The Cruel War - Sierra Leone
The Cruel War - Sierra Leone
Story and Photographs by Andy Rain
Peace has supposedly come to Sierra Leone. One of the poorest country's on earth and ravaged by 8 years of civil war, this tiny west coast African nation is approaching a crucial crossroads that is certain to play a major role in determining its future. No other country in the world craves peace like Sierra Leone. Arguably no other nation across the globe has suffered such pain, horror and upheaval during the last decade. Civil war has forced close to half a million Sierra Leonean's to flee the country.
Two million are displaced within the country, untold numbers have been killed and tens of thousands have been brutally maimed, in a campaign of terror that has not been seen since the days of Pol Pot, or the genocide in Rwanda. But this has been a war largely overlooked by the international community who has little strategic and economic interest in the region, and engrossed in the conflicts in Kosovo and Chechnya. Only now are the gross atrocities that threw Sierra Leone into darkness, being heard around the world.
The war that broke out in 1991, is a complex and brutal conflict, fueled largely by years of misrule, control for the wealthy diamond mines in the east of the country, and a long standing resentment among the poor rural interior, against the richer ruling class in the coastal capital, Freetown.
An Army Corporal Foday Sankoh set up the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) in ’91, a rebel army largely made up kidnapped drug induced teenagers. The RUF fought continuous Sierra Leonean Armies, terrorized the civilian population with such brutality, other wars seem tame in comparison. Terror was inflicted in the form of looting, burning, rape; killing and more disturbingly mass amputation, in an attempt to discourage the civilian population from supporting the government.
A peace agreement was signed in July last year between President Hamed Kabbah and Rebel leader Foday Sankoh, in a power sharing deal that offered high hopes for a brighter future. Sankoh has vowed his troops will surrender their arms and would respect the agreement. But words don’t always count for a lot in post war situations. Although disarmament camps have been set up across the country and a 6000 strong UN peacekeeping force is currently being deployed to maintain a precarious peace, over 60% of the country remains unsafe. Banditry and general lawlessness continues in much of the countryside and there are still over 30,000 armed RUF rebel fighters living in the bush. Peace has come on paper at least, and Sierra Leonean’s will be praying that it can prevail. But for many victims of this war the horrors they have endured during the last few years will remain with them forever.
In a muddle of blue and white canvas shacks the amputee and war wounded camp set up by MSF (Medicine Sans Frontiers) in Freetown, the capital, has become temporary home for some of the country’s amputees and war victims. Mariatu Kamara, 14, is amongst 371 registered victims who in one terrifying barbaric act of madness had her life changed forever. She recalls her tragic story as she rocks her new born baby boy in her arms.
“ It was last May ’99. I was with my husband, my sister and her husband. We were gathering fruits and vegetables around my village of Port Loko, 135 km’s north of Freetown, when we met a RUF rebel patrol. ‘ We are the rebels you have been hearing about’, they told us. They tied my sister and I, our arms behind our backs. Then they made as watch as they shot our men in the chests one after the other. They died on the spot. They pulled at our hair so that we could not look away. Then they took us to Mangamar village, about 7km’s walk through the bush. When we arrived they tied us up and put us in separate rooms. They left us there all morning. I cried. I couldn’t stop. My sister called to me from across the room, ‘ it’s going to be alright’, she kept saying. Then I heard her screams. I didn’t know what was happening. But they were using her (raping her). Then they came to me; I can’t count how many there were. After they were finished they held down my arms across a tree stump and chopped off my hands with a machete. ‘Now go and ask your president for new hands’, they told me”.
Mariatu now lives with her mother, father, sister and grandmother in the camp. Her sister suffered the same fate as Mariatu, both her hands were taken. Her grandmother also lost a hand, “but at least the family is together”, Mariatu explains.
Everyone who lives here has a shocking tale to tell. “ It’s a year today since they took my hand”, recalls Ali Sankoh, 30. It’s a date that he will never forget. “The rebels came to my house in Kissy, eastern Freetown in January ’99. They told us they were coming to make peace but after a few days they began harassing people, looting and burning peoples homes. We fled to another part of town with hundreds of others. We were all cramped into a three-floor building. The rebels broke in and ordered all the men to strip naked and to line up. They took three men down stairs and stabbed them to death. But they were the lucky ones. Those of us up stairs were told that we too would be killed, then they changed their minds. ‘No instead we will give you a message to take back to your president’. That’s when they began amputating everyone. It was terrible we couldn’t believe what was happening. Some men died on the spot from the pain. They took my left hand. I didn’t even support the government. I was just minding my own business selling building material”.
