‘Other Inhumane Acts’: Forced Marriage, Girl Soldiers and the Special Court for Sierra Leone
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663906066611 |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Author | Augustine S. J. Park |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
‘OTHER INHUMANE ACTS’:
FORCED MARRIAGE, GIRL
SOLDIERS AND THE SPECIAL
COURT FOR SIERRA LEONE
AUGUSTINE S. J. PARK
The Australian National University, Australia
ABSTRACT
The decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone gained international notoriety for the wide-
spread use of child soldiers, and the sexual abuse and ‘forced’ marriage of girl soldiers.
For the first time in international legal history, ‘forced marriage’ is being prosecuted
as a ‘crime against humanity’ in Sierra Leone’s post-conflict ‘Special Court’. This
represents an important step in advancing the human rights of girls, and follows a
growing trend in international criminal prosecution of gender offences. Notwith-
standing the significance of this indictment, international law is no panacea for the
deeper inequalities and vulnerabilities that girls experience in peacetime and in
wartime. This article advocates a specific focus on girls, who are often ‘disappeared’
under discourses of children and women. Moreover, using recommendations from
Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article attempts to point to
social and economic inequalities that must be addressed alongside criminal prosecu-
tion of gendered crimes against humanity.
KEY WORDS
child soldiers; forced marriage; gender rights; girls; post-conflict justice;
Sierra Leone
I did not want to go; I was forced to go. They killed a lot of women who refused
to go with them . . . When they capture young girls, you belong to the soldier
who captured you. I was ‘married’ to him. (‘Isatu’, aged 15 at the time of her
abduction; Amnesty International, 2000b)
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 15(3), 315–337
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906066611
316
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 15(3)
INTRODUCTION
ON6 MAY2004, the Trial Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra
Leone (http://www.sc-sl.org) issued a landmark decision allowing
the prosecution of ‘forced marriage’ as a crime against humanity.
This follows a growing trend in international legal measures that address
gender-specific human rights abuses. Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war
gained international notoriety for the widespread use of child soldiers by all
parties to the conflict, rampant sexual violence, and the practice of ‘forced
marriages’, which typically involved an adult male combatant taking a
captured girl soldier as his ‘wife’. Sixty per cent of girls involved with fighting
forces in Sierra Leone acted as ‘wives’ (McKay and Mazurana, 2004: 92).
While the practice has euphemistically been termed ‘forced marriage’, many
scholars and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) point out that it is,
more accurately, sexual and domestic slavery (see for example, Amnesty
International [hereafter, AI], 2000a; Alfredson, 2001: 5). The practice,
moreover, is not unique to the conflict in Sierra Leone. The preponderance
of forced marriage in armed conflicts around the world makes the Decision1
of the Trial Chamber timely and pertinent to the present human rights
situation for girls.
In this article, I will advance two arguments. First, I advocate a distinct
analytic focus on girls: girls should not be subsumed under the category
‘women’ or ‘children’, but require specific attention. Although empirical
research is required, it appears that most of the ‘wives’ in Sierra Leone’s war
were girls, not women (McKay and Mazurana, 2004: 93). Many reports by
NGOs and in the academic literature conflate women and girls. While
women and girls share experiences of gender oppression, girls are uniquely
positioned as not only a marginalized gender, but also a marginalized age
group. Girls, furthermore, are often subsumed under discourses of children;
however, ‘children’ have historically and continue to be conflated with ‘boys’
in talk and in practice.
The second argument that I will advance is that although the Special Court
for Sierra Leone is at the forefront of recognizing the human rights of women
and girls, and while international law plays an instrumental role in identify-
ing, affirming and advocating the rights of girls, international law is not a
silver bullet to alleviate the structural barriers, constraints and challenges that
entrench girls’ vulnerability in peacetime and wartime. Despite the margin-
alization of girls and their unique vulnerabilities, I will also argue that girls
cannot be seen as mere victims of armed conflict. Girls, in international
discourse, are rendered both invisible, in relation to their unique needs, but
are simultaneously rendered too visible as super-victims, representing a femi-
nized global South desperate for help from the (masculine) North (Burman,
1994; Buss, 2000). Instead of focusing on girls’ victimization, I contend that
girls’ considerable agency must be recognized and enabled in responses to
post-conflict recovery in Sierra Leone.
