Foday Saybana Sankoh

Both RUF leader Foday Sankoh and Liberia's President Charles Taylor had military training in Libya during the 1980s...

President Taylor's regime in Monrovia which is the main beneficiary of the smuggled diamonds has kept up plentiful supplies of arms and materiel to both wings of the RUF: that under Corporal Foday Sankoh's control which is mostly within Sierra Leone and the wing jointly controlled by Sam 'Maskita' Bockarie and Taylor (AC Vol 41 No 7) which divides its time between the diamond fields in eastern and southern Sierra Leone and training camps and border patrols in Liberia...

RUF fighters in Sierra Leone claim there has been a major rift between taylor and RUF leader Corporal Foday Sankoh about the militia's future and division of diamond earnings...

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...

Pushing Sankoh and co The job now is to put pressure on Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front and on his sponsors presidents Charles Taylor in Liberia and Blaise Compaoré in Burkina Faso to comply with the peace accord...

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...

At the same time and even more profitably Compaoré and Taylor went to war in Sierra Leone training and arming Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front...

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...

Many OAU delegates were appalled at Eyadéma's bringing Revolutionary United Front leader Corporal Foday Sankoh to Algiers with the Togolese delegation...

Sierra Leoneans reacted with a mix of relief and scepticism following the signing of the Lomé peace deal on 7 July which brings Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front into a power-sharing arrangement with President Tejan Kabbah's government...

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...