Sierra Leone Conflict: Rebel Leader Nowhere to be Found; U.N. Peacekeeping at Crossroads; U.S. Would Provide Logistical Support
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: As of this hour, it is relatively quiet in Freetown, the capital of the western African nation of Sierra Leone, where killing, violence, and hostage taking have been the norm in recent days. CNN's Ben Wedeman is there and he joins us with the latest -- Ben.</s>BEN WEDEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Judy, after yesterday's violent demonstration, the big question here in Freetown is where is Foday Sankoh, who is the leader of the Revolutionary United Front. Sankoh disappeared after Monday's demonstration. Today his home is empty. The floors are strewn with papers and photographs. In the morning, we saw some police who were sifting through the wreckage looking for what they said could be evidence to be used against Sankoh should they decide to launch an investigation. The mood, as you said before, in Freetown is much more relaxed today, largely due to the presence of those several hundred British paratroopers who are patrolling the area around U.N. headquarters. But the British troops are here to facilitate the evacuation of British subjects, and when that task is over they may just leave Freetown. But some Freetown residents are going to wait it -- aren't going to wait to find out, many continue to flee the city by air as well as by sea. And with the RUF leader Foday Sankoh missing and unaccounted for, many people assume here he is up to no good and are anxious to get out of the capital and out, I might add, of harm's way -- Judy.</s>WOODRUFF: All right, CNN's Ben Wedeman, who is reporting from Freetown, thank you, Ben. The current violence is placing United Nations peacekeepers in a very tight spot. CNN's Richard Roth explains how that happened.</s>RICHARD ROTH, CNN SR. U.N. CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): ... led by Foday Sankoh, signed a piece agreement with the government of Sierra Leone last July, eight years of civil war over; a war which featured a last-ditch brutal machete campaign by rebels against innocent civilians. Much of the outside world didn't raise a fuss, but human rights groups were outraged that all the rebels were given amnesty. The U.N., eager to respond to accusations of double standards, felt it had to be a presence in Sierra Leone, a non-strategic country, to make the deal whole, especially since it had gone into Kosovo and East Timor just last year.</s>KOFI ANNAN, U.N. SECRETARY-GENERAL: I think everybody realized it was going to be -- there will be some risk, but after many years of war and suffering of the people, the international community decided to take the risk in the expectation that everyone who signed the agreement would abide by it.</s>ROTH: The mission for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone? Separate the combatants and monitor disarmament. Eighty-seven- hundred peacekeepers arrived, 3,00 short of those authorized. The rebels far outnumber them. A U.N. spokesman says with budget cuts, peacekeeping is now done on a shoestring.</s>FRED ECKHARD, U.N. SPOKESMAN: Frankly, governments have not given us the strength we need here at headquarters to do the kind of professional job we would like to do.</s>ROTH: There were warning signs to the crisis. January 10, rebels take weapons and vehicles from peacekeepers from Guineau. January 14, Kenyan U.N. soldiers are ambushed and surrender weapons to a rival group, former government soldiers. February 23, rebels violate the agreement and refuse to allow Indian peacekeepers, a two- day stand-off before peacekeepers return to base. And February 29, rebels stop a U.N. helicopter from landing. The U.N. was still getting assurances from Foday Sankoh, now a part of the government, that everything would be OK, but his statements of cooperation were conflicted. The abduction in May of more than 500 peacekeepers threatens the U.N. Sierra Leone operation.</s>ADRIAAN VERHEUL, U.N. DEPARTMENT OF PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS: It was not designed, equipped nor deployed to fight a war.</s>ROTH: Sierra Leone has put the U.N.'s blueprint for peacekeeping at a crossroads. After failures in Somalia and Rwanda, the U.N. needs to make Sierra Leone work, or risk losing global credibility. Richard Roth, CNN, United Nations.</s>WOODRUFF: The United States has said it will provide support for the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone. Let's go on that -- for more on that, CNN's military affairs correspondent Jamie McIntyre, who is at the Pentagon. Jamie, what is the U.S. not willing to do, and what are they willing to do in this situation?</s>JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN MILITARY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, at this point they are not willing to send any ground troops, any combat troops, or peacekeepers into Sierra Leone. What they are willing to do is provide basically transportation to other countries who want to try to help out or augment the U.N. force there. The U.S. has offered to move a battalion of peacekeepers from Bangladesh if they are ready to go sometime in the next week or so and there -- that would either be by air or by ship. They have also made the offer to the U.N. to move other troops, and they have moved a coastal patrol ship near the area, but that is basically a precautionary measure, it only has a small number of Navy Seals on board, they're not preparing to go ashore.</s>WOODRUFF: Jamie, as everyone knows, the U.S. did become heavily involved in Bosnia, in Kosovo. Why not the same level of support in Sierra Leone -- is race an all -- at all an issue here?</s>MCINTYRE: Well, the Pentagon would say absolutely not, that they have to decide obviously when the U.S. is going to intervene they make that decision based whether there are vital U.S. interests at stake, whether there are alliances, whether there is regional stability that they have to protect, and also, a big factor, whether other countries can do the job. If that is the case, they -- the United States would prefer to provide whatever special additional capability that it can provide, but like, for instance, in the case of East Timor where they provided logistical support but no -- very limited number of people on the ground, that is what they are looking at here, trying to support allies like Great Britain, but not sending any ground troops of its own.