What African nation’s warlord ordered attacks of arson and looting aptly dubbed?

Question

“Operation Burn House” and “Operation Pay Yourself,” in 2000?


radio trivia

Answer 1

Sierra Leone.
Sierra Leone - The Country



Welcome to Sierra Leone. RUF rebels-in a drunken, coke-clouded, ganja-dazed nine-year insurgency against a couple of handfuls of governments and dime-store juntas-don't much concern themselves with the PC-sounding, ditty little battle euphemisms of the Western world for their terror-filled offensives. Nothing cute like Operation Desert Storm, or Operation Battle Sword. Nothing that sounds like WWF tag-team night in Indianapolis. Instead, RUF military campaigns go by codes like Operation Burn House (for a series of arson attacks), Operation Pay Yourself (a campaign of looting and pillaging) and the brutally self-explanatory Operation No Living Thing. The rebels always had a way with words and machetes. Even when rebel leader Fodah Sankoh tried to do a little whistlestop glad handing they sounded hollow and horrible. "You, who we have wronged, you have every human right to feel bitter and unforgiving, but we plead with you for forgiveness." Small comfort to the legions of armless or legless children who now must figure out how to survive in Africa's poorest country.

Libya trained the motley, human flesh-eating RUF as best it could, and mayhem has served as Sierra Leone's constitution ever since. There have been more deaths in Sierra Leone than Kosovo, more mutilations, more refugees, more rapes and more human rights violations. Sierra Leonians constitute the largest group of refugees in Africa. Yet aid groups in Sierra Leone ***** about their budgets being cut and diverted to Kosovo. As one analyst asked: "Would there have been this much international neglect of Sierra Leone if a bunch of white people were running around with their limbs hacked off?" Indeed.

The former British colony of Sierra Leone gets its sustenance from diamonds. It also yanks enough bauxite, gold and iron ore out of the ground to keep it mildly solvent. But diamonds are the lifeblood of this sweaty little backwater.

Sierra Leone hasn't had it easy. In 1787, Sierra Leone (Lion Mountain) became an experimental community for freed slaves after British do-gooders bought a swath of 52 square kilometers and called it Province of Freedom. Within three years, 90 percent of the former slaves and white settlers in the territory had died of tropical diseases. Of the 1,200 freed slaves who fought for King George during the American Revolution and were brought to Province of Freedom shortly afterward, 800 were dead in two years. Some 50,000 freed slaves were dumped into this sweaty hell-hole between 1807 and 1864.

Britain ceded independence to Sierra Leone in 1961, and the country formed a republic in 1971. In 1992, the people overwhelmingly voted to conduct democratic elections, which was a cue to the folks who were draining the diamond coffers that it was time for a coup. In April 1992, Captain Valentine Strasser seized control of the government and ruled whichever pieces of the pie he could govern.

The problem with the word "democratic" in Africa is that it is an antonym of the word "tribal." In Sierra Leone, where 52 percent of the population are animists, 39 percent are Muslim and 8 percent are Christian, it doesn't make for a recipe for democracy.

The rebels were at the doorstep of the capital Freetown until Strasser rented a group of mercenaries under the command of well-known American merc Bob MacKenzie. MacKenzie had fought in Vietnam, with the SAS in Rhodesia, and in El Salvador, and he had trained HVO (Croat-Bosnian Defense Force) troops for Colonel Zeljko "Nick" Glasnovic 1st Guards' Brigade at Capaljina in Bosnia. The British government (unofficially, of course) asked him to head a group of Ghurkas from Nepal to safeguard the diamond mines in Sierra Leone and push back the rebels. When MacKenzie was killed two months later (some say cannibalized by the rebels), the Ghurkas flew home. Pretoria, South Africa-based Executive Outcomes saw an opportunity and put together a small army of 200 South African mercenaries, complete with an air force and supply jets. They began training the Sierra Leone army and got to work liberating the diamond fields. The army was pumped up to about 14,000 men (and children).

Battles mainly consisted of brief encounters, with both sides discharging only a single clip before running like hell in the opposite direction. Both the army and the RUF rebels were whacked out of their brains on ganja and booze, which made for low casualties. Executive Outcomes carved disciplined killers out of the government army ranks, and the face of the war changed. The body count started rising (thanks in part to EO's very own Russian Hind Mi-24 helicopter gunship air force flown by Belorussian mercenary pilots), and the rebels went into retreat. Sierra Leone soldiers stopped selling their weapons and uniforms to the RUF rogues, and the diamond fields were returned to the hands of Strasser and De Beers.

The diamond mines were the first targets for repossession, as Strasser hired the mercs on credit, with a promise of US$500,000 a month payment in diamonds. Hardly surprising, as Executive Outcomes is reportedly owned.

The rebels took great pleasure in not only killing folks but taking Western hostages. Seven foreigners were grabbed in two days by RUF rebels and then released. Then the insurgents snatched seven Italian nuns, who were summarily killed, but at least spared from becoming Sunday night meatloaf. Because the drug-crazed rebels enjoy their victims as meals, most foreigners split Sierra Leone and the government mobilized all available troops to prevent the insurgents from getting any closer to Freetown. To date, more than 24,000 Sierra Leonians have fled into Guinea and 50,000 have been killed in the six years of fighting since 1991. There are still some 120,000 Sierra Leone refugees awaiting repatriation in Liberia and another 240,000 in Guinea. But why bother coming back? Some hospitals in Sierra Leone report that up to 100 people a day die from starvation. The eastern areas of the country are especially volatile. Sierra Leone's population of 4 million is suffering from food shortages and a general disintegration of society.

