Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, Who Guided Sierra Leone to Peace, Dies at 82
Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who as president of Sierra Leone was widely credited with returning peace to his West African nation after years of brutal civil war, died on Thursday at his home in Freetown, the country’s capital. He was 82.
His death was announced by John Benjamin, a friend and a former chairman of the Sierra Leone People’s Party.
Mr. Kabbah led Sierra Leone both during and after an 11-year civil war in which some 120,000 people were killed, many gruesomely. He was praised for instituting a disarmament program that led to the official end of the war in 2002, with the help of a United Nations peacekeeping force and British military trainers. But after the war, he was criticized for failing to lift his country out of poverty.
Born to a Muslim family in eastern Sierra Leone on Feb. 16, 1932, Mr. Kabbah received a Christian education and joined the civil service in 1959.
After the Sierra Leone People’s Party, to which he belonged, was defeated in elections in 1968, he lost his job, and his property was confiscated. He moved to Britain, where he studied law and became a jurist.
He joined the United Nations Development Program in 1970, and for the next 22 years worked in the United States and several African countries. In 1992, a year after the rebel Revolutionary United Front began a bloody insurrection, Mr. Kabbah quit the United Nations and was named president of a national council set up by a military junta to pave the way for a return to multiparty politics and draw up a new constitution.
Mr. Kabbah was elected president of Sierra Leone in March 1996, and that November he signed an accord with the rebel leader Foday Sankoh. But in May 1997 he was overthrown in a coup and fled to Guinea. Sierra Leone’s new junta allied itself with the Revolutionary United Front.
In February 1998, after fierce fighting, the troops of a West African regional force led by Nigeria chased the junta out of Freetown, paving the way for Mr. Kabbah’s return. But in January 1999, rebels attacked Freetown once again.
That July, Mr. Kabbah and Mr. Sankoh signed a peace accord and agreed to share power. Around the same time, United Nations peacekeepers were dispatched to Sierra Leone. But in May 2000, the Revolutionary United Front reneged on its pledges by taking some 500 peacekeepers hostage.
When the situation worsened, Britain sent armed forces to end the crisis.
Mr. Sankoh was imprisoned, and Mr. Kabbah began a disarmament program that led to the official end of the war in January 2002. He stepped down in 2007.
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Stay with Sierra Express Media, for your trusted place in news!
© 2014, https:. All rights reserved.
