Ebrima and all,

Here is a well-written piece on Sierra Leone.

Modou





Sierra Leone 2000 

How do you ask a man of 29 with three kids and both hands missing if his life is better now? 

Jon Henley
Thursday May 29, 2003
The Guardian 

St Michael's Hotel, as the name suggests, was once a hotel. It sits on a glorious palm - and mangrove-fringed beach about half an hour's drive out of Freetown, and for some years in the late 1980s was popular with foreign holidaymakers; the French tour operator that ran it even started building another, bigger place next door. It is now home to a floating population of about 50 Sierra Leonean children, from newborns to 18-year-olds - kids waiting to go home, unsure where home is, orphaned or estranged, and what are known in UN-land as former combatants. 

Shy teenagers here will tell you that their hobbies are now reading and football, and reel off statistics that prove that Ruud van Nistelrooy is a better striker than Thierry Henry. Then they show you their scars and explain that RUF rebel commanders cut them and rubbed cocaine into the wound to make them mad enough to fight or to chop people's limbs off. Sometimes the victims were their neighbours, or their brothers and sisters. 

"They gave us drugs the whole time," says Saidu, 16, who was abducted and recruited into the RUF when he was five. First, he worked as a bearer and messenger for the soldiers' "wives", most of whom were themselves abducted adolescent girls. When he was seven he was given a gun, a couple of months' training in Liberia, and sent to fight. 

"It was fun, like a big boy's game," he says. "They made us so crazy, we enjoyed the smoking, the drinking, the shooting, all that." He didn't enjoy having to cut a man's arm off, though, one morning on the road in from the airport. They were all lined up at gunpoint, the men, shaking, their arms obediently held out. Saidu couldn't look when it was his turn to swing his machete. He doesn't think the man survived. "I can't forget his scream," he says. 

How do you ask a 16-year-old what it feels like to have hacked a man's hand off? How, come to that, do you ask Thamba, a father of seven, what it's like to have his right leg severed below the knee? How can you ask a farm worker of 29 with three children and both hands missing whether, now that the British army has helped stop the butchery in Sierra Leone, his life is better? Of course it bloody isn't. He hasn't got his hands. 

"Robin Cook visited when the rebels looked like coming back into Freetown three years ago," says Edward Konte, chairman of the medievally squalid amputees' camp in Freetown where the men live. "He saw a 17-year-old with no arms, and said, 'Shit, this has got to stop.' The next week, in came [the] British marines. They stopped the killing and the maiming just like that." 

They love the Brits to bits here: we played a big part in bringing the place back from the dead. So much so that an astonishing number of people you meet, including some quite high-ranking government officials, would like Sierra Leone to become a British colony again. 

But that's not incompatible with a sad judgment: "You made a very big mistake when you pulled out of here in 1961," says Konte. "You could have left just one garrison, couldn't you? We know it now, we've seen how it works - just a few hundred decent soldiers could have prevented so much slaughter." 

Freetown is a sprawling, ramshackle and on the whole filthy place. It was founded in 1787 by English abolitionists, 400 of the slaves they had liberated, and a clutch of Liverpool prostitutes who must have wondered what had hit them. Five years later, 1,000 American slaves fleeing the war of independence landed from Halifax. From 1808, slave ships captured by British vessels began disgorging their human cargo. Later, as Britain expanded the colony, Graham Greene was among the many colonial staff (The Heart of the Matter is set here). 

A picaresque gang of ageing western reprobates - not just British but Dutch, German and, bizarrely, a handful of Icelanders - has been here ever since, and will never leave. Over stiff gins on early-evening verandahs, fishing flying ants deftly out of the Schweppes, they argue about which evacuation was the worst, compare malaria bouts, fret about their illegitimate offspring (never, they warn darkly, get involved with a Liberian woman), debate the best brand of generator, and swap hair-raising tales of fun encounters with Kalashnikov-toting preteens. 

