Variations in War Crimes During the Sierra Leone Civil War

This article explores the nature of, and variation within, war crimes committed during the Sierra Leone civil war. Drawing upon testimonies given before the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Committee and from trials held by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, this article establishes that crimes were committed by all belligerents in the war. However, the type of crime, the frequency, and the motivation of crimes varied widely among the different armed forces. By contexting these acts within the aims, composition, and position of the various warring parties, this article discusses the role violations of the Geneva Conventions played in the short- and long-term goals of each army.

Humanitarian Law (IHL; Butler et al., 2007;Mullins, 2011;E. J. Wood, 2006E. J. Wood, , 2009. But there is variation: The nature, frequency, and distribution of war crimes vary between conflicts. Some have high levels of offenses, some lower. Violations also vary by time within the conflict, type, belligerent, and theater of operations. The key to understanding the etiology and control of war crimes lies, in part, in documenting and understanding this variation. This article extends the concerns and approach seen in the wartime GBV literature to all war crimes. It examines the variation within war crimes committed by all belligerent parties during the Sierra Leone civil war (1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002). It examines the types, the extent, and the targets of violations of the Geneva Conventions by all parties to the conflict. Here, I draw upon the testimonies and evidence submissions from the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC, 2004) and the trials conducted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCfSL) to document and examine the nature and extent of variation within war crimes during the war.

Criminology and War
While some early criminological work identified the criminogenic nature of war (and the criminal nature of war itself-see Bonger, 1919Bonger, /1967, save for a few studies published during and after World War (WW) II (i.e., Clinard, 1946;Gleuk, 1944Gleuk, , 1945, most of the empirical work by criminologists concerning war is more recent. Some criminological works on the topic have paid more attention to the criminalization of war itself (Braithwaite & Wardak, 2013;R. Kramer & Michalowski, 2005Wardak & Braithwaite, 2013;Whyte, 2007) and less to the commission of crimes during war. Other work has looked at how the war-prone environment in the West catalyzed state-corporate crimes involving war profiteering, some of the same sorts of acts that attracted Clindard's (1946) attention half a century before (see Michalowski & Kramer, 2006;Rothe, 2009;Ruggiero, 2016;Whyte, 2015).
Most extant work on crimes committed against civilians by soldiers has focused on sexual violence or other forms of GBV. E. J. Wood (2006Wood ( , 2009Wood ( , 2018 has examined the nature and cause of variation in sexual violence during armed conflict, as have Lilly (2007) and Mullins (2009). Work has also examined sexual violence in the Sierra Leone conflict, specifically (Bensel & Sample, 2017;Cohen, 2013;Koos, 2018;Mullins & Visagaratnam, 2015), as well as a host of other modern conflicts (e.g., see Baaz & Stern, 2009;Bunds, 2009;Butler et al., 2007;Hagan et al., 2009;S. Kramer, 2012;Olujic, 1998;Robinson, 2017;Traunmuller et al., 2019). Almost all of this research has focused on soldier perpetrators and female victims though a few pieces address male sexual victimization (e.g., Linos, 2009;Sivakumaran, 2007). Studies of wartime sexual violence acknowledge the variety of types of assaults and varying motivations. This variation is often framed as exhibiting a continuum from almost no sexual violence to rampant sexualized attacks against civilians and enemy soldiers at the other (see E. J. Wood, 2006). In terms of motive, scholars postulate individual-level mechanisms at play, such as the frustration-aggression-inspired pressure cooker theory suggesting sexual assault is a way to release builtup tensions and stress accumulated by soldiers in combat situations (Brownmiller, 1975;Gottschall, 2004). Other theoretical approaches have highlighted the group context of most attacks, acknowledging the routine nature of military activities (individual soldiers are rarely alone) and the role of group context of sexual and other war crimes, especially forefronting the positive and negative consequences of tight military cohesion on group-based behavior (Pawinski, 2018;Rielly, 2001). Other approaches look at factors on the macro-level, especially a society's ability to exert social control over its own officials. Butler et al. (2007) concluded that while all wars have rape, they are more numerous where "there is a low level of control over public officials" (679), thus looking at the role of anomie and disorganization beyond the military itself and in the state as a whole.
Uses of terror to control civilians by rebels and government forces during insurgencies are not unique to this conflict. Such violence may be an attempt at general or specific deterrence on certain civilian behaviors or retaliation for defying the rebel's wishes (Asal et al., 2019;Kalyvas, 2006;Stanton, 2013). It can serve as a force multiplier and can be a rational response to an asymmetrical environment by compensating for military weakness or the rising costs of conflict (Crenshaw, 1981;Downes, 2006;Pape, 2003;Polo & Gleditsch, 2016;Stanton, 2013). It can be the product of groups competing for public support (McCauley & Moskalenko, 2008) or over economic resources (R. Wood & Kathman, 2012). Rueda's (2018) interviews with former combatants in Colombia found a strong moral framing of violence against civilians by combatants who say their "dirty work" is a necessary part of a broader social control process.
The Sierra Leonne civil war is one of the archetypical cases of a "new" civil war, one less interested in ideology and more interested in resource accumulation (Collier & Hoeffler, 2004;Kalyvas, 2001). Seen as more common in the postcold war period, some have suggested that in addition to different forms of motivation, "new" civil wars have less-controlled violence when compared with "old" civil wars. A lack of ideology within the group has led some to classify these as criminal wars or criminal fighters only interested in resource accumulation. Kalyvas (2001) questions, rightly, the reality of this distinction, showing that some "old" civil wars exhibited the same levels of civilian abuse and victimization as "new" wars and that, in the case of Sierra Leone, the so-called ideology-less rebels had a rich grasp on the politics of the war (see also Peters & Richards, 1998). It is an oversimplification to say that Sierra Leone rebels were only interested in the diamond fields; the rebel groups were more than bandits, and banditry was not limited to the rebels. Collier and Hoeffler (2004, p. 589) note that opportunity matters more than objective measures of grievance in predicting the eruption of civil wars but acknowledges that this does not "imply that rebels are necessary criminals. But grievances . . . may be substantially disconnected" from larger concerns.
