Sierra Leone rebels battling U.N. forces

Sunday, May 7, 2000

By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS
The Associated Press

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- Rebel forces using civilians as human shields battled United Nations forces in the interior of the country and were advancing on the capital Saturday, a U.N. official said.

The rebels, who had agreed to a U.N.-mediated peace agreement, launched the offensive from the town of Lunsar, 45 miles northeast of Freetown, the capital, and were heading toward the town of Masiaka, said U.N. spokesman Philip Winslow.

"We tried to stop the rebels using all the resources at our disposal," Winslow said, but he declined to characterize the battle any further, except to say that the rebels were not stopped.

The exact position and the intent of the Revolutionary United Front fighters were not immediately clear, but the fighting violates the peace deal that brought the rebels into the government and ended an eight-year civil war.

Winslow said the rebel force was estimated to be between 500 and 1,000 men carrying "infantry-type" weapons. They were using vehicles they had captured from U.N. peacekeepers, he said.

Since Monday, hundreds of U.N. personnel have been taken hostage by the rebels, and at least four are presumed dead after clashes.

On Saturday, the United Nations said it had lost contact with a 200-man peacekeeper unit near the town of Makeni.

If the U.N. peacekeepers, all of them Zambian, have been captured by Sierra Leonean rebels, that would bring the number of U.N. staff being held by the RUF to nearly 500.

U.N. officials emphasized earlier that the world body had no plans to withdraw from Sierra Leone. The mission had been dispatched in December to oversee the peace deal ending the civil war, which left tens of thousands of people dead and thousands more maimed in this diamond-rich nation.

The rebels, though, have insisted all along that they were neither holding hostages nor launching an offensive. The missing U.N. soldiers are simply lost in the jungle, they have said.

"These people, they are foreigners here, they do not know the terrain," rebel leader Foday Sankoh told The Associated Press on Saturday afternoon in front of his heavily guarded home. "As time goes on, I think all of them will come out. My men are helping to look for them."

"If they are being held by the RUF combatants, I'm sure they will be released," he added.

Nigerian, Malian, and Libyan delegations have met with Sankoh. Many other diplomats -- African, European, and American -- also have reached out to the rebel leader.

But Sankoh is a mercurial man long accustomed to confrontations with the United Nations and the Sierra Leonean government, and has often ignored their pleadings in the past.

The July peace agreement brought the RUF into a power-sharing government. But relations have remained deeply strained between the rebels and the government, despite their alliance, and thousands of rebels have refused to disarm.

In Freetown, residents feared an attack. Radio stations broadcast notices that religious services and other meetings were canceled "because of the security situation."

But government and U.N. officials said the city was well-defended, and the United Nations continued to appeal for international help. Earlier Saturday, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said the United Nations would continue trying to speed up deployment of the remaining three battalions -- Indian, Bangladeshi, and Jordanian -- due to arrive in mid-July to complete the 11,100-strong force.

Four Kenyan U.N. peacekeepers are believed to have been killed in the clashes that began Monday. The fighting began as the Nigerian-led West African intervention, which has fought the rebels for years as the de facto Sierra Leonean army, made its final withdrawal.

The United Nations says 12 people were wounded in the fighting and the RUF says six rebels were killed.

The rebels say the clashes began because peacekeepers were forcibly disarming RUF fighters -- a charge U.N. officials deny.