The Traumatized - Freetown
The Traumatized - Freetown
Story & Photographs by Andy Rain
Imagine a child, young and innocent. Imagine she is abducted by a group of armed men, dragged away from home and family. She is forced to place her arms across the trunk of a tree, and in one forceful blow her left arm is chopped off with a machete.Imagine her screams, the horror racing through her mind, her tiny limb lying amongst the shrub.Imagine the child is yours. Mariatu Manuray, 28, from Freetown, Sierra Leone, found herself as a parent in an all too similar situation in January '99.
Freetown was under siege from RUF (Revolutionary United Front Rebels) who had been fighting the government for 8 long years. Their fight from the outset had been seen as a just cause, a revolution for the people. But as Mariatu and thousands more like her found out, this war was not about the people at all. It was about greed and power, and what came with it was a campaign of terror the world has never seen.
Mariatu was living with her daughter, Memuna, 2, her mother and brother Alija when the rebels entered eastern Freetown just over a year ago. Rebels went house to house, looting, burning and killing. Mariatu had fled with hundreds of others, finding temporary safety in a nearby mosque. As the rebels passed the mosque, they heard young Memuna's wimpering. Everbody was ordered out into the street. But they failed to find Mariatu and Alija though, who had hid themselves far in the back of the building.
Frightened civilians were lined up, Memuna amongst them, who was now clinging to her granmother’s back. The sharp crack of gun fire filled the air, everyone was killed on the spot, except Memuna, who had received minor wounds to her abdomen. She sat crying amongst bloody bodies of the dead, Mariatu and Alija watched from afar. "Don't waste another bullet on her", shouted one RUF commander. "Chop off her hand", he ordered to a young rebel fighter, passing him a machete.
Unable to cope any longer. Mariatu ran from the mosque, pleading to the rebels to spare her daughter. She was shot in the chest and fell to the ground. There she lay motionless but alive and conscious as a young rebel lunged at the arm of young Memuna. Moments later the rebels were gone. Three days later Mariatu, Memuna and Alija were found by ECOMOG (West African Peacekeepers)and taken to MSF (Doctors without borders) for treatment. Mariatu survived a gun shot wound to the shoulder. Memuna's arm had become so infected, MSF had to amputate further up her to prevent infection from spreading.
Such horrific stories are common place in Sierra Leone. It has become a nation of traumatized people. This war has proved brutal beyond belief and largely unreportable by foreign journalists, because it was too dangerous to cover and because the world's media had focused its attention entirely on the Kosovo crisis. Only now after years of horrifying atrocities is Sierra Leone's story being heard around the world.
The war began in 1991 over years of corruption among the ruling elite and questions were being asked about how the countries diamond wealth was being spent. The RUF was set up in '91 by a former army corporal, Foday Sankoh. They fought against successive Sierra Leonean armies and in May '97 joined ranks with the military junta, which called itself the AFRC, Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. They overthrew President Hamed Kabbah’s government in May ‘97, who was elected in the fairest elections seen in Sierra Leone in years just a year before. But the junta’s control was short lived.
The West African Peacekeeping Force, ECOMOG, ousted the junta in February ’99 enabling President Kabbah to return from exile in Guinea. The operation was hailed as a major success for solving African problems with African solutions. Rebel fighters fled into the bush, attacks intensified and the war got uglier and uglier. Kabbah agreed to a power sharing deal with Sankoh last July when they signed a peace treaty in Lome, Togo, with Sankoh vowing his rebels would give up their arms.
Disarmament and reintegration camps have been set across the country while a 6,000 strong UN deployment is underway. But disarmament and security is not going all to plan. Over 60% of the country is still highly dangerous with armed factions controlling the countryside and diamond areas. Just a quarter of combatants have been disarmed, leaving another 30,000 rebel fighters in the bush. Moreover to exasperate Sierra Leone’s problems this has been a war fought largely by children. Both victims and fighters are so traumatized it is questionable if they can ever be reintegrated into society.
The victims have become forever symbols of the madness and mayhem that has descended upon this beautiful West African coastal nation. Half a million people have become refugees, 2 million are internally displaced, unknown numbers have been killed and tens of thousands brutally maimed. In Freetown MSF (Doctors without Borders) have set up a camp for amputees and war wounded, many of whom are children.
An orthopedic center overlooks the camp preparing prosthesis for upper and lower limbs for amputees, which most victims simply refuse to wear. “They’re ugly”, says Sheku Mansuray, 14.
“How can I feel normal with hands for clips”. Sheku lives alone in the camp and spends most of his time walking around with too much time to reflect on what has happened to him.
