Cry Blood, Africa, Your Children are Insane
The East African (Nairobi)
May 25, 2000
By Charles Onyango-Obbo
Nairobi - The latest fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea found me in Addis
Ababa. It was a typical week for Africa - bad.
The armies of Uganda and Rwanda, once the best of friends, fought again in
the Congolese city of Kisangani.
And then there was Sierra Leone, with that insane chopper-off of hands and
feet Foday Sankoh wrecking the peace. In Africa, one usually learns to put
these things in some perspective. That was until I went to Mulago Hospital,
Uganda's "referral hospital", on Wednesday evening, to see a patient in the
cancer ward.
At 10.30 pm, the duty officer said sternly that all visitors should leave.
She wanted to bolt the doors.
In the parking yard outside the tuberculosis ward, a relative of the patient
I had been to visit said evenings are still the best time to visit for
people who are too busy during the day; and that some duty officers allow
visitors to stay longer.
Why do they make such a big deal about bolting the doors, I asked. He told
me that even with the hospital's best efforts to provide security, thieves
still prey on patients. The TB ward next to where we were standing, which
has old-fashioned windows that can't be fastened tightly, was the worst hit.
Thieves routinely raid the ward and pluck blankets and sheets off frail TB
patients!
It is easy to lose perspective here and next to impossible to make sense of
outrageous stories like these.
Then you take another look at the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict and the UN
debacle in Sierra Leone and you get totally lost. When the latest round of
fighting broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea, there were 600,000 soldiers
massed along the disputed border!
A famine is ravaging parts of Ethiopia, and anything up to 11 million people
face starvation. Several hundred have already died. According to journalists
in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia needs 4,000 trucks to ferry the relief food that is
pouring into the Djibouti port from the international community.
However, Ethiopia's national truck fleet is only about 500 - 3,500 short.
Journalists allege that most of those trucks are in any case deployed in
Ethiopia's war effort to reclaim the land it says Eritrea stole from it. You
would think that would have caused massive public outrage. Wrong.
I was puzzled that I could hardly find an Ethiopian, even critics of the
Meles Zenawi regime, who didn't express some understanding for the
government's actions.
Rebel leader Sankoh baffled me even more. After murdering and sowing terror,
he was rewarded with the position of vice-president in the government
cobbled together as part of the peace deal to end the bloody civil war in
his country.
He undermines the peace deal and throws the UN peacekeeping mission into a
spin. His rebels kidnap up to 500 UN peacekeepers, and resume the war. He
orders his guards to shoot at a demonstration that was marching on his
Freetown house... Then he disappears. He is enemy number one.
Yet not even Sankoh's arch-enemies thought he was an utter fool. Last
Wednesday, he was caught sneaking back into his home, accompanied by a
sorcerer. Reports claim he was returning to look for drugs and diamonds he
had hidden there.
How could Sankoh expect to find his treasures intact in a house that had
been thoroughly ransacked? Why did a man whose rebels controlled whole
diamond mines return to search for a few stones? And how could a killer who
needed an army of heavily armed rebels to secure his interests, expect he
would be protected by a lone juju man?
Then those Freetown people who hated him so much - when they captured him,
they only stripped him naked, then handed him to the police!
The UN, though, is the one that stumped me most. Not for its monumental
incompetence in Sierra Leone. Rather, I just couldn't understand what else
it expected from the potbellied officers and soldiers it deployed in
Freetown.
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