KAILAHUN, SIERRA LEONE — Greetings from a war zone that's not Iraq. And not Afghanistan either.
I'm checking in from West Africa, where I've been working with women in three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.
Surely you remember these conflicts. Liberia's war came in three successive waves, lasting from 1989 to 2003. Sierra Leone's war started in 1991 when guerrillas of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, trained in Liberia, invaded their own country. The war drew many players and lasted a decade, until January 2002. In Ivory Coast, the civil war began in 2002 when northern rebels attempted a coup to oust President Laurent Gbagbo; after international intervention, a treaty was signed in 2003.
Today, we've been told, these countries are no longer war zones. Accords have been signed. Peacekeeping forces are on duty or close at hand. The United Nations and international aid agencies are assisting "recovery." Some arms have been surrendered; some refugees have returned from exile.
But although Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast are now officially designated "post-conflict zones," which sounds vaguely hopeful, in reality they are so fractured, so traumatized and, especially in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone, so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said to be securely at peace. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as the lowest-ranked country on the United Nations' index of human development, which measures literacy, health and poverty. Like Afghanistan, it is a nation of widows.
Of all those who suffered in the West African wars, it was civilians who suffered the most. Specifically targeted and terrorized as a tactic of war, they were displaced, exiled, abducted, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed and killed. And of all the civilians who suffered, none suffered as disproportionately as women. Today, millions of women in these three West African countries are still struggling to recover; for them, the wars aren't really over at all.
To understand why, consider this description from Amnesty International last March of the least of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Ivory Coast:
