2002 — Sierra Leone's Civil War Declared Over

On January 18, 2002, President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah declared Sierra Leone's eleven-year civil war over at a United Nations-backed disarmament ceremony in Lungi. He told the nation in Krio: "De war don don." Nearly three thousand weapons were burned there, as over forty-six thousand combatants surrendered some fourteen thousand five hundred weapons.

The war had killed an estimated seventy thousand people and displaced more than half the population. Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front was infamous for amputations, mass rape, and child soldiers, funded by blood diamonds. A United Nations-backed Special Court was set up to try war crimes; in 2012, it convicted Liberia's Charles Taylor of aiding them.