PARK: ‘OTHER INHUMANE ACTS’
317
THE WAR IN SIERRA LEONE
Rebel incursions across the eastern border of Sierra Leone on 23 March 1991
sparked a decade-long civil war between the insurrectionary Revolutionary
United Front (RUF) and government forces, which was to exact the most
terrible toll on the rural civilian population. Backed by Charles Taylor’s
National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and bolstered by Burkinabe
mercenaries, the stated intention of the RUF was to overthrow the patri-
monial kleptocracy of Joseph Momoh’s All People’s Congress (APC), the
long-ruling party of post-colonial Sierra Leone (Richards, 1996/2002: xviii,
4–5). A coup of junior officers in 1992, motivated by the state’s failure to pay
soldiers, resulted in the creation of the National Provisional Ruling Council
(NPRC). While there were nascent hopes for a quick end to the conflict
under NPRC leadership, Sierra Leone’s army was hampered by decades of
demoralization and decline in skill and professionalism under the APC.
Moreover, officers often sold rice rations for their own enrichment rather
than feeding soldiers, which resulted in the phenomenon of ‘sobels’; that is,
soldiers posing as rebels by night in order to loot civilians (Richards,
1996/2002: 9–14; Hirsch, 2001: 36).
Beginning in 1993, the RUF was taking more daring steps in their politics
of terror, taking international hostages and capturing important industrial sites
(Hirsch, 2001: 36–8). With the RUF at the doorstep of the capital, Freetown,
the NPRC called in the controversial South African security firm, Executive
Outcomes. Despite its sordid history with apartheid assassinations and ques-
tionable relationship with mineral extraction companies, Executive Outcomes
was an important factor in eventually forcing the RUF to the negotiating
table for peace talks. The departure of Executive Outcomes in 1997,
moreover, proved fatally to prolong the war (pp. 38–40). The year 1996 saw
the transition from the NPRC to an elected civilian government, not without
considerable costs to ordinary Sierra Leoneans. The RUF, in a bid to prevent
elections, began a campaign of amputating the hands and arms of civilians
actually and symbolically to prevent them from voting. So widespread was
this campaign of amputations that Médicins sans Frontières reportedly
‘carried out thirty operations in one week on people who had double
amputations, severed arms, or faces slashed with machete blows’ (p. 44).
Nonetheless, the elected civilian administration of President Ahmad Tejan
Kabbah’s Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) came to power in 1996,
ushering in a period of government reliance on Civil Defence Forces (CDF),
derived from traditional hunting societies known as Kamajors in the South
and as Tamaboros in the North. Shortly after finalizing the doomed Abidjan
Peace Agreement in November that year, a May 1997 coup sent Kabbah into
exile, partly in response to the army’s dissatisfaction with the state’s new
reliance on CDFs. The military junta, the Armed Forces Revolutionary
Council (AFRC), which ousted Kabbah, was soon to join forces with the
RUF in a bid to end the conflict (Hirsch, 2001: 51–9; Richards, 2002: 261).
By 1998, Nigerian ECOMOG forces (Economic Community of West
318
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 15(3)
African States [ECOWAS’s Ceasefire Monitoring Group]) had ousted the
junta and restored Kabbah to power. At the same time, the RUF resumed its
bush campaign. The 1999 Lomé Peace Agreement was followed by more
fighting; however, the presence of UN ground forces and a series of tenta-
tive ceasefires led finally to the close of the war in January 2002 (Richards,
2002: 261–2).
RESPONDING TO WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
All armed parties to the conflict perpetrated heinous atrocities for which this
war has become notorious. For example, Amnesty International (2000b)
reports that in the 1999 invasion of Freetown, countless women and girls
were raped, 2000 civilians were killed, and at least 500 people had limbs
amputated (p. 10). Thousands of children were recruited as fighters into
different armed groups, many of whom were forced to ‘marry’ their captors,
and commit heinous crimes. Houses and villages were routinely looted and
torched and significant portions of the population were displaced. In the
aftermath of this war characterized by many atrocities, both the Sierra
Leonean government and the international community have engaged in inno-
vative approaches to post-conflict justice. This is in no small part due to the
controversial terms of the Lomé Peace Agreement, which conferred a blanket
amnesty on combatants and a ‘free and absolute’ pardon for Foday Sankoh,
the leader of the...