It's easy to see why they stay, however. You can have a fine time in Freetown if you've got a bit of cash, which people on international salaries and $115 (£73) UN daily allowances have. There are bars and nightclubs and Chinese restaurants and pizza joints (although the enterprising Thai lady with a penchant for post-conflict environments who has opened eateries in both Kosovo and Kabul has yet to pitch up here). And Number Two River Beach is a gem, but don't tell anyone, because on weekends it's already crowded with truckloads of Bangladeshi peacekeepers in their underpants, frolicking in the surf. 

Freetown is reckoned to be the third largest natural harbour in the world. The country's fisheries, currently all but unprotected and being systematically raped by mainly Chinese factory ships, are fabulously rich. The soil is fertile. Up-country, as they called it in Greene's day, there are still plenty of the top-grade diamonds that fuelled the decade-long civil war, and enough other valuable minerals to make Sierra Leone if not rich, at least comfortable. 

By rights, this should resemble paradise. But in Freetown the rubbish lies stinking in skips and open sewers and the electricity fails at least once a day, usually at dinner-time. You queue four or five hours for petrol; local women sit for three times as long behind upturned soapboxes, lit at night by a flickering candle, hoping they might sell two mangoes. 

There's much worse. Eleven years of fighting brutal even by Africa's bloody standards has left between 75,000 and 200,000 dead (estimates vary) and tens of thousands more maimed or psychologically scarred, including upwards of 10,000 child soldiers, bearers and sex slaves. In parts of the country, less than 3% of people have access to safe drinking water. For every thousand babies, 170 will die at birth and 286 more before they reach the age of five. The average life expectancy here is 37 years. 

"There's now peace and a measure of stability," says Alan Doss, number two in the UN mission here, Unamsil. "But history is not on Sierra Leone's side. We have to keep tackling the problems here in an integrated way, like one big jigsaw, but it remains a terribly fragile situation." The trouble, this being west Africa, is that many of the pieces do not want to fit into the puzzle. 

As in Kosovo and Afghanistan, international intervention has undeniably accomplished great things: 70,000 combatants have been disarmed, and half a million people have returned to what was left of their homes (300,000 were destroyed). Successful - and overwhelmingly peaceful - elections were held last year, returning to power President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, a former UN official and a decent man, and finishing off the RUF, which tried to convert itself into a political force and ended up a political farce. Basic infrastructure is gradually being repaired, although the word atrocious still doesn't begin to do justice to the roads. 

"But," says Father Joseph, the 71-year-old Italian priest who runs St Michael's, "this is a small country; just as it takes very little to plunge somewhere like this into chaos, it takes very little to rescue it and make it function on the most basic level. Without the international community, there'll be no money, no possibilities. But you are not a thermometer of stability. Your mere presence can give the impression that things are working when they're not." 

Three hours' drive outside Freetown is Makene, the main base of the rebel forces in the latter days of the war. One long, shattered main street lined with shabby shops and stalls, outlying houses sporting the names of dozens of foreign NGOs (the Norwegian church is very active), it's an oppressively hot and dusty place at this time of year. 

Here the NGO Caritas Makeni, funded by international Catholic aid agencies, runs training and reintegration courses for war-affected youth. Sad young girls with rebel soldiers' babies in their arms learn dyeing and hairdressing and basket-weaving; teenage boys with empty eyes are taught carpentry, car mechanics, smithery. 

"Obviously my life is better now," insists Abass Gbla, 15, who at the age of 10 was a sergeant commanding 10 other boy soldiers in a rebel SBU (yes, it stands for Small Boy Unit). "Although with the drugs I have to say I was addicted to the fighting; I felt like a big man. But now I recognise I'm learning a skill, a valuable skill. It will be help me to live and to forget." 

But what life awaits these children once they have have left Caritas's care? How many will actually become hairdressers, or make a living from carpentry? Many cases have already emerged of boys from countless similar well-meaning projects simply selling the tools they are given in their end-of-course start-up kits, and heading off to go diamonding in the north. 

