Ahmed Tejan Kabbah

That has failed on all counts: Britain's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Peter Hain has said he would be surprised if Sankoh were not held to account for breaking the Lomé peace accord a view echoed among officials of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's government in Freetown...

The UN and the now even wobblier government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah will have to cope with a new influx of people fleeing into Freetown...

In the meantime the real alarms are sounding in Sierra Leone where President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah looks likely to lose his tenuous grip on power once more giving way to a Foday Sankoh presidency underwritten by neighbouring President Charles Taylor in Liberia...

Nearly five months after the signing of the Lomé peace accord between President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's government and Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front none of the agreed 6 000 UN peacekeepers have been deployed; and Sankoh's rebels still control Sierra Leone's main diamond fields shipping the proceeds to Liberia...

The 6 000 blue-helmeted UN troops are heading for Sierra Leone partly because Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo wants to withdraw its soldiers who have spent the last three years propping up President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah...

This is when the Revolutionary United Front leader Corporal Foday Sankoh and his allies are to arrive in Freetown to take up government jobs alongside President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and the RUF soldiers have to hand over their guns to the international peacekeepers...

Weaknesses on both sides may just offer a chance of serious negotiations on power-sharing and amnesty (AC Vol 40 No 6 Leaving for Lomé) as talks between President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and Corporal Foday Sankoh's teams opened in Lomé on 25 May...

Like the current head of state Abdulsalami Abubakar Obasanjo may want to pressure the West into providing more financial and logistical support for Nigerian peacekeeping operations as well as press President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah into serious negotiations with the Revolutionary United Front...

Getting it right in Sierra Leone has become a Whitehall imperative after last year's political row over the involvement of British security company Sandline in supplying arms and mercenaries to reinstate the ousted (and elected) government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah...

Foreign pressure is growing for President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to start substantive negotiations with the Revolutionary United Front...