self. "It is being in a state of humiliation because you are "in a situation that reduces your humanity, "and you fall below a certain level of humanity. "It is not just a lack of something. "It is to be seen in that state of inability, "That's the shame. "It is only the half person that we see in Sierra Leone; "not the full realization of our potential. "You can grow, but only half. "There is something about the place that stifles growth "into the full flower of bloom. "It's not that you will not be, but you will have to remain "at a certain level because it comes to a time when "other issues invade the space of the personality that "wants to thrive, and it cuts short your growth as "an artist, your growth as whoever you are. "So we tend to be a nation where we have a lot of talents "that, in their incomplete forms, are moving around. "They are not fully realized. "They have a sense that they "could have been something else." The war started in March 1991, when an attack came from neighboring Liberia, and it lasted a bit more than 10 years. Liberia had been at war for already a bit more than a year by then, and that was the beginning in Sierra Leone of what we call the rebel war, led by a movement called the Revolutionary United Front, RUF, which was backed by the main Liberian warlord, Charles Taylor, who would become later president of Liberia. The original dimension of the conflict is there from the beginning, and will remain until the end. However, the Sierra Leone war, even though it came from Liberia and at the beginning Liberian fighters were really the core of the RUF, it was also, of course, clearly a Sierra Leonean affair. Actually, for a number of Sierra Leoneans, the war was the only solution to put an end to the one-party system. Sierra Leone was a very peaceful society. Without going into stupid cliches, it really was. And we have a rather low history of conflict in the 20th century. I met another one of the radical students from the mid-70s, a man called Charles Coker. Charles Coker was the son of a Paramount Chief. Paramount Chiefs are the highest traditional authorities in the country. But his father was killed during, by the thugs of the ruling party of Siaka Stevens in the early 80s during elections, which were really violent because it was with elections, of course, within the party. They were still incredibly violent. So, Charles Coker's father was killed, so at an early age, even though he was one of these radical minds, he decided to take over and become a traditional ruler, which was a bit strange to me as a man who has shared these very radical ideas. But this is how he described to me his feelings at the very beginning of the war, and I think they also capture the exact two feelings that we felt almost simultaneously at the time when the fighting started. This is what he said. "To tell you the truth, I was also looking forward to "the war and to welcome it, if it came closer. "When the rebels hit Bomaru", which is the first town that was attacked, "it was quiet". "We were looking forward to saying "redemption is about to come. "And then they went and they collected schoolchildren, "small boys, took them, raped schoolgirls. "They said they were Superman, that gunshots couldn't "go against them and this and that, "and they opened the stomach of pregnant women, "took out the children and I said no, this can't be mine. "So I reverse my thoughts about them." The first characteristic of the war was that, and that's very common to many contemporary wars, as Scott knows much better than me, that it mainly targeted civilians, and that really started from the very beginning. Which is why the RUF, which as Chief Coker indicates, could have been extremely popular because everybody was completely fed up with the one-party system, became immediately very unpopular. The war eventually displaced half of the population of the country. They became either what we call internally displaced, or refugees. And the other half also had, at some point, to leave their homes temporarily. No Sierra Leonean family would be spared by the war. In the space of about 10 years, about 70,000 people were killed. Thousands of children, boys and girls, were transformed into victims as well as perpetrators. They were subject to forced recruitment, forced marriage, forced labor. Campaigns of amputations that you might have the memory of became the sad signature of that war. 2,500 villages were destroyed; 300,000 houses. So, you won't be surprised if I tell you that Sierra Leone, which was already the last country on the UN Human Development Index in 1991, still was in 2000. During that decade of violence and brutality, Sierra Leone experienced two army coups, one free election, two peace accords that were signed and then broken, and there were an incredible number of armed factions that at some point or another got involved, which may also be something we see in several contemporary conflicts. To name them is to only tell you how, at some point, the war got so confused for everyone there, and for Sierra Leoneans primarily. There was a loyal part of the army. There was a disloyal part of the army. They were the RUF, of course, Liberian fighters. A huge civil defense force was created to fight both the rebels and the army because civilians felt attacked by both, so they gradually developed their own defense. And they also invented a word that actually tried to illustrate the problem they had. They invented the word sobel, which is half soldier and half rebel. So, soldiers by day, rebel by night. So you had this civil defense, you had South African as well as Nepalese mercenaries. You had a big West African force. You had the United Nations peace