Sierra Leone Votes

“The real significance of this election is in its conduct and not really in its outcome,” said Lansana Gberie, an analyst and author who has written extensively about the wars that have wracked his country. “If they are peaceful and there is transfer of power with no violence, it shows that Sierra Leone has turned a corner.”

The election is a bookend to a violent era that turned Sierra Leone, a hilly, palm-fringed country roughly the size of South Carolina on the southern coast of West Africa, into an indelible symbol of human brutality.

The war began in 1991, when a band of rebels led by a retired soldier and journalist named Foday Sankoh attacked from a jungle hideout in western Liberia. Trained in Libya’s insurgent camps and backed by the Liberian warlord Charles G. Taylor, Mr. Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front unleashed a tide of death and misery that would leave hundreds of thousands of people homeless, maimed, raped or dead.

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Sierra Leone has made some strides since then. Its army and police force have been reformed from incubators of coup plots into instruments of order and public service. A few hundred miles of roads have been built, and 153 schools and 76 hospitals and clinics have been erected or rehabilitated. Special schools have been established to help students forced out of school by war, putting lanky teenagers into third-grade classrooms.

Some of the men most responsible for the war atrocities — recruiting child soldiers, rape, amputation and looting — have been convicted by the international tribunal set up in the capital, Freetown, after the war. Mr. Taylor, the war’s mastermind, is awaiting trial in The Hague after being arrested last year.

But many of the problems that led to the war persist. The vast gulf between the richest citizens — who control political power, and the country’s diamonds and other resources — and the poor masses remains larger than ever. Efforts to tackle endemic corruption have foundered as entrenched political elites have thwarted attempts to loosen their grip on the country’s purse strings.

Most troubling of all is the country’s huge generation gap. Unemployment among young people — more than half of Sierra Leone’s population is under the age of 35 — stands at 80 percent. Of the 71,043 combatants who were demobilized in a United Nations-sponsored program that gave them cash and job training, only 42 percent found work, according to a survey of combatants in 2004.