The Perils of Peace Efforts in Sierra Leone

War in Sierra Leone, as in many other parts of Africa is not "the continuation of politics by other means"; it's the continuation of business by other means. And very ruthless business, meaning that the presence of United Nations peacekeepers is of little consequence to the fighters of the Revolutionary United Front, who continued to hold some 50 U.N. troops and officials hostage Thursday, after killing seven Kenyan soldiers of the international peacekeeping mission Wednesday. The RUF launched fierce attacks on U.N. forces when the peacekeepers attempted, in line with a peace agreement signed last year by the government and RUF leader Foday Sankoh, to disarm rebel forces. But despite the agreement, and the fact that Mr. Sankoh was made a government minister even though he leads an army that terrorized the country by systematically dismembering civilians, the rebel fighters have shown no interest in disarming. To do so would break their grip on the rich diamond fields that have financed their insurgency.

"Their resistance is driven not by politics but by economic considerations," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "Essentially, they're less an insurgency than a bandit group. What's needed, therefore, isn't a traditional peacekeeping operation — which keeps apart the foot soldiers of two armies whose leaders have agreed to make peace — but an expeditionary force to subdue the rebels."

The Sierra Leone peacekeeping debacle will weigh heavily on the mind of Washington's U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke as he meets Thursday with Congolese president Laurent Kabila to discuss plans to deploy a U.N. force in the similarly troubled Congo later this year. "Holbrooke has been warning for some time of the danger of sending in forces that are too small to deal with the scale of the problem and therefore vulnerable to attacks and kidnapping, which appears to be exactly what has happened in Sierra Leone," says Dowell. "But it's no simple matter to expand the peacekeeping force, because to control a recalcitrant guerrilla army in hostile terrain would require a military commitment far larger even than what the U.S. undertook in Vietnam, and it's unlikely that the international community will be willing to take that on." In addition, the threadbare economies of countries such as Sierra Leone and the Congo create little grounds for optimism about the durability of peace. After all, until now the weapons that the Sierra Leone rebels refuse to hand over have guaranteed them a more viable economic existence than theyd be likely to find in civilian life.