deployment that became, at some point, the largest UN deployment in the world, and you had British commandos. So, as I said, the war in Sierra Leone has some common features with many contemporary wars in Africa. The deep inequalities, the collapse of the state, the multiplicity of armed factions, the fact that 90% of the victims were civilians. But it also had a number of things that I thought was very different. I had a bit of a conversation with Scott the other evening on one of them, which might be challenged, which Scott challenged a little bit, and rightly so. But the Sierra Leone war never turned into an ethnic or religious war. Over 10 years. And that, to me, is pretty unusual, unique in contemporary wars. Scott said that we could also think about Mozambique, and that's right. But then there would be a difference. Mozambique is a Cold War conflict and that had some sort of ideological dimension. Sierra Leone didn't have any. There was no strong ideological clash in Sierra Leone, just as much as there was no ethnic, religious, or even regional dimension. Just to stop here and say a word about, and I'll try not to be too long, but about religious tolerance in Sierra Leone, which is something that Sierra Leoneans are extremely proud of, and rightly so. But Sierra Leone is a place where it is an absolutely common situation where parents and children do not share the same religion, where siblings do not share the same religion, and it is no problem at all. You will very easily find a father is Muslim with Christian children. Within a couple, they can also share different religions, and that's really deeply rooted. Some pretty bad minds, I think, will say that this is because their religion is sort of a light version of the real religion. I find that so insulting that I'm not going to expand on it. And so all this, perhaps, makes us understand why there was another thing that was very surprising at the end of the conflict is that the Sierra Leone society just got back together as it were before the war. You could barely feel that anything had happened, if it wasn't for, of course, people wounded, the amputees, and all the destruction. But otherwise, really, social life resumed very much as it was and, actually, as it was during the war in the cities and towns when they were not attacked. Throughout the war, Dennis worked with the youth in the capital city. And at the end of the war he was also nominated as a representative of the civil society in the Commission for the Consolidation of Peace. And this is how he talked about the war. He said, "The war in Sierra Leone was an environment that "allowed the worst in each and every one of us to flourish "for a while, to grow like wild vegetation very fast, "and then it burned itself out. "It died out far away from logic."

And then he repeated

"Far away from logic." A couple of years ago, when I told Dennis that I really felt like people didn't seem to carry the war, it felt to me that the war had been absorbed. And he said, "I wouldn't say it's absorbed; "I would say it's flushed out." Sierra Leoneans have a remarkable capacity to endure their patience as they suffer from all sorts of difficulties, is boundless and sometimes even irritating. But the war was also a period where they showed that even they had limits. "And they showed, at some point, amazing courage at making their voices heard. I think the most striking moment really was, when they showed their strength and spirit, was when the elections were organized in 1996, so in the middle of the war, against the will of the rebels and against the will of part of the army. Nobody believed in these elections, and yet, they took place and you had these extraordinary scenes of civilians carrying these ballot boxes on their heads and shoulders under fire to protect the vote. This was a time that, this is how the New York Times actually called the event. It said it was one of the most remarkable change of fortune this continent has seen since the dawn of independence nearly 40 years ago. Women played an absolutely crucial role in these elections and in pushing the military out of power and have the civilian rule back. That leads us, I hope I'm not too long, that leads us to the post-war situation. As you know... Sierra Leone became a major field of experiment of what we call transitional justice. So, justice in transition from, in this case, from war to peace. So by 2003, it simultaneously had a Truth Commission and a special court. Both of them were the hybrid model that Scott has referred to. So a mix of international and national commitment. The Truth Commission had the majority of Sierra Leonean commissioners. The special court was very much controlled by foreigners. The Truth Commission started very poorly. Honestly, it really almost collapsed in its first few months. It was saved, really, by miracle and in part by a Nigerian guy who just did an incredible job at doing the right thing at the very last minute when nobody was believing in that thing anymore. It never quite shined. It never quite shone. When I was attending the first hearings, it was very depressing. We were in a hall with just twice as big as this room, and we were 10 attending. And yet, in 2004, the Truth Commission delivered its report. And I consider this report as the most remarkable document ever written on the war. It's an extraordinary piece of work. So, just for you, in case you have the desire to work in this country, keep in mind that this huge Truth Commission report is of incredible value. Unfortunately, most Sierra Leoneans have never read the report because of lack of access to libraries or to internet. Its archives have never been made public. They