This article examines the nature and diversity of war crimes committed across all factions of the conflict. The starkly different patterns and motivations for war crimes in the Sierra Leone civil war make it an excellent case to explore the emergence of criminality contemporaneously in different belligerents. It identifies the types and frequencies of crimes committed and contextualizes the acts specifically within that group's war experience and effort. To do so, this article next presents an overview of the conflict and its parties and describes the nature and source of the accounts drawn upon in this research.

Brief Overview of the Conflict
Sierra Leone, a former UK colony on the West African coast, is home to 16 ethnic groups and is religiously diverse. Just under 73,000 square miles in size, its primary economic revenues come from agriculture, but it is better known for alluvial diamond deposits in the eastern portion of the country (Zack-Williams, 1999). Six years after independence in 1961, the All People's Congress (APC) took control of the state; the APC's government was widely seen as corrupt, nepotistic, and inefficient. To obtain wanted international development loans, Sierra Leone entered into a structural adjustment program that required the firing of 15,000þ civil servants, more than 40% of such workers in the nation. What resources were freed though austerity were used for debt management. This severely weakened the state (Reno, 1997), inhibiting its ability to act as a functioning patronage network (thus maintain a network of loyal followers). A weakened state catalyzed a student resistance movement focused on Fourah Bay College in Freetown. While repressed by the APC, the movement grew in rural areas, even though it consistently drew on "the unemployed, urban youth of Freetown known for their anti-social behavior" for membership (Weinstein, 2005, p. 615). This is not dissimilar to how the Interahamwe (Prunier, 1997) and many Serbian militias such as Arkan's Tigers (Gow, 2003) recruited members.
The primary insurgent group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), was composed of numerous factions, some of which grew out of the student protest movement. It was primarily organized militarily in Liberia by Foday Saukoh with the financial and military assistance of Charles Taylor's Liberian regime, including units of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), as well as receiving ample assistance from the state of Libya (MacKenzie, 2012;Mitton, 2012;SLTRC, 2004).
On March 23, 1991, the RUF, numbering less than 300 fighters, launched an invasion from neighboring Liberia, starting a 10-year war well known for brutality, systematic kidnapping of children as a recruitment strategy, epidemic looting, and widespread sexual violence (Bensel & Sample, 2017;Mullins & Visagaratnam, 2016;SLTRC, 2004). Initially, the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) opposed the RUF, along with help from the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) initially deployed in the region to intervene in the civil war in neighboring Liberia. Groups of traditional hunters, the Kamajor, self-organized to oppose the RUF, and in doing so served as a model for the pro-government militias-termed Civil Defense Forces (CDF)-organized in 1993. The government sought to bolster its security apparatus by hiring a series of private "security" services: Frontline Security Service in 1993 and Gurkha Security Guards Ltd (GSG) in 1994. Internal divisions within the government led to the killing of a GSG commander, in turn leading to the company removing its personnel. In 1995, the government hired executive outcomes, a South African mercenary outfit, to provide additional military assistance (Reno, 1997). In May 1997, a coup led by Major Koroma ousted the then President Kabbah producing a new government, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), with an army composed primarily of disaffected SLA troops. The AFRC abolished political parties and declared a ruling council composed of military officers. The next month, the AFRC united with the RUF (Meredith, 2005;SLTRC, 2004;Zack-Williams, 1999).
Kabbah's exiled government retook control of the country (or at least the capital) by mid-1998. July of that year saw the establishment and deployment of the United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL). By the end of the year, the rebel groups controlled about half of the country, including the diamond fields. In January 1999, the RUF/AFRC attacked and took control of the capital, Freetown, in an atrocity-filled campaign termed "Operation No Living Thing" (MacKenzie, 2012;SLTRC, 2004;Utas & Jörgel, 2008). The 3-week occupation was marked by systematic violence and looting. July 1999 saw the government and rebel groups agree to the terms of the Lomé accords, but fighting continued. It was not until May 2002 that the RUF officially disarmed and transformed itself into a political organization (MacKenzie, 2012;Meredith, 2005;SLTRC, 2004).

The Belligerent Parties
The Sierra Leone civil war was notable for the large number of belligerent parties participating in the fighting (see Figure 1). At least nine different military entities took part in the war at some time. Six of these groups fought for or with the sitting government of Sierra Leone at some point: the SLA, the ECOMOG, Community Defense Forces (CDFs), Executive Options (EO), the UNOMSIL, and Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (SLTRC, 2004). The main rebel group was the RUF, though after the fall of Freetown in 1999, pieces of the RUF joined with parts of the former SLA and formed the AFRC (MacKenzie, 2012;SLTRC, 2004). Charles Taylor's NPFL was involved, especially at the start. The RUF and AFRC spun off smaller splinter groups-that is, the West Side Boys-that seemed to be little more than local gangs or militia and more interested in immediate personal gain than controlling a state (Meredith, 2005;Utas & Jörgel, 2008).
During the invasion, the RUF was accompanied by troops from the Liberian NPFL (Meredith, 2005;SLTRC, 2004). This creates a point of confusion in many of the testimonies and other accounts of crimes against civilians, especially early in the conflict, as it is not clear who was committing the atrocities in question: the RUF or the Liberians. Throughout the conflict (and after), many RUF leaders attributed the worst, if not all, of the anti-civilian violence to the Liberian units (SLTRC, 2004). It appears that such units were only under the loosest control by RUF command, often pursuing their own goals and ambitions. As the war progressed, the RUF produced many splinter groups that were still nominally focused on overthrowing the standing government but typically pursued their own interests (i.e., the West Side Boys; see Utas & Jörgel, 2008).
