Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

REWARDS FOR JUSTICE PROGRAM • 601REVOLUTIONARY UNITED FRONT (RUF). The RUF was an antistaterevolutionary group that sought to overthrow the governmentof Sierra Leone using remarkably vicious tactics, such as mutilation,rape, and burning alive of its victims, and that did not distinguish betweencivilian and military targets. The group began its activities on23 March 1991, led by former army corporal Foday Sankoh. It soughtto overthrow the president, Joseph Saidu Momoh, who was the weakleader of a corrupt one-party state, and continued to fight againstthe new government of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, elected on15 March 1996. Although Sierra Leone has great mineral wealth ofmetal ores, it was in a chronic state of economic collapse, whichmay account for the RUF’s ability to recruit thousands to its ranks.The RUF did not have a coherent ideology or alternative program ofgovernment but appealed mainly to populist resentments of rural SierraLeoneans against the elites of Freetown. The signature act of theRUF was cutting off the hands of civilian victims and telling them togo to ask for new ones from President Kabbah. This was a referenceto Kabbah’s election campaign promise to Sierra Leoneans to “lendthem a hand” toward economic recovery.Although the rebels offered little in the way of political or economicsolutions for Sierra Leone’s problems, they had remarkablemilitary success and were rumored to have enjoyed covert supportfrom Liberia’s president, Charles Taylor, which he denied. In January1999 the RUF captured Freetown but was driven out a few weekslater by a Nigerian-led military coalition of other West African nations.On 17 May 2000 Sankoh was arrested in Freetown by eliteBritish troops assigned to the UN peacekeeping forces there.The group’s last known operation was on 5 September 2000, whenthe RUF kidnapped two Italian missionaries in a remote village alongthe border with Guinea; the missionaries were released unharmedtwo months later. RUF rebels were disarmed and demobilized beginningMay 2001. With the end of the civil war officially declared inJanuary 2002, the RUF was effectively defunct. On 29 July 2003Foday Sankoh died in prison while awaiting trial for war crimes.REWARDS FOR JUSTICE PROGRAM. Also known as the Counter-Terrorism Rewards Program of the U.S. Department of State, establishedby the Act to Combat International Terrorism of 1984 (PublicLaw 98-533, Title 22 U.S. Code, Section 2708). The program offersrewards of up to $25 million for information leading to the arrest of