The Holocaust in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s isn’t the only extreme act of killing and violence that has occurred in the world, in fact there have been many others, and some just as brutal as Hitler’s. This is one that was very dark, and lasted over a decade. The Sierra Leone Civil War raged on for almost eleven years and consumed over 50,000 lives through murder, rape, mass killings and battle fatalities. This is the story of the dark past of Sierra Leone and it’s conflicts with diamond mining, and uprising of rebellious political groups.

In early spring on May 23, 1991, The Revolutionary United Front along with the help and support of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia tried to intervene in Sierra Leone, their neighboring country and overthrow the Joseph Momoh government in revenge for a similar war that was imposed on Liberia a few years previously. During the first year of the war the Sierra Leone government failed to act quickly, and RUF was able to capture large areas of land in the eastern and southern areas of Sierra Leone. However, by the end of 1993, the Sierra Leone Army had successfully been able to push the RUF back to the Liberian border and was in the process of what they believed to be ending the war and fighting. The war carried on, gathering and losing many political groups and other fighting forces who fought over the Sierra Leone land and the valuable diamond mining land that exists there.
The most shocking part of the war happened in 1997 when a rebel group took Freetown. Shortly after that there was a rampage of rebels that stormed through the town stealing, looting, raping and murdering citizens, workers, children, and other radicals. The town was taken back shortly after this. Fighting continued for a few more years until in January of 1999 when world political figures began to intervene the fighting diplomatically. During the coming months the UN and the United Kingdom would help to intervene and reclaim Freetown for good. On January 18th, 2000, the Sierra Leone Civil War was declared over.
This war was due to many things, and some of them are similar to what happened in the Holocaust and in the book Night by Elie Wiesel. First of all, one of the main causes of the Sierra Leone Civil War was the want to control the diamond mining territory there, however this is not a similarity between the Holocaust and the Sierra Leone Civil War.
One major similarity is something much darker, which is the use of children to do work and terrible things for a terrible cause. In the Holocaust, children were torn from their families and forced to join the Nazi army and support the cause by learning to kill people from a very young age, which surely ruined their childhood. Jewish children were forced into concentration camps and had to watch their loved ones die and thousands of strangers being murdered in horrific ways.
In Sierra Leone, children are kidnapped, stolen from their families, and sold into the diamond business. Children are treated terribly in this job and are given hardly any of what they need to survive, food, water, and shelter. They are often beaten, mutilated, and taken advantage of, just like the way Elie describes the children were in the Holocaust.
Throughout the Holocaust and the Sierra Leone Civil War, children were killed and treated horribly. Both of them involved teaching innocent children to do terrible things, and often hurt or killed them for no reason. These events were both atrocities on adults and children.