SLA forces were tasked with protecting civilians, engaging and defeating the RUF, and protecting the capital and the diamond fields. A standardized form of command and control existed but discipline was lax at the local, "on-the-ground" level. Such laxity allowed for the development of a phenomenon that civilians called "Sobels": soldiers by day, rebels by night (Mackenzie, 2012;SLTRC, 2004). Sobels were members of the state forces who, when not on duty, would leave their bases to engage in various criminal behaviors including robbery, looting, property damage, and sexual violence. Victims typically had trouble distinguishing Sobels from RUF or NPFL. All wore militaristic garb but often without emblems or other identifying features, which itself is a war crime (Meredith, 2005;SLTRC, 2004).
The AFRC was formed by members of the SLA who orchestrated a coup that deposed the government on May 25, 1997 (Meredith, 2005;SLTRC, 2004). It was both the new government and the new state army. The AFRC almost immediately formed a joint government with the RUF. The alliance held power until mid-February to early March 1998 when ECOMOG forces took the capital and reinstated the Kabbah government.
The CDFs were ad hoc defense groups organized by a community for their own protection from other belligerent parties. The Kamajors were specifically a group of hunter-gatherers who utilized their hunting and foraging skills to protect their people from various violence from various parties. Initial resistance to the RUF and protection of locals caught the government's eye. As the state's control of the SLA was weakening, it began to work directly with community leaders to create, arm, and otherwise support CDF activity throughout the nation but especially in the western and central areas. A leadership structure was created within the government, but its relationship with on-theground troops is unclear. 1 The amount of command and control among these groups was informal and varied per village.
ECOMOG, the peacekeeping mission established by the Economic Community of West African States, had its second deployment in Sierra Leone, following a prior deployment in neighboring Liberia. ECOMOG represented a regional response to humanitarian crises,à la the Organization of African States, seen as necessary by regional west African powers due to the general absence of will on behalf of the United Nations (UN) to intervene in a post-cold war Africa (Arthur, 2010).

Data and Method
This article utilizes archival data to examine accounts of victimization experiences during the civil war. It primarily depends upon transcripts and other records from the SLTRC (2004) archived by the SLTRC and publicly available (http://www.sierraleonetrc.org/). The transcripts, submissions, and supplementary statistical analyses are available in the appendices to the SLTRC's main report.
Proposed in the Lomé Peace Accords and formally established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Act of 2000, the SLTRC was "established . . . to create an impartial historical record of violations and abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law" (TRC Act 6.1). The commission relied upon voluntary testimonies but was empowered to issue subpoenas (8.1. (g)).
Ignoring court summonses and intentionally providing false narratives to the commission was referable to the criminal courts for prosecution (8.2). Public comments were collected between December 2002 and March 2003. A total of 7,706 individual testimonies were given; 140 of the country's 149 paramount chiefdoms were represented in statements provided to the commission. While it is not possible to objectively assess the representativeness of the testimonies, they do represent the result of a concerted effort to educate Sierra Leonians about the TRC and encourage participation. Additional effort was made to recruit participants who experienced sexual or other GBV (TRC Vol. 1). All sorts of people testified before the TRC: rebel officers and soldiers, state troops, community leaders, victims, and witnesses of victimizations. Testimonies were transcribed and, along with written submissions and other materials, attached to the final report of the commission in appendices constituting about 3,000 pages of material.
All testimonies from the TRC were analyzed; the testimonies were downloaded from the TRC and put into a single-document file. The materials were initially coded to identify the specific type of crimes contained in the narrative (i.e., amputation, assault, pillage, rape), with attention paid to time, location, victims, and responsible party for each case. Coding was then done within (and between) categories to discover themes within. This approach was chosen for two main reasons: (1) The project was primarily driven by an interest in IHL violations and (2) the massive amounts of materials have to be initially sorted in some way, and crime type seemed the most reasonable place to start. In some ways, the coding processes here were done in the opposite fashion of many grounded theory studies (see Bernard et al., 2016;Corbin & Strauss, 2008). It started with an etic categorization based upon a typology of crime forms. A second turn of coding was more open, inductive, and exploratory looking for patterns within the narratives. Those patterns are the foundation of the findings presented here.
Other sources of information were used to triangulate the findings from the TRC testimonies. The TRC published a statistical analysis of the testimonies which was used to validate certain themes as they emerged (see Conibere et al., 2004). Transcripts from trials at the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone, extant as of this writing as the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone (RSCSL), were examined. The RSCSL archives daily transcripts of proceedings of all four trials conducted by the court (the CDF case, the RUF case, the AFRC case, and the Charles Taylor case), among other things. Transcripts were drawn from the CDF and the RUF/AFRC trials. Attention was especially paid to trial dates with witness or victim testimonies and the testimonies and cross-examination of the accused. Similarly, there was ample secondary literature available, as well as numerous external human rights investigations (most done by Human Rights Watch, 2011), that also served as sources of validation.

Findings
Violations of International Criminal and Humanitarian Law were committed by all belligerent parties in the Sierra Leone civil war. Type, frequency, and motivations, however, differed. Forced displacement was the most common violation reported to the TRC, accounting for approximately 20% of crimes mentioned in testimonies (see Table 1). Abductions, *15%, detentions, 12%, killings, 11%, and property destruction, 8.5%, round out the top five most frequent violations. The RUF was responsible for 59% of all violations reported to the TRC, with the allied AFRC responsible for another 10%, and another 10% attributed simply to "rebels" (see Table 2). Thus, approximately 80% of all crimes were committed by the insurgents. Approximately 7% of crimes were attributed to the SLA and 6% to the CDFs and other local forces. The remainder was distributed among the other militaries operating in the region (i.e., ECOMOG, United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO); Conibere et al., 2004).

