Greedy Elites, Dwindling Resources, Alienated Youths The Anatomy of Protracted Violence in Sierra Leone DAVID KEEN T he war in Sierra Leone was ignited in March 1991 when a small band of rebels, supported by Liberian rebel Charles Taylor, attacked from Liberia. But it was underlying resentments inside Sierra Leone that turned this relatively small incursion into a conflict that displaced close to half the population. All About Diamonds? Sierra Leone’s Permanent Representative to the un , Ibrahim Kamara, told the un Security Council in July 2000:»The root of the conflict is and remains diamonds, diamonds and diamonds«. Problems in the diamond sector did indeed feed into the war – in at least four important ways. First, diamonds were an incentive for violence. This applied both to the ruf and to many government soldiers. Both groups quickly showed an interest in illegal diamond-mining. Whilst pitched battles in the war were relatively rare, those that did occur were often over diamond areas. Thousands of civilians were expelled from, and kept away from, diamond-rich areas. Second, diamonds helped to fund the violence. The rebels of the Rev­olutionary United Front( ruf ) used diamonds to pay for arms, purchas­ing arms from government soldiers as well as outside the country. A number of traders benefited from rebel violence and seem also to have helped to fund it. The rebels’ trading system – covering an area broadly in line with Taylor’s vision of a»Greater Liberia« and including Sierra Leone’s main diamond fields – provided an alternative to the tightly-con­trolled networks of patronage and trade that were based on Freetown, but also to the estimated seventeen unofficial diamond dealers who dom­inated pre-war diamond smuggling, much of it to Liberia. Third, the diamond sector helped to fuel the war as a result of frustra­tions arising from the very unequal benefits accruing from diamond ex­ipg 2/2003 Keen, Sierra Leone 67