Executive Outcomes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYE1s7lDBYc

Many lamented the lack of foreign intervention in Rwanda in order to stop genocide. In the late 20th century Africa was an extremely tumultuous continent. Only about a year after Rwanda, a brutal civil war erupted in Sierra Leone, a nation on the west coast of Africa, extremely wealthy in diamonds. The Revolutionary United Front, or RUF savagely massacred villagers and forced many to labor as slaves in the diamond mines, which they used to buy arms. They captured children and indoctrinated them with propaganda, drugs, and alcohol, using them to commit many atrocities against defenseless villagers. When the government held free elections, the RUF chopped off tens of thousands of arms, because if you don't have a hand how can you vote? Fear tactics and war crimes such as these caught the World's attention, and soon after the government was forced to hire a private military company, or PMC, of white South African, or Afrikaans, ex-special forces from the recently dissolved apartheid government's military known as Executive Outcomes. Roughly one hundred men, with two attack helicopters and a handful of tanks and armored personnel carriers asked for the meagre sum of $15 million and rights to some of the diamond mines, a paltry sum compared to the cost of most military expeditions. In a few weeks the RUF advance had been halted by less than 100 well trained, organized, and motivated men. One wonders if the moderate Rwandan government had hired Executive Outcomes, perhaps genocide could have been prevented. The Interahamwe were no better trained than a civilian and had few real weapons. After peace was achieved, the UN quickly pressured EO to pick up and leave before their contract was up, as the UN feared the growing power of PMC's. The UN quickly sent 17,000 peacekeepers, having learned from Rwanda and wishing to show they could do the same job as a 100-man PMC force. The RUF quickly broke all ceasefires and advanced on the capital, kidnapping UN peacekeepers and using them as hostages for bargaining. The Sierra Leone conflict also brought up the issue of conflict diamonds, or diamonds used to fund groups accused of war crimes and the like. De Beers was brought under immense scrutiny, as they were accused of buying conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone, although there is no real way to tell. The Kimberly Process came about as a solution to the conflict diamond issue in 2003. The film Blood Diamond is based off of these events.