Rebel Groups: The RUF and the AFRC
The RUF and the AFRC 2 amalgamation were the most frequent offenders during the civil war. They also represent the widest diversity of war crimes, a wide range of acts including assault, looting, murder, amputation, abduction of children to use both as soldiers and sexualdomestic labor, and forced displacement through the burning down of entire villages. There were also more intense campaigns such as those that occurred during and after the attack on the capital of Freetown in January 1999, so-called Operation No Living Thing, with violence directed at anyone and everyone in the city. After the fall of the capital, the newly created RUF-AFRC alliance saw the widespread assault, rape, and murder shift to the systematic looting of "Operation Pay Yourself." As announced by AFRC commander Johnny Koroma, all active troops, regardless of which force they served, were told to take what they wanted as compensation for their service and they did (MacKenzie, 2012;Meredith, 2005;SLTRC, 2004). The RUF established itself as a force willing to commit atrocities from the start of the war. Some RUF leaders (i.e., Captain Kosia in his TRC testimony and Foday Sankoh in numerous public statements) blamed crimes committed early in the conflict on the Liberian forces and later to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children troops after the merger of forces. While Sankoh punishing offenders for looting and rape is occasionally mentioned in testimonies, this discipline and order maintenance seemed to be limited to the general's immediate surroundings. Outside of his immediate influence, discipline faltered.
Property crime violations were rampant; the RUF, and later the AFRC, frequently looted everywhere they went. A retired government worker gave the following testimony to the TRC: [a] group of 10 rebels entered my House . . . and placed my family and my self under gun point. They requested . . . five million Leones 3 but I told their commando that I am a retired civil servant and do not possess such a colossal amount. Consequently, he ordered me to give them all the money I had in my possession and warned me that if I do not cooperate with them, I shall swim in my blood. I went into my room under escort and removed the five hundred thousand Leones [testifier cries] I had in my box; under great shock I handed the money to them. The commando ordered one of his men to give me two slaps which he did very brutally. The commando ordered his men to lock my family and myself inside one room whilst they ransacked all the 6 rooms and the roof of the house and the store. All the articles they looted where loaded inside a lorry but before they departed, they ordered me to dance and laugh and express my gratitude to them for looting my house. (43) The humiliation piled on top of theft and assault is a typical element of RUF behavior as recorded in the TRC transcripts. Such acts are a blatant exercise of power that reinforce the subordinated status of civilians and provide a rush of exercising power over others (see Katz, 1988). It also served to reinforce the inversion of traditional norms that followed the rebels (Mitton, 2012). Exertion of power was also seen in torture that accompanied the looting. One citizen described before the TRC an episode when the RUF arrived at their village looking for food and other valuables. They pulled a man aside and asked him to lead them to where the rice was. But they decided to torture him before going for the rice and they lit a polythene bag and the hot droplets coming from the bag were directed to continue to drop into the man's anus. Then, the commander ordered him to take them to where the rice was and that pronounced immediate death sentence on him, should they not find the rice. (924) The torture of the man was unnecessary; he disclosed the location of the hidden rice when asked. It was a raw expression of brutality and control. Soldiers, no matter which force they belonged to at the time, used violence to establish situational dominance over civilians. The sexualized nature of some of the acts further emasculated the victim and, by proxy, the village (see also Bensel & Sample, 2017;Mitton, 2012).
While the top rebel leadership disavowed encouraging the crimes, it is clear from the testimony of victims and witnesses that on-the-ground leaders not only encouraged crimes, many held their troops accountable if the crimes were not committed. A civilian described the following: When they [civilians] were decapitated, the heads were all kept in a bag. Even the amputated hands were all kept in a bag. Their explanation was that their bosses visited them every Thursday. So when they came around, they were shown these dismembered parts as a sign of the fact that they were doing their job effectively. (990) While several forces utilized amputations, the RUF and other "rebel" groups used it most frequently and for a variety of reasons. Without fingers or hands, most Sierra Leonians found it difficult to engage in work, be it farming, labor, or other vocations. Rebels also removed hands and fingers to prevent voting: dipping a finger in ink marks that a citizen has voted and prevents fraud. However, with no fingers to mark, voting was not allowed. Several victims mentioned that the rebels specifically indicated that one of their motives was punishment for past votes or to prevent future voting: "They also said, I had used my hands to vote for Tejan Kabbah; I will never vote again in my life (591)." In his testimony before the TRC, former RUF officer, Captain Kosia, was straightforward about his troop's use of the practice: Yes, the RUF started it in the North. The amputation started again when the RUF were chased out by ECOMOG. In 1996, the aim was to prevent voters from voting, those who were caught at the polling station had their hands chopped off. (61) He went on to strongly reject that his men were responsible for such actions outside of the 1996 election context: If you talk looting, harassment, rape and the molestation of civilians, I can accept that; but of amputations, it was only done in 1996 when the elections were approaching . . . it was done to prevent people from voting.