FORCED MARRIAGE, GIRL
SOLDIERS AND THE SPECIAL
COURT FOR SIERRA LEONE
AUGUSTINE S. J. PARK
The Australian National University, Australia
ABSTRACT
The decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone gained international notoriety for the wide-
spread use of child soldiers, and the sexual abuse and ‘forced’ marriage of girl soldiers.
For the first time in international legal history, ‘forced marriage’ is being prosecuted
as a ‘crime against humanity’ in Sierra Leone’s post-conflict ‘Special Court’. This
represents an important step in advancing the human rights of girls, and follows a
growing trend in international criminal prosecution of gender offences. Notwith-
standing the significance of this indictment, international law is no panacea for the
deeper inequalities and vulnerabilities that girls experience in peacetime and in
wartime. This article advocates a specific focus on girls, who are often ‘disappeared’
under discourses of children and women. Moreover, using recommendations from
Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article attempts to point to
social and economic inequalities that must be addressed alongside criminal prosecu-
tion of gendered crimes against humanity.
KEY WORDS
child soldiers; forced marriage; gender rights; girls; post-conflict justice;
Sierra Leone
I did not want to go; I was forced to go. They killed a lot of women who refused
to go with them . . . When they capture young girls, you belong to the soldier
who captured you. I was ‘married’ to him. (‘Isatu’, aged 15 at the time of her
abduction; Amnesty International, 2000b)
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 15(3), 315–337
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906066611
316
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 15(3)
INTRODUCTION
ON6 MAY2004, the Trial Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra
Leone (http://www.sc-sl.org) issued a landmark decision allowing
the prosecution of ‘forced marriage’ as a crime against humanity.
This follows a growing trend in international legal measures that address
gender-specific human rights abuses. Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war
gained international notoriety for the widespread use of child soldiers by all
parties to the conflict, rampant sexual violence, and the practice of ‘forced
marriages’, which typically involved an adult male combatant taking a
captured girl soldier as his ‘wife’. Sixty per cent of girls involved with fighting
forces in Sierra Leone acted as ‘wives’ (McKay and Mazurana, 2004: 92).
While the practice has euphemistically been termed ‘forced marriage’, many
scholars and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) point out that it is,
more accurately, sexual and domestic slavery (see for example, Amnesty
International [hereafter, AI], 2000a; Alfredson, 2001: 5). The practice,
moreover, is not unique to the conflict in Sierra Leone. The preponderance
of forced marriage in armed conflicts around the world makes the Decision1
of the Trial Chamber timely and pertinent to the present human rights
situation for girls.
In this article, I will advance two arguments. First, I advocate a distinct
analytic focus on girls: girls should not be subsumed under the category
‘women’ or ‘children’, but require specific attention. Although empirical
research is required, it appears that most of the ‘wives’ in Sierra Leone’s war
were girls, not women (McKay and Mazurana, 2004: 93). Many reports by
NGOs and in the academic literature conflate women and girls. While
women and girls share experiences of gender oppression, girls are uniquely
positioned as not only a marginalized gender, but also a marginalized age
group. Girls, furthermore, are often subsumed under discourses of children;
however, ‘children’ have historically and continue to be conflated with ‘boys’
in talk and in practice.
The second argument that I will advance is that although the Special Court
for Sierra Leone is at the forefront of recognizing the human rights of women
and girls, and while international law plays an instrumental role in identify-
ing, affirming and advocating the rights of girls, international law is not a
silver bullet to alleviate the structural barriers, constraints and challenges that
entrench girls’ vulnerability in peacetime and wartime. Despite the margin-
alization of girls and their unique vulnerabilities, I will also argue that girls
cannot be seen as mere victims of armed conflict. Girls, in international
discourse, are rendered both invisible, in relation to their unique needs, but
are simultaneously rendered too visible as super-victims, representing a femi-
nized global South desperate for help from the (masculine) North (Burman,
1994; Buss, 2000). Instead of focusing on girls’ victimization, I contend that
girls’ considerable agency must be recognized and enabled in responses to
post-conflict recovery in Sierra Leone.