“ Rebels came to my home about a year ago, they took my father and I outside the house and told me they were going to kill my father. I pleaded to them not to kill my father. They shot him, one shot. They took me over to the large wooden bowl where my mother bashes pepper. They tied my hands behind my back and held down my forearms across the wood. They chopped off my right hand, then my left. It took three blows for them to sever my left hand. Now go and ask your president for new hands, they told me. I ran after them, kill me, please kill me. I am useless now. I chased them for 3 km’s but they ignored me and beat me back with their rifles. When I got home my mother and two brothers had gone. I still don’t know where they are. It’s hard to live like this. I can’t do anything for myself. Sometimes at night I just cry and cry”.
“ We are a Traumatized people”, says Duke Tucker, 39, my driver and translator as we drive toward Laka along the peninsular, south of Freetown. Laka is home to St. Michael’s Interim center for rebel ex-combatants. Over a hundred young killers have some of the best coastline in Africa to themselves. Here they will try to find a place for themselves in society.
“When a child arrives we give them a couple of weeks to calm down”, says Father Berton, 38. “We are trying to unite them with their families, but if that’s not possible we are trying to educate them, this may be their only way out. Most have been on drugs for years. They steal and fight as they go through withdrawal symptoms. “ You can see the changes in them. They are so aggressive when they arrive here. They have been in the bush for years. But with time they calm down.
I meet Sheku Jalloh, 12, as he returns from classes on a hot hazy afternoon. His head is shaven, eyes distant. He struts around like a true soldier, picks up sticks and fires imaginary rockets from his bazooka. His eyes dart around suggesting he is not entirely here but somewhere else all together. “I could fill your whole book with my stories”, he gloats. Sheku is from Kabala, 300km’s northeast of the capital, Freetown. There was a time when he lived a normal life with his mother and father, 5 brothers and 5 sisters.
“The rebels came to our village in 1996. They told us they had come to surrender their weapons, that they wanted peace. There was jubilation in the villages, but it was just a game they were playing. They started burning homes, killing people. They caught me and one of them, they called him Jacob, he was not much bigger than me, injected me with cocaine into my chest and bottom. I was afraid at first, but soon felt fine. Jacob, gave me an SMG rifle, my head was turning and I just started shooting. I can’t remember how many I killed in those first few days. We lived in the bush under the sun and under the rain. At night we would go on patrol. I really didn’t care if I lived or died. My first assignment was to fill 2 sacks full of human limbs. Don’t come back until they’re full, my commanders told me. I had to do it because I knew they would hurt me too. But it felt OK because I had more cocaine.
The boys I had got to know over 3 years in the bush became my friends. They called me bazooka, because this became my this became my personal weapon. I remember one time I killed this ECOMOG guy in the bush. I went to take his gun, but was fired upon by another soldier from behind a mango tree. The bullet flew over my head. I shot back and he ran into the bush. The soldier I had killed lay at my feet, my friends and I cut open his chest and dug out his liver, we made soup with it. Jacob, who by now we were calling Van Damme, told us to do it. We added salt and pepper; it tasted just like goat’s liver. If I look back on those times I still feel bad about all that, sometimes it reappears in my head. I like it hear, I still have my friends and we play ball and go swimming. One day I’d like to work in an office.
These were the words of a young boy, a young killer who hadn’t even reached pubity. What kind of future is there for a nation whose children know only tragedy, horror and despair? As an outsider and a father, it is difficult to grasp what these children have been through and what they must overcome to regain a normal life. Moreover I can’t tell who is better off, the victims or the perpetrators.
Memuna nevertheless, seems to the happiest child in the world. She runs at me and grabs me around the neck. “Dada, Dada”, she says, not knowing that her father was killed by the rebels years earlier. Her aunt dresses her for school this day. She is full of smiles as she eats her bread before school, totally unaware she is different to other children.
Mariatu, her mother is not around to witness her youthful innocence. Two months after she was injured and her daughter lost her arm, she died, from what the doctor explained as a broken heart. She was just 28 years old.
It may be that peace has finally arrived in Sierra Leone, and if it can be maintained the Memuna’s and Sheku’s of this country may get another shot at life. But in securing peace, justice it seems is being overlooked. Sierra Leone is proving no exception to the old adage, ‘in war, the innocent, pay the heaviest price. While RUF ex-combatants are being given $300 for transitional allowance, and are living in well organized, open camps, their victims languish in squalid conditions, surviving from monthly WFP food donations. But as one amputee in Freetown reiterated, “Revenge will get us nowhere, we have no choice but to open our arms to the rebels”, explains Patrick Sumana, 52, a former policeman and amputee himself. “ There is no alternative but war”.
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