Unlike the other forces, the RUF also more frequently drew upon explicitly sexualized violence beyond rape. Some abducted women had "RUF" carved into their chests with razors, marking them as rebel property (a practice not limited to females). In some instances, the RUF ordered civilians to rape and sexually molest each other, even if ultimately such acts were not carried out. An RUF soldier discussed such an incident that occurred shortly after his abduction: we saw some men who had dread locks and others had red caps; the ones who had red caps spoke Krio. They asked us to carry ammunition boxes. We complained that the boxes were heavy, but they said that if we complained, we would be killed. We arrived in a village were many people had been captured, and there was fire on many of the houses. When we dropped the boxes, I saw my mother and father; they were naked. There were also other people there. They ordered all the women to have sex with their fathers; and all the men were ordered to have sex with their mothers. I shouted out that I had never done that. They asked me to identify my mother. When we got to the top of the bush, they put them all in a house, sprinkled petrol on the house and set the house on fire. They asked us, who had carried the boxes [to come with them]. (124) Such demands violate deeply held incest taboos and were used mockingly to demonstrate both the total control the rebels held over a village they occupied and the ruthlessness of the RUF as a military organization (Bensel & Sample, 2017;Mitton, 2012). The subsequent killing of the villagers and the burning of the village were not atypical.
Local tribal leaders were often stripped naked before their people when brought in for questioning. Razak Kamara, a chief, discussed several instances of this during his testimony before the TRC. Often, this humiliation followed his intervention on behalf of his people for crimes committed by RUF forces (956-965).
They . . . removed me from the jail and I was stripped naked and beaten. They said I was thinking that I was in an educated world but now I have been handled. I was stabbed on my hand and Lion [an RUF leader] kicked me in my penis. He did this together with Yellow Man [another leader in the region] and I pretended to be dead. So they said they should leave me because I was now dead. They broke my hands and my feet and they again took me to the jail. (961) The beatings and lack of medical attention left him blind and impotent. The messages sent by such treatment are clear: The RUF held local leadership in disdain and often abused and debased them. Literally attacking the paramount chief's masculinity-taking his sexual functionality-is a powerful refutation of his authority.
There are multiple causes and catalysts of the high levels of violence committed by the rebels. The original goal of the formation of the RUF itself, and the primary goal of Liberian and Libyan support, was obtaining control of Sierra Leone's diamond fields, not the removal of a state and its replacement. If a belligerent party expects to rule people after a conflict, good relations with the citizenry, while not absolutely necessary, are a plus. Violence against civilians by insurgent groups can be curbed, if not deterred, by the hope of a supportive population in a postwar environment. The leadership within the RUF, and later the AFRC, did not care about, and had no incentive to prevent, violence against locals. Lack of resources catalyzed both looting and abductions. The rebels needed people and matériel, so they took them. Armed force clearly facilitated plunder and kidnapping. With no effective external controls functioning in the anomic anarchy of war, rebel groups of various flavors had free reign to take what or whom they wanted. Opportunity structures drove much of the offending.
However, several former RUF officers testified before the TRC that the RUF forces were well organized and well controlled; under the leadership of Foday Sankoh, rules were well enforced and followed. 4 In his testimony before the TRC, retired Captain Kosia, an RUF officer, directly blamed Liberian troops for all atrocities, including sexual violence, admitting he and his officers could not control them. He did acknowledge though, "when the boys [RUF] were at the front lines, it was difficult for the high command to know what they were doing" (62). There are instances of civilians seeing, or knowing of, the RUF executing soldiers for crimes, especially rape: I came one morning and my people complained of some people raping . . . so I met Colonel Bai Bureh and asked him on what principles the RUF were operating? And he told me than in the RUF the punishment for raping is death. If you harass any liberated civilian you would also be killed. If you loot or burn a house you will be killed too so I told him that my people have been grumbling about such activities of the RUF so he said that from hence forth, anybody identified of committing any of the above crimes should be brought to him. I then went and told my people . . . I went back in the afternoon hours of the next day, only to be told of a boy by the name of "I like it" who was shot . . . I ask them for the reason why "I like it" was killed and why did they also refuse to have his body buried. They said "I like it" was their child and he was shot only because he broke the law by raping a suckling woman. I then ask them if they investigated the matter and they told me that it was the woman herself who went and reported the matter before they caught "I like it". And the men said he should not be buried so that it could be an example for others to stop. (957) The bulk of testimonies before the TRC show that these incidents were rather rare; few were recorded. It further highlights the role that on-the-ground command and control can play in formal and informal social control. With few incentives not to offend and leadership that cared more about preventing offending only situationally and sporadically, it is not surprising that rebel groups were responsible for over 80% of the offenses.

The CDFs
The CDFs 5 were locally organized militias, encouraged and assisted by the sitting government, formed primarily to protect community members from the depredations of other belligerent parties. As the war progressed and the SLA and government weakened, they focused their activities more generally on anti-rebel activities but remained defensive, not offensive forces. Their crimes consisted generally of two types: either crimes committed against rebels and suspected rebels or punishments for civilians perceived to be cooperating with rebels. Their organization was catalyzed by the same weak state that underlay the "Sobels" and lack of order in SLA troops. When the regular army could not or would not provide needed protections, the CDFs formed to do so themselves. Here, we see crime as self-help in its raw form (Black, 1976(Black, , 1998. Most CDF violence was directed at rebels and suspected rebels. For example, a rebel child soldier captured by the Kamajors testified before the TRC that they lashed him 100 times with a cane and left him imprisoned in a house, which he was able to escape (271). Another civilian told the TRC about an instance of multiple extrajudicial executions committed by the Kamajors. They arrived in his village in advance of ECOMOG troops, calling the villagers out for "routine checks." Encountering citizens selling gasoline, the CDF troops "lined up all of them" including the testifier's brother, "and one Kamajors took out a knife and chopped all of their ears and chewed one . . . they then put all seven of them in a vehicle" and left the village. They returned later with seven heads . . . and I started crying saying that they had killed my brothers. They then called me out side to come and identify my brothers' heads and laugh at the same time. 6 I did it as there was no alternative. (7)(8) This is one of many examples of CDF troops killing suspected rebels, often in advance of ECOMOG troops entering an area, who would restrain CDF troops. This highlights how strong control elements can function to reduce offending in some contexts but catalyze it in others.