PARK: ‘OTHER INHUMANE ACTS’
317
THE WAR IN SIERRA LEONE
Rebel incursions across the eastern border of Sierra Leone on 23 March 1991
sparked a decade-long civil war between the insurrectionary Revolutionary
United Front (RUF) and government forces, which was to exact the most
terrible toll on the rural civilian population. Backed by Charles Taylor’s
National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and bolstered by Burkinabe
mercenaries, the stated intention of the RUF was to overthrow the patri-
monial kleptocracy of Joseph Momoh’s All People’s Congress (APC), the
long-ruling party of post-colonial Sierra Leone (Richards, 1996/2002: xviii,
4–5). A coup of junior officers in 1992, motivated by the state’s failure to pay
soldiers, resulted in the creation of the National Provisional Ruling Council
(NPRC). While there were nascent hopes for a quick end to the conflict
under NPRC leadership, Sierra Leone’s army was hampered by decades of
demoralization and decline in skill and professionalism under the APC.
Moreover, officers often sold rice rations for their own enrichment rather
than feeding soldiers, which resulted in the phenomenon of ‘sobels’; that is,
soldiers posing as rebels by night in order to loot civilians (Richards,
1996/2002: 9–14; Hirsch, 2001: 36).
Beginning in 1993, the RUF was taking more daring steps in their politics
of terror, taking international hostages and capturing important industrial sites
(Hirsch, 2001: 36–8). With the RUF at the doorstep of the capital, Freetown,
the NPRC called in the controversial South African security firm, Executive
Outcomes. Despite its sordid history with apartheid assassinations and ques-
tionable relationship with mineral extraction companies, Executive Outcomes
was an important factor in eventually forcing the RUF to the negotiating
table for peace talks. The departure of Executive Outcomes in 1997,
moreover, proved fatally to prolong the war (pp. 38–40). The year 1996 saw
the transition from the NPRC to an elected civilian government, not without
considerable costs to ordinary Sierra Leoneans. The RUF, in a bid to prevent
elections, began a campaign of amputating the hands and arms of civilians
actually and symbolically to prevent them from voting. So widespread was
this campaign of amputations that Médicins sans Frontières reportedly
‘carried out thirty operations in one week on people who had double
amputations, severed arms, or faces slashed with machete blows’ (p. 44).
Nonetheless, the elected civilian administration of President Ahmad Tejan
Kabbah’s Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) came to power in 1996,
ushering in a period of government reliance on Civil Defence Forces (CDF),
derived from traditional hunting societies known as Kamajors in the South
and as Tamaboros in the North. Shortly after finalizing the doomed Abidjan
Peace Agreement in November that year, a May 1997 coup sent Kabbah into
exile, partly in response to the army’s dissatisfaction with the state’s new
reliance on CDFs. The military junta, the Armed Forces Revolutionary
Council (AFRC), which ousted Kabbah, was soon to join forces with the
RUF in a bid to end the conflict (Hirsch, 2001: 51–9; Richards, 2002: 261).
By 1998, Nigerian ECOMOG forces (Economic Community of West
318
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 15(3)
African States [ECOWAS’s Ceasefire Monitoring Group]) had ousted the
junta and restored Kabbah to power. At the same time, the RUF resumed its
bush campaign. The 1999 Lomé Peace Agreement was followed by more
fighting; however, the presence of UN ground forces and a series of tenta-
tive ceasefires led finally to the close of the war in January 2002 (Richards,
2002: 261–2).
RESPONDING TO WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
All armed parties to the conflict perpetrated heinous atrocities for which this
war has become notorious. For example, Amnesty International (2000b)
reports that in the 1999 invasion of Freetown, countless women and girls
were raped, 2000 civilians were killed, and at least 500 people had limbs
amputated (p. 10). Thousands of children were recruited as fighters into
different armed groups, many of whom were forced to ‘marry’ their captors,
and commit heinous crimes. Houses and villages were routinely looted and
torched and significant portions of the population were displaced. In the
aftermath of this war characterized by many atrocities, both the Sierra
Leonean government and the international community have engaged in inno-
vative approaches to post-conflict justice. This is in no small part due to the
controversial terms of the Lomé Peace Agreement, which conferred a blanket
amnesty on combatants and a ‘free and absolute’ pardon for Foday Sankoh,
the leader of the...
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