Foday Sankoh was born on 17 October 1937, in the remote village of Masang Mayoso, Tonkolili District in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone to an ethnic Temne father and a Loko mother. Sankoh was the son of a farmer.
Sankoh attended primary and secondary school in Magburaka, Tonkolili District and took on a number of jobs in Magburaka before he joined the Sierra Leone army in 1956. He undertook training in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. In 1971, then a corporal in the Sierra Leone army, he was cashiered from the army's signal corps and imprisoned for seven years at the Pademba Road Prison in Freetown for taking part in a mutiny.
On his release he worked as an itinerant photographer in the south and east of Sierra Leone, eventually coming in contact with young radicals.
Sankoh and confederates Rashid Mansaray and Abu Kanu solicited support for an armed uprising to oust the APC government. They then traveled to Liberia, where they reportedly continued recruiting and served with Charles G. Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL).
Foday Sankoh was a student who was imprisoned several times because of his activism, he went on to form the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in order to oppose the installation of then president Joseph Momoh, a military leader in Sierra Leone. During his exile, he met Charles Taylor who was his benefactor and primary ally during the Sierra Leone Civil War. Charles Taylor soon became the president of Liberia.
On 23 March 1991, the RUF, led by Foday Sankoh and backed by Charles Taylor, launched its first attack in villages in Kailahun District in the diamond-rich Eastern Province of Sierra Leone.
The RUF became notorious for brutal practices such as mass rapes and amputations during the civil war. Sankoh personally ordered many operations, including one called "Operation Pay Yourself" that encouraged troops to loot anything they could find. After complaining about such tactics, Kanu and Mansaray were summarily executed.
In March 1997, Sankoh fled to Nigeria, where he was put under house arrest and then imprisoned. From this time until Sankoh's release in 1999, Sam Bockarie performed the task of director of military operations of the RUF. During the ten-year war, Sankoh broke several promises to stop fighting, including the Abidjan Peace Accord and the Lomé Peace Accord signed in 1999. Eventually the United Kingdom and ECOMOG intervened with their own small, but professional, military forces, and the RUF was eventually crushed.
Arrest and charges
Sankoh was later arrested after his soldiers gunned down a number of protesters outside his Freetown home in 2000. His arrest led to massive celebrations throughout Sierra Leone.
Sankoh was handed to the British. Under the jurisdiction of a UN-backed court,he was indicted on 17 counts for various war crimes, including use of child soldiers and crimes against humanity, including extermination, enslavement, rape and sexual slavery.
Sankoh died of complications arising from a stroke whilst awaiting trial. In a statement by the UN-backed war crimes court, chief prosecutor David Crane said that Sankoh's death granted him "a peaceful end that he denied to so many others".
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