Knowing ECOMOG was under international pressure to maintain order and prevent extrajudicial executions, certain CDFs would be sure that their violence against citizens was done before ECO-MOG arrived. The international force served as a partial deterrent; CDFs change their behaviors but not in the precise manner hoped for by external governments.
CDF violence was frequently used against civilians who were suspected of cooperation or collaboration with rebels. The CDFs used amputations, though distinctly less often than other belligerents. The motivation was not voting prevention; rather, these actions were retaliation for assisting rebel groups. The economic effects of amputation for CDF victims are the same as those amputated by others. Further, it left victims visibly, symbolically labeled as collaborators who could not be trusted. A more permanent label than the shaved heads of women in France and the Low Countries after WW II.
The Kamajors also perpetrated the practice of specifically punishing women they perceived as collaborating with the rebels. Below is the story a father told to the TRC about the death of his daughter: My daughter was attending school in Freetown. She was in form five. Upon completion, she decided to visit us. At the time my daughter came to Kenema, she had jerry curls and a pair of trousers on. As they came in contact with her, she was alleged to be the wife of a soldier and she was shot. I found the corpse of the girl ablaze. The following morning I came and saw the remains . . . . The Kamajors had the opinion that any neatly dressed woman had dealings with soldiers. (367)(368) Not all instances of violence against civilians committed by the Kamajors were a result of perceived assistance of the rebels or other groups that threatened their village. One participant in the truth and reconciliation process explained that his sister was killed because she had given an injection to the daughter of one of the militia members which caused an abscess. She was bound and left to the elements and later taken to the local police station. When her brother went to the station the next day, he was told she was dead (87-88). This, too, is a form of crime as self-help. It is a further reminder of the general lack of formal social control in the region during the war and how the CDFs self-organized to fill the social vacuum.
The CDFs lower incidence, and smaller geography of influence, was a factor of the nature of the groups themselves. They were small, locally based groups with a very limited set of objectives that were focused on expressly defensive concerns. While there is a strong flavor of indiscriminacy to rebel violence, CDF-led violence was anything but, it was highly rational in, targeting and execution.

The SLA
Like the CDFs, the Sierra Leone national army had low, but persistent, rates of offending during the conflict, at least until the fall of the Kabalah government in 1997. The statistical appendix of the TRC counts 2,724 offenses committed by the SLA during the entire course of the war, slightly higher than the CDFs but less than the AFRC and substantially less than the RUF's 24, 353 (Conibere et al., 2004). Some of the crimes committed were opportunistic acts facilitated by the lack of civil order and the inherent power in being a part of a military unit. A widow testified before the TRC about an incident of retaliation carried about by SLA soldiers. A local man had beaten the wife of an SLA officer. Shortly thereafter, four SLA soldiers entered the village mosque, where they proceeded to assault a number of the men inside.
When the soldiers came they entered the mosque and started beating up the people. My husband and others fled, but my husband fell on the wayside. The soldiers found him and gave him severe beating thinking he was the [perpetrator]. Eventually my husband managed to reach the house. . . . my husband died as a result of the beating. (163) This too falls within Black's (1976Black's ( , 1988 notion of crime as self-help. SLA soldiers took it upon themselves to punish a perceived assault against one of their own. In the absence of a functional civil legal system, offending such as this is not rare. Ordinary crime commission is facilitated by the nature of war. Civilians and soldiers use the opportunity the anarchy of war presents to settle old scores that have nothing to do with the current conflict. In combat zones, the force of law is often predicated on the force of arms, not legal legitimacy, and the amount of order within such a territory is a function of how much order the occupying forces seek to provide. In his testimony before the TRC, Dauda M'bayoh testified to watching troops burn down his village, killing his wife and son in the process. The day before, soldiers whom he described as "rebels" had arrived at the village and spent the night there peacefully. The next morning, other troops arrived to burn the village. When asked if he could distinguish the troops that attacked the village from those that stayed, M'bayoh explained: "They were in the same uniform . . . . in military fatigue; it is difficult to distinguish them" (148). Similarly, a paramount chief's testimony before the TRC highlighted the issue as well: I must tell you that this war was 'a chameleon war'. The soldiers [SLA] were not sincere . . . . the rebels had attacked Gbaima and caused a lot of havoc; my belongings were scattered all over the place. By the time the soldiers got to Gbaima, the rebels had left. The soldiers were seated on my veranda. I realized that they [the SLA] had killed my personal bodyguard, Francis Musa, and five other people (311) . . . I had a hundred and fifty cows and they killed all of them; I had forty-five goats and seventy sheep in Gbaima town; the soldiers [SLA] ate all. They took away all my personal effects. I said that this war was a chameleon war, there were soldiers who were supposed to be protecting this nation, yet they were rebels. They would kill any soldier who prosecuted the war honestly and sincerely in the interest of the nation. My son is an example. 7 (312) Much of the criminality within the ranks of the SLA was a product of weak command and control: There were few functional social controls among the troops-internal or external. Leadership failed to enforce laws and the lack of esprit de corps allowed the strength of peer-and group-based influences to be directed toward offending and not away from it. SLA troops found themselves in a position of impunity robbing and assaulting civilians. While it was not clearly ordered by superiors, it was seemingly not punished; no record in the materials examined here discusses an SLA soldier being punished for crimes against civilians. Most crimes committed by SLA troops were neither organizationally driven nor focused on objectives relevant to the broader conflict. They were mainly opportunistic instances of individual Sobels enriching themselves due to the lack of social controls.

