Sierra Leone: When Faith Leaders Refused to Look Away
NATIONAL INTERFAITH PLATFORMS
Takeaway: Peace tends to hold when faith leaders refuse to look away and build practical bridges between government and rebels, parties and voters, doctors and grieving families.
Sierra Leone’s civil war dragged on for more than a decade. Villages emptied. City streets felt haunted even at noon. People started to talk as if brutality were the new baseline. In 1997, as the fighting deepened, Muslim and Christian leaders chose another path. They formed the Inter‑Religious Council of Sierra Leone, or IRCSL, to act as a bridge between armed groups and a frightened public. Both sides treated the Council as fair. That is rare in a polarized landscape and it did not happen by accident.
Their first moves leaned on moral authority to open doors politics had slammed shut. In May 1997, Council leaders met President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to press for de‑escalation. Days later, after a coup toppled him, they engaged the coup leaders as well, condemning abuses while insisting on dialogue and a return to civilian rule. The visibility alone appears to have deterred worse. After the devastating January 1999 attack on Freetown, a UN envoy needed credible go‑betweens. He turned to the IRCSL. The Council gained access to RUF leader Foday Sankoh in custody and secured a radio link to his field commanders. Fifty‑four abducted children were released after that contact. None of this was neat or quick. It often meant waiting in corridors for hours and returning the next day anyway.
Their influence carried into the Lomé Peace Agreement in 1999. They pushed for negotiation, consulted chiefs and parliamentarians, and spoke publicly against atrocities. Negotiators even wrote in a Council of Elders and Religious Leaders to help mediate future disputes. That body was planned but never fully set up, which is its own quiet lesson about how hard it is to turn text into practice. After Lomé, the IRCSL printed thousands of copies of the agreement and took it on the road. Forums popped up in parish halls, mosque courtyards, and community centers where victims, former fighters, local officials, and traditional authorities talked through forgiveness, implementation, and the fragile business of reintegration.
Who stood behind this effort? The membership spans the major faith bodies in the country. On the Islamic side: the Supreme Islamic Council, the Sierra Leone Muslim Congress, the United Council of Imams, and others. On the Christian side: the Council of Churches in Sierra Leone, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Pentecostal Churches Council. It is a standing architecture for cooperation, not an ad hoc committee. To be fair, coalitions like this need constant maintenance. Personal rivalries and institutional pride do not vanish just because the logo says “inter‑religious.”
When the war ended, the Council kept working in the places where indifference often creeps in. Elections. Public trust. As the country prepared for high‑stakes polls in 2007, the Political Parties Registration Commission created a National Code of Conduct and a Monitoring Committee to reduce violence. The IRCSL was written directly into that oversight structure as a civil‑society voice and on‑the‑ground mediator. District‑level monitors followed the same pattern. The result was national and local contests in 2007 and 2008 that stayed largely peaceful despite grim forecasts. There were tense moments, as there always are, but the floor held.
Crisis returned in a different form during the Ebola epidemic from 2014 to 2016. Fear and rumor spread faster than the virus. Trust became the decisive medicine. Religious leaders, organized through the IRCSL and partner networks, were mobilized at scale. Friday sermons and Sunday homilies carried public‑health basics in the moral language people trust. No washing of bodies. Call trained burial teams. Trade handshakes for a nod or an elbow tap. Pastors and imams modeled the changes themselves, then went on Krio‑language radio to repeat the messages until they stuck. Evaluations by Christian Aid and humanitarian briefings on ReliefWeb credit thousands of clergy with helping turn resistance into cooperation, a shift public‑health agencies struggled to achieve alone.
A through‑line appears. When institutions fracture, indifference moves quickly. The IRCSL kept choosing the opposite. During war, they carried messages between enemies and pushed for dialogue that felt impossible. After war, they monitored campaigns so competition did not flip into violence. During disease, they used pulpits and prayer spaces to rebuild trust in science and in the state. The method was simple and stubborn: show up, listen hard, lend credibility where fear had emptied the room.
Sources
Conciliation Resources
United States Institute of Peace
Innovations for Successful Societies (Princeton)
ICVA / Christian Aid
ReliefWeb