Sierra Leone’s 8 years civil war has been fought largely by children. Both the RUF and government militias recruited young boys and girls, many in their early teens. And now as many are being encouraged to give up a life in the bush and to give up their arms a whole different world beckons. Can young killers who have survived in the forests for years from the power of the gun and motivated by drugs ever find a place in society? Moreover can society survive with traumatized young killers allowed to run free?
Only the future can tell. Nevertheless such youngsters are getting a chance at St. Michael’s interim center at Lakar, 15km’s south of Freetown. “We have around 125 ex-combatants here, aged between 5 and 18 years old ”, says Father Berton. “ We are trying to unite these kids with their families, but that is not always easy”. This was evident in the face of female ex-combatant Finda Kamanda, 15. “ I was captured by the rebels in 1993 when I was living with my mother, father, 3 brothers and 4 sisters”, recalls Finda. “They attacked the village. There was shooting and burning. Everybody was running. In ended up in Kabala, 300km’s northeast of Freetown, and spent 6 months training. I missed my family. We lived in the bush, on yams, goats and cows and sheep that we killed. I always enjoyed it when we had a cow. I didn’t think of village life, but I always thought of my family. I was given an Ak47, taught how to fire it, clean it. I was always told what to do. Told how to kill people, if I didn’t they would kill me. I didn’t feel good, I mean I didn’t want to do it. I like it here at the center. My parents came to see me once”. I ask her why she doesn’t go home. She’s silent. Her eyes stare off into the distance suggesting that maybe she is not wanted back in her village. “I’ll stay here for a while”, she replies.
Older ex-combatants of which a total 16,000 have so far left the bush for disarmament and reintegration camps are being paid US$300 for transitional allowance to encourage them to give up their weapons and to embrace the peace process. Disarmament is proving slower than expected, but as Neil McCafferty, 29, a co-ordinator for the Department for International Development, that is oversees the DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization & Reintegration) camps, explains, “albeit slow, the momentum is there. The important thing, is that, while there is not a shooting war, there is a real possibility this peace will work”.
The camps themselves are tense and not without there problems. “Of course there are hiccups, but we have the word from various factions that their arms will be handed over”, says Major Frank Ofodile, 38, camp commander at Lungi. When you take thousands of killers who have little respect for life and put them into a controlled environment with rules, things can get a little haywire. As I drive through Port Loko on my way to DDR camp south numerous buildings stand gutted, others are riddled with gunfire. The mosque and church have had bullet holes filled with cement.
DDR camp South, is a well organized grid of white canvas huts that houses over 3000 ex-combatants and their dependents. They are given adequate meals of rice and beans twice a day and await ID cards and transitional allowance. The notorious RUF make up most of the camp population. I pass well built young men as they sit outside their huts, They wear US flag bandanas, black shades, and their bodies bare the scars of battle and years of living in the bush. They eye my cameras as I walk past. A group of them complain to me that they haven’t been paid yet. Outwardly I sympathize with them, but can only laugh under my breath, why such killers should be paid for killing innocent people and chopping off the hands of young children?
One of them says, “fuck off white man, go home, this is Africa”. Close to the camp gate ex-combatants line up to receive their payments. Armed UN and ECOMOG (West African peacekeepers) watch over them. A fight breaks out. UN troops are on hand to break it up. A few hundred meters up the road a couple of thousand displaced people have built temporary shelters from trees and palm leaves. These are the very people forced out by the rebels, but they are given little help from aid groups. They are surviving from monthly WFP (World Food Program) donations.
In the capital Freetown, the desire for peace equals that of frustration over the country’s leaders. “ Ever since I can remember”, says Duke Tucker, 39, a local taxi driver, “this country has been going down the spout. We are a good people, but we are hungry, and when people are hungry they are angry. The government fails to realize that. At least for the first time in years Freetown’s residents are enjoying the sandy coastline that makes this country so strikingly beautiful. Sundays fill the sands with joggers, families, ex-combatants and UN staff taking a dip in fresh waters. Nobody dared tread these sands during the war, those who did were shot and dumped into the Atlantic. Human bones still lie on the shores around Aberdeen.
Sunsets are not clear over Freetown these days. Desert winds from north Africa have cast a haze over the capital in some way implying that the future too is proving unclear. “We still can’t see the future of our country”, says Duke. Nonetheless, through all the doubt and uncertainty that remains in the hearts of Sierra Leonean’s, the fighting for now has stopped. The people of Sierra Leone will be praying that peace can be sustained so that after all the madness that has come and gone, they can return home to rebuild their lives.
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