Concluding Discussion
The civil war that plagued Sierra Leone for over a decade is an example of widespread violations of IHL, that while exhibiting high amounts of variation, were nigh ubiquitous in the conflict. All parties committed war crimes. Yet the frequency, targets, and nature of the crimes were highly varied by belligerent parties. Rebel groups', not interested in establishing legitimate, civil rule exhibited the highest levels of offending. Some of the higher rates were driven by opportunistic encounters but much of it was the product of loose organization, lack of local command and control, and the establishment of an environment where such acts were normal, if not normative. The CDFs had a much narrower operational mandate but drew on homicide and assault in their informal policing of their territories. Like the rebels, the SLA generally suffered from weak command and supervision structures, which facilitated the sorts of crimes described by Dauda M'bayoh as well as providing an opportunity structure that allowed Sobels to thrive. This article establishes, again, that while war crimes may be ubiquitous in modern conflicts, ample variation exists within them (see Mullins, 2009, E. J. Wood, 2006, and it is through exploration of this variation that a criminological understanding of them can be reached. Varying belligerent motives, force composition, command networks, and other forms of social controls produced different frequencies of offending and different types of war crimes. Organizational-level command and control have been often mentioned as a crucial factor in deterring war crimes by active troops; here, command and control issues seemingly played a strong role in all of the belligerent parties. In the absence of guardianship (see Felson, 1994)-or when the troops are the guardianship-motivated soldiers are free to capitalize on their encounters with citizens. Such are the routine activities of a war zone. In the AFRC and RUF, there was clear encouragement of the offending for the accomplishment of organizational and individual goals in certain subgroups and commands. At times, it was expressly condoned if not outright ordered: Operation No Living Thing, Operation Pay Yourself, and the widespread use of abduction as a recruitment tool are cases in point. Evidence shows that, at least at times, when rebel commanders who disfavored such actions as rape or murder of civilians were proximate, soldiers avoided offending and some were punished for it. Yet this was the exception, not the rule.
For smaller RUF units operating on their own outside of immediate supervision, there was a laxness of authority facilitating crime commission. Butler et al. (2007) argue that it is the actors in the field, not the officers (or the agents not the principals in his language), who influence the "choice, level, and type of violence" committed (671). In the absence of strong command, indeed, soldiers are left to their own devices and supervision. In the case of the RUF, some crimes-child abduction and looting-were driven from the top, while much of the physical and sexual assaults might better fit Butler et al.'s (2007) assertion that crimes against civilians are led by those in the field.
It is this same sort of lax command structure that facilitated SLA troops acting as Sobels. Similarly, there was also a seemingly tacit understanding in both the SLA and rebel groups that looting of food stocks was acceptable and expected. This is not an uncommon practice for armies in the field and is allowed under IHL in certain circumstances. 8 In the CDFs, the crimes were driven by on-the-ground commanders. Extrajudicial executions were seen as a desirable and useful tool and were treated as such within the group. As examined above, when faced with the arrival of groups that would prevent such killings (i.e., ECOMOG), CDF troops would hasten their identification and execution of perceived rebels and rebel sympathizers.
There is a clear parallel between the functioning of armed units, especially rebel and militia units, and street gangs as seen in the west. These groups have similarly tight-knit structures, with members strongly reliant on the others for personal and collective defense. Being dominated by young men, forms of hypermasculinity predominate in these groups (Peters & Richards, 1998;Stretesky & Pogrebin, 2007;Utas, 2005). In the absence of other forms of capital, young men are attracted to the group (be it gang or rebel) for a variety of reasons including financial, gender, and social capital. It has been noted by several scholars that many women took active combat roles during the civil war (see Cohen, 2013;MacKenzie, 2012), as well as camp roles or becoming bush wives. It has also been noted that some of these women were just as, or more, savage than their male peers. Similar dynamics have been found in U.S. street gangs, where mixed-gender gangs had higher levels of crime than single-sex groups (Petersen et al., 2001). Not only do the female fighters have to establish themselves as useful and equals to their male peers but have to also fend off sexual advances, some more aggressive than others, and are viewed skeptically by their male co-fighters. This can lead to elevated levels of violence and aggression among the women as they attempt to "fit in" and "prove" themselves to male peers and superiors. Male violence and aggression may increase in these groups because women's aggression has escalated, and men feel the need to reestablish themselves and their gendered reputations at a "higher" level in comparison with the young women. This is a manifestation of Kandiyoti's (1988) concept of bargaining with patriarchy, with women finding themselves stabilizing their social position by enforcing gendered norms on others.
The general isolation of the rebel groups in the bush, along with the other typically shared experiences of armed conflict participation, served to increase cohesion among the fighting (and nonfighting) units, especially among the RUF and later the AFRC. Strong group bonds are a known agent of the transmission of criminal motivation and techniques (Sutherland, 1939;Warr, 2002). Such increased cohesion can result in the intensification of aggression channeled toward nongroup members, especially those seen as being in opposition to the group (Pawinski, 2018;Rielly, 2001). A classic example of "spillover" (Bell et al., 2012;Johnson et al., 2005;Nelson et al., 2009), it is not surprising that modes of behavior deemed appropriate toward one segment of the population, would be applied to another segment in a different context, even if those groups were legally protected under IHL. It could be argued that here legitimate soldiering violence and illegal and illegitimate violence against civilians are not separated by social or physical space, such as work-home spillover is typically conceived, and the notion does not apply. However, the phenomenological differences between an active firefight with enemy troops and entering a village without the presence of armed opposition seem significantly different enough to potentially elicit a different set of behavioral scripts-they have a clearly different legal context and set of behavioral demands.
