Foday Saybana Sankoh

This time RUF leaders are involved in the national reconciliation process though their top man Foday Sankoh remains in detention...

RUF leader Foday Sankoh is in gaol...

Sesay and Massaquoi want Foday Sankoh and the former-RUF ministers released in return for handing over the diamond fields - a demand which was rejected three months ago by the Freetown government which is now sounding more conciliatory...

The last big protest in Freetown was in May 2000 when thousands of people surrounded the house of RUF leader Foday Sankoh to protest at his organisation's return to war...

That set off a chain of events which gravely damaged the RUF's political leadership: Foday Sankoh and RUF ministers in the power-sharing government such as Mike Lamine (Trade and Industry Minister) Paulo Bangura (Energy and Power) and Brig...

The capture of the RUF leader Corporal Foday Sankoh and the sacking and arrest of RUF members of Kabbah's power-sharing cabinet ended the tentative and controversial Lomé peace settlement...

A key plank in the Lomé accord was that Liberia and its President would play a constructive role in persuading Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front to abide by the accord surrendering its arms in exchange for jobs in a power-sharing government...

Despite December's agreement between the Sudanese and Ugandan governments the Khartoum-supported Lord's Resistance Army (led by Joseph Kony who is based near Juba) continues to commit atrocities like those once typical of Mozambique's Resistência Nacional Moçambicana and more recently of Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone...

Williams had been detained at Pademba Road Prison for disloyalty to Kabbah but have now been brought in to command pro-government forces; some are former RUF soldiers motivated more by opposition to RUF leader Corporal Foday Sankoh and RUF sponsor Charles Taylor than any loyalty to Kabbah...

By the end of the 1980s though it was clear that Foday Sankoh a disenchanted former SLA corporal had emerged in control after several brutal purges of the intellectual types who'd been there from the start...

The arrest and detention on 19 May of Corporal Foday Sankoh leader of the Revolutionary United Front strengthened President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's weak and too conciliatory government...

Last July Whitehall backed the Lomé peace accord which appointed RUF leader Corporal Foday Sankoh chairman of the National Diamond Commission left Sierra Leone's diamond fields under the control of RUF and sundry allies and offered other RUF commanders and fighters an unconditional amnesty in exchange for their cooperation with a United Nations-supervised demobilisation and disarmament programme...

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...