In Sierra Leone anyone with a gun seems assured of a term in office, and their fifteen minutes in the sun-but rarely a few moments past that. On May 27, 1997, an obscure army major with the name of a Brooklyn rapper, Johnny Paul Koroma, deposed democratically elected President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah in Sierra Leone's third military coup in five years. Koroma accused Kabbah of being "nurtured on tribal and sectional conflict," and cited the government's failure to end a rebel uprising and low pay as reasons for seizing Kabbah's office. The U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, John Leigh, was probably closer to the mark when he remarked the coup's organizers were simply "out to line their own pockets."

Kabbah was Sierra Leone's first elected president in five years, and is credited with negotiating a November 1996 peace treaty designed to end the government's five-year civil war against rebels of the Revolutionary United Front. In fact, things seemed to be going pretty well for the respected Kabbah before his ouster, so well the Nigerians waited only long enough for U.S. Marines to evacuate foreigners out of the capital before pummeling it with shells from offshore in an effort to reinstate the Sierra Leone leader, who fled safely to Guinea during the coup.

Koroma schmoozed RUF leader Sankoh and the RUF, formed in 1991 by Sankoh in an alliance with Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front for Liberia, suddenly found itself nominally in power in 1997 after Koroma's coup.

But Johnny Boy's coconut junta was ousted in February 1998 by a determined ECOMOG, and Kabbah was reinstalled as president. Sankoh's guerrillas became guerrillas again and were joined by the crux of Johnny's army back in the bush to regroup with the assistance of Liberia and Burkina Faso. Sankoh was arrested in Nigeria and charged with treason.

In October 1998, RUF was ready and began intensifying their attacks against ECOMOG's 15,000 soldiers and the Sierra Leone army after 24 members of Koroma's junta, including senior RUF officers, were executed and Sankoh was sentenced to death. In December, the rebels launched an all-out offensive on Freetown, occupying most of the capital for a brief period in January 1999 before being driven back into the jungle.

But it became obvious by the spring of 1999 that neither side could win an outright military victory without turning the country into a moonscape and Sankoh was released by Kabbah to pursue peace talks in the Togolese capital of Lome. Though, publicly, Kabbah vowed to carry out Sankoh's death sentence, he also admitted he would pardon the rebel leader if that's what it would take to attain peace in Sierra Leone.

After four months of diplomatic fisticuffs, including six weeks of direct talks between Kabbah and Sankoh and some less than gentle prodding by Liberia's president and RUF compadre Chuck Taylor, a peace deal was reached in Lome on July 6, 1999. Both Taylor and Togo President Gnassingbe Eyadema came out smelling like roses. And Sankoh, who a few months earlier was getting goosed on death row, was slotted for a cabinet post and given a full pardon.

The price of peace in Sierra Leone? Amnesty for the rebels and at least four ministerial posts for RUF in the Kabbah government.

The war in Sierra Leone is fought by children, many as young as eight. They're not the cuddly variety. Their Kalashnikov teddy bears reek of cordite. It is not a war of ideology, as no wars fought by eight-year-olds can be, but one of diamonds, wealth, poverty and 30 years of resentment among the destitute rural masses of the interior against the rich folks of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown. It has its roots in more than a generation of government ineptness and greed, and the civil war in neighboring Liberia. Like Angola's UNITA guerrillas, rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF)-a rebel group of black Muslims formed by former army photographer Foday Sankoh-have a perversion for hacking off the limbs of villagers, keeping them from farming their fields of casava, rice and vegetables. And to keep them from eating, of course. They then send the newly stumped bleeding and traumatized into towns held by the government, not so much as a warning, but as a further strain on government resources to care for the victims.

Between December 1998, when RUF renewed its war on Freetown, and February 1999 at least 5,000 people were killed. One government pathologist counted 7,335 corpses from the January 6, 1999, RUF offensive alone. Woman and young girls were raped systematically by the guerrillas. The population was routinely used as human shields. The mutilations since December have been countless. Entire compounds of families have been emptied, the villagers lined up while the rebels jokingly decide which ones to shoot and which ones to let go, or carve a drum stick off of one of the villagers. In one instance, to prevent a small child from bringing his newly severed hand to a hospital for possible reattachment, RUF insurgents sliced the amputated limb in half.

For its own part, the Nigerian-led ECOMOG "peacekeeping" force comprised of soldiers from Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea have hardly been angels. Summary executions of rebels and suspected rebel sympathizers have been the order of the day. Little effort has been made by the peacekeepers to prove the guilt of their victims. An early 1999 UN report accused ECOMOG of a "totally unacceptable" level of atrocities.

Well call it fox in the hen house politics. Former coup leader Johnny Paul Koroma will head a commission responsible for overseeing implementation of the accord that ended eight years of civil war and Kabbah confirmed the appointment of rebel Revolutionary United Front leader Foday Sankoh as head of a commission to oversee exploitation of mineral resources including gold and diamonds.

Who says war crime doesn't pay?

Hope this is enough, and helps.

Answer 2

Sierra Leone

Answer 3

Sierra Leone

Answer 4

Sierra Leone works for the radio trivia.

Answer 5

Sierra Leone
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In January 1996, Strasser was deposed … in a bloodless coup and in February Ahmed Kabbah was elected president. … In November (1996) Kabbah and Sankoh signed a peace accord, but it did not hold. Within months, the Sierra Leone army, led by Johnny Koroma, mutinied, deposed Kabbah and struck their own deal with Sankoh, inaugurating a period of joint Armed Forces Revolutionary Council-RUF rule … violence only escalated. … The names of the rebel offensives spoke for themselves: "Operation Burn House" gave way to "Operation Pay Yourself," then "Operation No Living Thing."

Answer 6

Sierra Leone is the correct answer.....

Answer 7

SIERRA LEONE WORKS FOR RADIO TRIVIA:-}

Answer 8

SIERRA LEONE IS THE ANSWER FOR RADIO TRIVIA!!:-)