are almost impossible to access for researchers as well, and most of the recommendations of the Truth Commissions have never been applied and have been consistently ignored by politicians But it remains to me a fantastic source of information. The special court began its investigations in mid-2002. In less than a year, it indicted 13 individuals. That was the fastest start of an international tribunal I've ever seen. So, for a while we thought that maybe this court is going to do better than the other tribunals, and the whole reasoning behind these hybrid tribunals was also to try to be faster. It did start very fast, and it remains today probably as one of the tribunals with the most coherent and focused prosecution strategy. Very narrow but, going for all sides and concentrating on really the most important individuals. Eventually, so it tried, eventually, three members of the RUF, three members of one of the military juntas that really, really became the most brutal, violent, and bloody armed group in the conflict, as well as three members of the civil defense forces, which was the most bold move, because the civil defense forces have always supported the civilian government that was in place at the time the court was established. Yet they were targeted just as well. And the last one the court targeted was Charles Taylor, who was, at the time, the president of Liberia. All men eventually were convicted, different sentences. They served their sentences in Rwanda, which is a strange loop in history, except Charles Taylor who is imprisoned in Great Britain The special court was also the first of all these international tribunals to close down. It closed down, really, last year for good. But, so it would seem that the experiment was perhaps a better example of what can be done. In reality, not so much. If you look at the cost per case, for instance, this court was not cheaper than the two international tribunals we had before. One of the expectations was that it would also help to strengthen the national judicial system. And the court tried to convey the idea that it did. That's not the reality. In fact, we could realize that it's not by having six to 10 policemen being recruited as investigators that you're going to change the police force, because what happens to these policemen? They actually don't want to go back to their previous job, which is so poorly paid. So they are trying to get other jobs within the UN system or they retired. And even those who went back to the system, sometimes in quite high position, one of them became the number three of the police force, and he told me "I cannot change it. "I cannot change it alone. "I don't have, we don't have the critical mass "to change the force." And, actually, when they go back to the force, all their police tell them, "You know what? "You shut up because during all those years that you "enjoyed the UN pay and the UN privileges, "we were still struggling in our system." This you can apply it to also the judiciary in general. We didn't have, we didn't witness the impact that the court claimed it would make on the national judiciary. So, again, Sierra Leone is one of these cases that should make us very modest about what these courts do. It's very symbolic, it's very limited, and it cannot really claim having the wider impact that many of its supporters say it has. The special court was much more confusing than the Truth Commission when it came to the narrative of the war. Several top officials, especially at the office of the prosecutor, consistently said publicly that the war was about diamonds, as I said at the beginning, and I hope I have been clear enough that of course diamonds fueled the war, and of course at the very end of the war a number of armed factions were more interested in diamonds than in anything else, but it should never mean that this war was about diamonds. It was about all what I said at the beginning. The selective prosecution had also its downsides because a number of senior guys in the RUF became key prosecution informants and witnesses and are now living under protection in some countries in the region or in the west. And because there were so few, every court does that. Every court uses some of the main perpetrators to help bring the evidence against those you prosecute. But in Sierra Leone, since there were so few prosecutions, it was much more visible which ones were the so-called protected or anonymous informants that every Sierra Leonean know. And that is a bit, that remains a bit, it's something that Sierra Leoneans remember. It's something that Sierra Leoneans know, and they can be a bit cynical about the fact that some had a good deal with the court as opposed to others. But what's interesting at the end of the day is that even though when the civil defense forces were prosecuted at the beginning it was quite controversial, 10 years later it's very obvious to me that there is a very widespread acknowledgment by Sierra Leoneans that all these factions committed atrocities and that it was the right thing to go after all of them. And what they remember most, to finish with this part of the story, is Charles Taylor. When you ask them what did you get from that court, they really tell you we got rid of Charles Taylor. And I have to say that for anyone who has covered this sub-region from 1989 to 2004, the fact that Charles Taylor was finally out of the political scene has obviously been a very good thing for the region. So what has the war really changed? Sierra Leone is still considered today as a success story when it comes to foreign intervention post-conflict recovery. Since the end of the war, we've had three democratic elections, to the point