The Civil Defense Forces or CDF were a paramilitary

Paramilitary

A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....

 organization who fought in the Sierra Leone Civil War

Sierra Leone Civil War

The Sierra Leone Civil War began on 23 March 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front , with support from the special forces of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia , intervened in Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow the Joseph Momoh government...

 (1991-2002). They supported the elected government of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah against the rebel groups RUF (Revolutionary United Front

Revolutionary United Front

The Revolutionary United Front was a rebel army that fought a failed eleven-year war in Sierra Leone, starting in 1991 and ending in 2002. It later developed into a political party, which existed until 2007...

) and AFRC (Armed Forces Revolutionary Council

Armed Forces Revolutionary Council

The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council was a group of Sierra Leone soldiers that allied itself with the rebel Revolutionary United Front in the late 1990s. While the AFRC briefly controlled the country in 1998, it was driven from the capital by a coalition of West African troops...

). Much of the CDF was made up of the Kamajors

Kamajors

The Kamajors are a group of traditional hunters from the Mende ethnic group in the south and east of Sierra Leone...

 group, which is part of the larger Mende

Mende people

The Mende people are one of the two largest and most dominant ethnic group in Sierra Leone, along with the Temne. The Mende make up 30% of Sierra Leone's total population or 1,932,015 members...

 ethnic group. The Kamajors believed in many magical ways of defending themselves, such as rituals to create bulletproof skin. Three leaders of the CDF have been indicted at the Special Court for Sierra Leone

Special Court for Sierra Leone

The Special Court for Sierra Leone is an independent judicial body set up to "try those who bear greatest responsibility" for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Sierra Leone after 30 November 1996 during the Sierra Leone Civil War...

, more specificially Samuel Hinga Norman

Samuel Hinga Norman

Samuel Hinga Norman was a Sierra Leonean politician from the Mende tribe. He was the founder and leader of the traditional Civil Defence Forces, commonly known as the Kamajors. The Kamajors fought under the supported the government of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah against the Revolutionary United Front,...

 (head of the CDF), Moinina Fofana

Moinina Fofana

Moinina Fofana is a Sierra Leonean former military commander who was the leading general in the Kamajors militia and director of the Civil Defence Forces during the Sierra Leone Civil War...

 (second in command) and Allieu Kondewa

Allieu Kondewa

Allieu Kondewa is a former traditional doctor in the Kamajors tribe and military commander of the Civil Defence Forces in Sierra Leone. He was born in the Bo District and lived served until his arrest and subsequent trial by the Special Court for Sierra Leone....

(military commander of the CDF).

History

The term “Civil Defense Forces” was first coined in between 1997 and 1998 by expatriated Sierra Leoneans in Monrovia. The title encompassed “disparate militias previously referred to by ethnically coded titles” . The CDF included soldiers from the militia groups the Kuranko tamaboro, the Mende kamajoisia, the Temne gbethis and kapras, and the Kono donsos. The goal of the over-arching title was to create a sense of unity and prerogative between the independent militias.
The largest group involved with the CDF was the kamajoisia, or kamajors. Traditionally, the title “kamajors” is used to refer to the Mende belief in “specialized hunters empowered to use both firearms and occult ‘medicines’ in pursuit of big game” and against all other forces that threatened Mende villages. In Mende culture, the identity of the kamajors is synonymous with protection, and represented a similar meaning when community defense militias mobilized in reaction to the Sierra Leonean government’s failure to defeat the rebel forces of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
The militia groups became increasingly consolidated as civilians came to distrust the military, which they saw as being as dangerous as the rebel groups. They soon fell under the influence and direction of academic Dr Alpha Lavalie and the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) Secretary of State East, Lieutenant Tom Nyuma, . The CDF increased its prominence and influence following the election of the Sierra Leone People’s Party into office in 1996, which was largely composed of Mende members. Sam Hinga Norman, the Regent Chief of Jiama-Bongor chiefdom, became a key figure in the kamajor movement and was appointed as the SLPP's Deputy Minister of Defense. The CDF was widely viewed as the de facto security force for the SLPP, and would come into direct conflict with the military after the military’s ousting of the SLPP government in May 1997. In coordination with the Nigerian-based Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), the CDF was able to reinstate the SLPP to power in March 1998, and would be officially constituted until the civil war was officially declared over in January of 2002..

Atrocities

The CDF committed of a vast number of atrocities and human rights abuses during the long Sierra Leonean civil war. During the war, while fighting along side the Nigerian ECOMOG troops, the CDF was either complicit or directly responsible for many of the events brought before the Special Court for Sierra Leone. In the offensive of January 1999 the CDF was accused of committing upwards of 180 executions of captured RUF members without validating their guilt. Furthermore, around the towns of Bradford and Moyamba, members of the Kamajors posed as rebels and launched multiple attacks on the civilian population that included robbery and indiscriminant murder There have also been countless accounts of CDF abuses on children as well as the indoctrination and forced subordination of child soldiers ).

Indictments

In 2003 the Special Court for Sierra Leone was set up in cooperation with the UN o bring those responsible for the greatest crimes in the country’s civil war to be prosecuted. Among the 13 convictions that were handed out were three prominent CDF members. The three men indicted were Allie Kondewa, Moinina Fofana and Samuel Hinga Norman. Each of these men had been decided upon as the central leaders of the CDF and the most responsible for the crimes after a thorough investigation by the Court, which took the testimonies of thousands of victims. The trial began in July 2004 and concluded in September 2006. Before sentences could be handed out Samuel Hinga Norman died of natural causes during surgery in Dakar, Senegal. Fofana and Kondewa were found guilty of the charges of murder, pillage and the use of child soldiers and were sentenced to six and eights years respectively. In 2008 the appeal court changed the sentencing and gave Fofna fifteen years and Kondewa twenty years to be served out in Rwandan prison.