There are clear rational elements to the commission of the crimes examined here, a wellacknowledged aspect of street crime (Clarke & Cornish, 1985) and corporate crime (Paternoster & Simpson, 1996). The selective use of violence to punish past and prevent future defection to, or cooperation with, enemy forces is a key example of the rationality behind war crimes (see Kalyvas, 2006). Recall Kosia's direct acknowledgment of the RUF's use of amputation to influence the outcome of the 1996 general elections. Similarly, encouraging or allowing looting of foodstuffs by RUF, AFRC, and SLA troops is a rational response to the need to keep an active army fed. The CDF and ECOMOG using extrajudicial executions is another example of a pure rationality in the decision to engage in a war crime. The rationality behind these acts is further reinforced by limited deterrent effects: ECOMOG ceased its use of extrajudicial execution due to international pressure; CDFs took pains to not conduct such executions when other forces were present.
We should not assume that all of the crimes are the product of a rational decision-making process. Much can be seen as irrational in nature (Katz, 1988;Mitton, 2012). Even if one accepts a degree of rationality in some of the violence as attempting to control or terrorize civilians, the excessiveness of the violence and the taunting demeanor displayed by some combatants, especially child soldiers, highlight a brutalization effect where the combatants seemed amused by that which they knew would be seen as morally repugnant. This was the product of a specific socialization program that exposed those abducted to high levels of violence and demanded they commit atrocities against civilians as a form of initiation (Mitton, 2012) and a way to collectively bond group members by ensuring everyone is culpable for the criminal acts.
As Mitton (2012) shows, an inversion of norms seemed to follow the rebel wherever they went. Systematic assault, pillage, and property destruction show the abandonment of typical Sierra Leone mores and of ordinary domestic law. This inversion is also reflected in the frequent mocking of victims by the rebels, forcing them to dance or laugh. It is most starkly exhibited in the rebel's demands that victims rape their family members in front of the village. Humiliation is a key goal of these actions, especially in the dramaturgy adopted by the rebels where the village itself is the staging area, and witnesses become forced participants in their own degradation (see Katz, 1988;Wright & Decker, 1997). Mitton (2015) also suggests that this inversion of norms is a way to reduce the civilians to the same level the rebels are occupying-knowing that their behavior, criminal and non, through the course of the war would normally bring shame on them and their families. By debasing and shaming civilians, the rebels ensure they are not the only ones socially and morally tainted-they are bringing the civilians down to their level (something also seen during the Rwanda genocide; see Gourevitch, 1998;Mullins, 2009;Prunier, 1997).
The data here clearly reinforce the importance of strong command and control of on-the-ground troops to deter war crimes commission. For nation-states with uniformed troops, increasing the presence of field offers who actively and publicly enforce military regulations, especially in terms of interactions with civilians, appear to reduce the number of citizens who are victimized and the number of different types of crimes can be reduced as well. Tighter enforcement could have reduced the crimes of the SLA and did reduce those of ECOMOG and EO: These two groups had the lowest level of misbehavior, and ECOMOG actually acted as a control on the CDFs. It does appear that it is possible to generate deterrence within these groups vis-à-vis these types of crimes. State-tied forces, especially those tied to other nation-states or quasi-governmental organizations (i.e., ECOMOG, UNMOISL), appear more subjected to this type of effect than the rebel groups. It is probable in these belligerent groups that this is not only a punishment avoidance strategy (i.e., true deterrence) but also a function of norms and norm reinforcement patterns within these groups.
The larger policy question is how to reduce nonstate belligerents from victimizing citizenry. The RUF and AFRC clearly did not have the organizational resources or structures to enforce the will of leadership, and it is not clear how strongly these groups cared about preventing war crimes, despite some of the narratives presented before the TRC discussed above.
The permanent International Criminal Court and the ad hoc UN-tribunals (including the SCfSL) represent the major threat of legal prosecution for mass atrocity crimes. It is an open question if the International Criminal Court (ICC) or other international courts deter offending (though that is far from the only function such courts serve-see Jeßberger & Geneuss, 2020). The post-WW II tribunals and prior ad hocs, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, clearly had little impact on the ways various belligerent parties operated in Sierra Leone. The civil war led to the creation of another ad hoc tribunal.
Other typical responses to civil war violence-the insertion of military external observer and assistance missions-were implemented here. ECOMOG, and later the UNMISL, didn't seem to have an impact on the behaviors of rebel groups, but as discussed, they did act as a control on some of the government forces, especially the CDFs. In the anarchy of war, potential use of force is a crucial key facilitator of crimes against civilians. It can be countered by other armed groups in the area willing to enforce existing norms and laws. In Sierra Leone, ECOMOG was a clear check on the CDFs. Other limited successes include the French Operation Turquoise in Rwanda (Prunier, 1995) and some aspects of the UN and North Atlantic Treaty Organization interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cattin et al., 2010). Recent successes of interventions, like that to counter election violence in Côte d'Ivoire (see Bekoe, 2018;Human Rights Watch, 2011), reinforce the potential of more robust intervention responses to stabilize situations. However, legal issues of sovereignty and foreign willingness to intervene remain as obstacles to effective external interventions.
Ultimately, a weak state in Sierra Leone, a highly anomic economic and political situation made worse by its entry into an SAP, and the existence of easy exploitable diamond fields catalyzed an externally supported uprising that devolved into an a-ideological conflict with multiple belligerents often pursuing seemingly aimless objectives and goals. With little formal social control and a wide variety of informal control forces and mechanisms, war crimes were a nearubiquitous phenomenon. But the crimes were committed at different frequencies on differing targets with different motives and goals. The vast array of crimes committed during this conflict is representative of the wide variety of motives that drive war crimes. From opportunistic, individually driven acts of plunder or revenge to systematic physical and sexual assault and terrorization of civilians, motives are tied to context, the nature of the military organization, and ultimate goals of the belligerent party.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.