that in 2007, a the party won, and, the man who became the president again was the party that ruled Sierra Leone before the war as a one-party state and that really led the country to ruins. In the five years after the end of the war, this party was back in power. In the past 10 years, we've seen also an incredible mining boom in the country with incredible growth, like in 2012 it was a 16.5% growth, which is, European, my country would love to have that. But, of course, it's very distorted, and in reality, the politics in Sierra Leone didn't change much. It's very much business as usual. It's very much the old political tricks of the 80s. And in a way, the Ebola crisis last year was a moment where all this was also so visible and so exposed that the whole country infrastructure has absolutely not improved over the time. Corruption is widespread, incompetence in the government is widespread, and there is actually even a growing sense of division along possible ethnic lines or regional lines. We're not there yet, and Sierra Leone, I think, is still quite protected from that dimension, but, obviously, there is a deterioration in this respect. There's an interesting thing on the political scene. It's that the RUF transformed after the war. The RUF totally dissolved as a known group at the end of the war, but then it transformed into a political party called the RUFP, the RUF party, which was as unpopular as the rebellion was. Never made it anywhere in the polls. But yet, it still exists. And so I went to see its current chairman, who has been a fighter during the first half of the war, spent five years in jail, was actually a very lovely man, and I asked him, how, really, how do you justify the existence of the RUFP when you don't get any votes, you've never been popular, everybody looks at you as what the RUF has done. The headquarters is now located in very poor suburbs of Freetown. They have no money, they have no members. So I asked him, what are you here for? And he had an interesting answer, I thought. So he said, "We are a reminder. "That is the reason why we continue to exist. "Something went wrong in the society, "and we are bringing it to people's attention. "We want to remind people that if you talk about "the consequences of the war, you have to go back "to the root cause of the war. "Sierra Leone is being manipulated by "They monopolize the money and the resources of this land." I thought that was interesting, and I have to say that I felt that it was a quite legitimate statement and a good reason for them to exist if it's a reminder of that. Have Sierra Leoneans, Sierra Leoneans went back to their survival mode. They don't have the time to mobilize, and to try to really make a difference as they did during the war when they really, really were pushed against a wall. But they are probably much more aware of the abuse of the powers of the government, and there is a much wider sense of their rights at every level of the society. Perhaps a good way to try to capture that dimension is to go back to Chief Coker, this Paramount Chief and he says about the change at the community level.

This is what he said

"Even at the village, "we hear them talk of human rights. "Even with us, the authorities, they come and say, "'That's my human rights chief, "'I don't think I will accept this.' "Before the war, as a farm manager, "I was sitting in my village, I would send to "the section chief, and say I want you to come "on Friday to come and work for me. "He would send my boat to go and collect them. "Some people would not want to come, "but they would say the chief has called, you come. "They had then the audacity, the effrontery, "or even the courage to say, "'Chief, we didn't want to come.' "Today, you can't call them. "So we're beginning to employ them. "We're introducing wage in the formal sector of agriculture "as opposed to this kind of forced labor that used to exist. "This is the kind of change I am seeing because "if you don't do that, they won't come. "This is positive." That's what Chief Coker said. And I shall conclude. I started with a, the reference to this 1977 generation. The irony, of course, is that these bright students from the late 70s that could have made a difference, that could have changed the course of the nation, never made it to power. A much younger generation took over during the war, and then the old guard came back. They never made it. Although, the current president, who has been the president since 2007, is from that generation, but he was absolutely not part of the 1977 movement. He does not represent the spirit of 1977. There is actually a quite serious crisis today at the top of the ruling party. They got rid of the vice president in a very brutal way, and the new vice president, who has just been nominated two months ago, happened to be the man who came to speak to defend the former one-party before the Truth Commission. And I was, before he became the vice president, I was struck by his statements being the most divisive and the most unapologetic and denying the history of all the political leaders who came before the Truth Commission. So it doesn't seem to me to be a very encouraging sign if this is the kind of man the party is promoting to such position. Let's remember that this party still has to prove, because it never did in history, still has to prove that it can accept defeat by democratic means. And I think I shall end here. As I said, Ebola exposed very much the fragility of Sierra Leone's recovery, even though there is something real about it. But you can easily say that no condition is permanent remains pretty much what runs the life of most Sierra Leoneans. Thank you very much. (applause)