strategy, since the country needed support – urgently. UK intervention was very much shaped by consecutive crises prior to peace in 2002, particularly with a military junta in power from 1997-1998, the invasion of Freetown in 1999 and 2000, the RUF attacks on UNAMSIL, and so forth. UK staff had to try to react to that which forced them into action. Given this, it was not surprising that activities on the ground were not particularly joined-up. In fact a report written as early as 2002 concluded that in “the absence of clear guidelines and precedents for SL-type situations, the strategy follows the pattern of needs as they occur and are recognized, rather than vice versa”264.
In 2002, when the MoU was signed between the Governments of Sierra Leone and the UK, a number of activities were outlined, effectively within a first phase of engagement. However, the MoU framed a 10-year commitment of the UK to spend £40m a year and there was no re-evaluation of MoU commitments to adjust them according to changing priorities. There was a vision, but no real evolving strategy to underpin that vision. The lack of an overarching strategy and a clear end-state also meant that the same concerns kept emerging again and again. For example, within the MoD, each time a new IMATT Commander was deployed he had to ask the same questions:
“This lack of overall vision: Where do we want to go with this? The end-state: When do we know when we’ve succeeded? When do we know that we have something that is good enough? Ultimately this boiled down to the issue of: Against what are we judging success?
Are we judging success on the basis of people being able to make their own decisions? Are we judging people on their effectiveness?
There are all sorts of criteria”265.
Sierra Leone’s Role in the Establishment of the Conflict
Division (SSD), for instance, would not have been possible (and indeed only happened in the late 1990s) if individual CCSSP staff had not gone straight to the UK Chief of Defence Staff for support (albeit with DfID blessings)266.
“Until then [when the GCPP and ACPP were established], we had steered away from anything to do with weaponry. Not that we [DfID] could do anything with weaponry, but at least the Conflict Pool mechanism got us into that”267. The new 2001 Overseas Development Act and the establishment of the joint conflict pools were seen as enabling SILSEP to encompass activities, such as specialist training for intelligence services that were previously considered inappropriate for ODA funding. Likewise the inter-Departmental pool mechanism allowed for thinking about operational issues, including training for the Anti-Corruption Commission, Special Branch and FISU, which had been resisted by DfID. The division simply became that in those areas were there was a clear operational aspect to the training, funding was provided by the ACPP, rather than DfID, development funds.
Prior to the integration provided by the pools, the UK Government was only able to draw on a relatively small pool of FCO funding; no ODA funding was available for many of the relevant activities. After the Abidjan peace agreement and democratic elections in 1997, the country was relatively peaceful and the window of opportunity was used by the UK Government. A number of projects were begun, in the words of former British High Commissioner, “to nurture the infant democracy, including the judiciary, police, the public sector, media and a military training programme, the budget [for which] was something like
£150,000”268. Following this, the patchwork of activities outlined in the narrative was enacted utilising different pools of support. However, in 2001 UK Government concluded that it could make coordination much more formal.
The three relevant ministers, Clare Short (DfID), Jack Straw (FCO) and Jeff Hoon (MoD), jointly decided to establish two funding mechanisms, the GCPP and the ACPP. In fact, the idea of the ACPP had initially come from DfID, immediately followed by the FCO’s idea of a GCPP. As recalled by Clare Short:
“Gordon Brown and the treasury came up with this idea, putting lumps of money up to encourage cross-departmental working so somebody in Africa Division said, let’s go for an Africa Conflict Prevention Pool, and we were up for it, we’d done some work on conflict in Africa. The idea then was that the Treasury would put in their £20 million – it wasn’t much – on the table and then the other Departments would match it, but then that money would be run jointly. The point from the Treasury’s point of view was leveraging better inter-departmental working. For us, of course, it meant, really getting into the policy-making, including the security services”269. The idea of the pools was to provide a formal indicator that the three departments were willing and able to work together, and, as such, they were at least partially positioned to respond to political pressure within Whitehall. The accounting officers of the departments would remain accountable for the expenditure, whilst the Ministers engaged in joint policy decisions. Apart from the fact that each of the pools dealt primarily with post-conflict, rather than ‘conflict prevention’, there were additional problems in making the pools genuinely joined- up. In particular, the different cultures amongst the different ministries were exposed within the operational mechanism of the pools, as well as continuing bureaucratic obstacles to meaningful collaboration.
While there might not have been a clearly outlined strategy for security system transformation process in Sierra Leone, meetings in the Cabinet Office about UK engagement in the country took place regularly. However, the evolution of joined-up work in Whitehall is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the days of ODA, the “idea that you would have anything to do with ‘nasty’ Ministry of Defence was deeply resisted”270. At the same time, whilst resistance remains strong among development agencies to engage in security-related programming, it is important to recognise that people have travelled a long distance since 2000 in terms of working jointly: “This period will in the future be looked at, probably not as seismic, but as a quite significant shift in the whole ethos. The idea of being involved in intelligence is strange – I mean, talking to people in Vauxhall Cross, it was dangerous”271.
Cabinet meetings aside, there was little evidence in 2007 of coherent cross- departmental strategic direction regarding Sierra Leone from the key departments in London272. This could have a significant negative effect in terms of changes to current programming or on devising an exit strategy. Without a clear consensual notion of where Sierra Leone lies on the spectrum between a
‘post-conflict’ and ‘developing’ country contexts, it is difficult to make a proper assessment of whether executive roles of international staff should be considered or whether a developmental approach would be more appropriate273. Similarly, the current lack of a clear definition of what the realistic end-state for Sierra Leone might be has made it difficult to properly assess which programmes to scale down or what actions are needed to allow for a measured handover of responsibilities over time. Political will and momentum in the UK and at country level will dictate future engagement.