</s>WOODRUFF: All right, CNN's Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon, thank you. For the Clinton administration, where does Sierra Leone rank on the international priority list? For more on that, let's go to CNN State Department correspondent Andrea Koppel -- Andrea.</s>ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN STATE DEPARTMENT CORRESPONDENT: Judy, at this moment there are three senior Clinton administration officials who are all in Africa, all in different places, but none of them in West Africa trying to mediate an end to the crisis in Sierra Leone. Privately, the U.S. is hoping that regional leaders like Nigeria's President Obasanjo will send in troops and will help to kick start the peace process. But observers say already the people of Sierra Leone are quickly losing confidence in the ability of the United Nations to defend them and feel that the U.S. and Great Britain pushed them into signing a bad peace deal last summer with rebel leader Sankoh. And now that Sankoh himself has backed out of the peace deal, they feel that the U.S. isn't backing up its talk with action and the sense, Judy, is that they are actually trying to wash their hands of the matter -- Judy.</s>WOODRUFF: All right, CNN's Andrea Koppel reporting from the State Department, thank you, Andrea. The leaders of nine African countries met in Nigeria Tuesday to discuss the Sierra Leone conflict. Nigeria pulled its forces out of the country just a few weeks ago and Nigerian officials say they will consider sending troops back in if the U.N. will pick up the bill. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone appears, as we've been suggesting on the verge of collapse. Joining us now from the U.N. to talk more about this crisis is Shashi Tharoor, who is a close adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Mr. Tharoor, how did this situation get so dire?</s>SHASHI THAROOR, ADVISER TO U.N. SECRETARY-GENERAL: Well, I am afraid there are many reasons, but the most simple one that is we sent in peacekeepers to implement a peace agreement that the parties concerned had agreed to uphold and one of them chose not to uphold it at a time when we were still deploying, our troops were not up to full strength, they didn't have all their equipment yet, they were simply getting to their bases around the country when one of the parties, the RUF, decided that they didn't want to cooperate and they wanted instead to attack the peacekeepers. Tough situation...</s>WOODRUFF: But it...</s>THAROOR: I beg your pardon.</s>WOODRUFF: I was just going to say, with all due respect, Mr. Tharoor, didn't the U.N. know full well going in ahead of time that you were dealing with people who could not be relied on?</s>THAROOR: Well, the fact is that when you plan for bad faith, you plan differently. We had, for example, an operation in Croatia, in eastern Slovenia, where we went in with mechanized infantry, helicopter gunships bristling with artillery. That is not the kind of force we've sent to Sierra Leone. That is not the kind of force the Security Council authorized and that's not the kind of force that member states were willing to provide or pay for. So we have to understand the U.N. is what governments allow it to be. This is the kind of force that governments around the world were prepared to back and send in to essentially implement a peace agreement.</s>WOODRUFF: Well, given that, was this mission a mistake in the first place?</s>THAROOR: Well, it's possible to say that with hindsight, but don't forget, we have been engaged in Sierra Leone for quite some time and the peace agreement was a result not only of hard bargaining, but of a process that included a very active and one might even say an assertive military presence by the West African states, the ECOMOG operation lead mainly by Nigeria. So a certain peace had been brought to the country before the peace agreement was signed and governments therefore felt, as you heard Kofi Annan say a few minutes ago, that this was a risk worth taking.</s>WOODRUFF: There are reports, as you know, that these U.N. peacekeeping troops were ill-trained, not only poorly equipped but easily intimidated. Is there truth to these accusations?</s>THAROOR: Well, it certainly looks like some of our contingents, not all of them, but one or two of them have not performed as well as we would have hoped. The U.N. has no standing army of its own. We go to governments and we expect governments to give us well-equipped, well-trained and able troops, sometimes governments fall short of that ideal. But you must realize that the big countries, the stronger armies around the world with the exception of India, which is there in Sierra Leone, none of the others were willing to provide troops. We had to make due with the material we had available and we went in with good faith, and we asked the governments to do their best. Sadly, it seems that some of the soldiers may have fallen short of our own expectations of them.</s>WOODRUFF: As a result of this, Mr. Tharoor, does the U.N. risk losing or has it lost some of its global credibility with these peacekeeping missions?</s>THAROOR: Well, we haven't given up yet, Judy. The fact is that we are now urgently moving to reinforce the existing force to try and bring them up to strength, to make sure that they are there, fully armed, fully equipped and in the numbers authorized. There is also a possibility of other troops coming in, perhaps with a further expansion of the size of the force. We aren't giving up. The British are there to evacuate foreigners, they've already secured the airport, that is freeing some of our soldiers for other tasks. We are determined to try and get this back on track through a process of political pressure on Mr. Sankoh as well as military actions, and we do hope that the peace process will be brought back on track and we can still implement what remains of the peace agreement. We haven't written it off yet.</s>WOODRUFF: All right, Mr. Shashi Tharoor, who is one of the main advisers to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, thank you very much for joining us.</s>THAROOR: Thank you.