Variations in War Crimes During the Sierra Leone Civil War

• Author: Christopher W. Mullins
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567720981621
• Published date: 01 June 2023
• Date: 01 June 2023
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Original Article

Variations in War Crimes

During the Sierra Leone

Civil War

Christopher W. Mullins

1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

war crimes, Sierra Leone, conflict sexual violence, abuse of civilians

The study of war and war crimes by criminologists has a deep history in the field (see Bonger,

1919/1967); Clinard, 1946; Gluek, 1944; Sutherland, 1949), though it has never been a central

concern. Recently, a number of papers and books have appeared which embrace and extend the

project of a criminology of war (e.g., McGarry & Walklate, 2016, 2019; Walklate & McGarry,

2015). This new energy has produced work examining a range of intersections between the study of

law, crime, and war. Here, the concern is less with attempts to define war as criminal or study the

phenomena of war itself as a crime (see Kramer & Michalowski, 2005; Ruggiero, 2005) but is

focused on examining the nature and context of violations of the laws of war committed by soldiers.

Sexual assault as a war crime and other gender-based violence (GBV) has received the greatest

amount of attention from different disciplinary approaches (e.g., Burds, 2009; Butler et al., 2007;

Ericsson, 2011; Gottschall, 2004; Mullins, 2016; Utas, 2005; E. J. Wood, 2006, 2018). Key ques-

tions about the basic nature and distribution of violations of the laws of war remained unexplored

and unanswered. Scholarship that has attempted to address this absence has focused on the funda-

mental issue of variation, noting that war crimes are nigh ubiquitous in conflicts—with no single

armed conflict in recorded history not seeing violations of the laws of war, or later, International

1

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Christopher W. Mullins, Southern Illinois University, 4226 Faner Hall, Mail Code 4504, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA.

Email: mullinsc@siu.edu

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DOI: 10.1177/1057567720981621

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Humanitarian Law (IHL; Butler et al., 2007; Mullins, 2011; E. J. Wood, 2006, 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, belli-

gerent, 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 (1991–2002). 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.

Literature Review

Criminology and War

While some early criminological work identified the criminogenic nature of war (and the criminal

nature of war itself—see Bonger, 1919/1967), save for a few studies published during and after

World War (WW) II (i.e., Clinard, 1946; Gleuk, 1944, 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, 2005, 2011; Wardak & 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 (2006, 2009, 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 & Visag aratnam, 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 acknowl-

edge 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 ter ms 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

198 International Criminal Justice Review 33(2)