Madam, - Your extensive and thoughtful coverage of Sierra Leone in recent days suggests that you share my conviction that what happens there matters greatly for the rest of the world. Your respectfulness also contrasts sharply with the "sneer" mentality which lies behind much recent reporting about that country
In the past decade two huge international institutions, the UN and the international diamond industry, have recovered their shredded respect because of Sierra Leone. The UN steeled itself and actually delivered a successful peacemaking mission there immediately after its humiliation in the Balkans. The international diamond trade eventually held up its bloody hands and admitted that the ring on your finger may have cost somebody their arm in Sierra Leone.
This has led to the Kimberley Certification Process and a fundamental challenge to the practices that have pervaded the diamond industry since the days of Cecil Rhodes. I think the world is a better place because of the sufferings of Sierra Leoneans and I fully appreciate how they have paid for this enhanced world order.
The outgoing government of Sierra Leone was the best government the country had in 40 years. It was not the best government in the world, nor was it a community of saints, as your reporters pointed out. But there is more to be said about government in Sierra Leone than that it is corrupt.
I will not mount a defence of corruption here, but I suggest it is a shorthand term which explains nothing about the dynamics of making a state out of some colonial cartographer's concept.
Local corruption has become a moral high horse on which the international community rides through Sierra Leone. However, it is a fact of life, like as the weather and the mosquitoes. The international diamond industry admitted that it was not itself without sin, though awful things were happening in its name inside Sierra Leone. Therefore, it did not cast the first stone.
The result has been very creative coalitions for development between the local and international stakeholders in that industry. Other participants in post-election Sierra Leone could study their example. - Yours, etc,
MARTIN ROWAN, Sierra Leone-Ireland Partnership, Palmerstown Woods, Dublin 22.