"It's ridiculous," snorts a woman from an American NGO. "These kids have been profoundly traumatised and are being released into a society that to all intents and purposes barely exists. It will be a miracle if a fraction of them stay off the streets." 

Graziella Godain, who runs Médecins sans Frontières' Sierra Leone programme, says society here has been "totally transformed" by a decade of fighting. "Often, I don't think the time has been taken to really evaluate the impact on a society of a war of this scale and duration," she says. "Often the responses are bureaucratic, not effective and concrete answers to people's needs." 

Dennis Bright, a quietly spoken and quietly impressive former academic who spent long years studying literature in Bordeaux and now finds himself Sierra Leone's youth minister, sits on his terrace on a bank holiday morning and says bluntly that the fate of the country's children will determine the fate of the country. "Well over half of those under 30 were directly affected by the fighting, and most of the rest have seen and heard things no child should see or hear," he says. "If we ignore their needs and cries, the kernel of another catastrophe is sitting right there, in baggy jeans and a baseball cap, on the corner of every street. Somehow we have to get these kids to a point where they have something to lose. There's a very, very long way to go." 

Sierra Leone also bears the scars of more than 40 years of postcolonial bad governance: coups, countercoups, incompetence, endemic corruption, and the flight abroad of whole generations of able Sierra Leoneans who are now in the US or Britain and show little sign of coming home. Even before the war, 80% of the country's professional class had left. 

It is no more than justice that a British task force should have given the Unamsil international peacekeepers, then 6,000 and now 15,000 strong, the steel to halt the bloodshed; that London has pledged £120m in aid over three years; that dozens of villages have been provided with new huts, primary schools and water pumps by the Department for International Development; or that British officers make up the bulk of the 115-strong International Military Advisory and Training Team, which, as its name suggests, advises, trains and all but runs Sierra Leone's army. ("Brilliant," one expat sneers into his beer one evening. "If we get the army really smart and efficient and disciplined, maybe next time they get shirty about their pay and how little they're being allowed to rip everyone off for, the next coup will be a bloodless one.") 

But thus far there is peace, at least within Sierra Leone's fairly notional borders. "The sub-region's the big problem," says Brigadier Adrian Frerr, Imatt's chief, who in a former life led the Fifth Airborne Brigade into Kosovo. "In the past three to four months it's got more volatile, more uncertain. There's basically a large and transient group of people in this part of west Africa who know nothing but carrying AK-47s and will go wherever the money is." 

The question on everyone's mind here is what will happen in Liberia, where many former RUF and thousands of other fighters took refuge and where President Charles Taylor - a leading backstage player in Sierra Leone's war - is now battling rebels of his own in yet another regional conflict that has displaced up to a million people. 

At least 70,000 of those have fled to Sierra Leone, a flow of human desperation that this already battered country, and the overstretched international aid agencies on the border, will not be able to absorb for long. Neighbouring Ivory Coast isn't looking too wonderful at the moment either, and no one knows what will happen when Lansana Conté, in power in Guinea since the early 1980s, finally goes. 

In this wider context, Sierra Leone is anything but safe. Some of the institutions that Britain is supporting within the country may not be contributing to its longer-term stability either. On a hilltop site overlooking Freetown are the half-finished cell blocks and barely begun courthouse of the special court, a unique international tribunal set up to try those from all sides in the conflict alleged to bear the greatest responsibility for the atrocities. The first trials should start by the end of this year. 

So far the prosecution has indicted eight men out of what will probably be a total of no more than 15-20, including the former RUF leader Foday Sankoh, now apparently demented, and one of his most bloodthirsty henchmen, Sam Bockarie, who launched Operation No Living Thing in which "everyone is to be killed down to the last chicken". He has since been shot dead in Liberia (although the body has yet to be returned to Sierra Leone or positively identified). 

But the court has also indicted Johnny Paul Koroma, a charismatic former military ruler who overthrew Mr Kabbah in 1997 and is currently on the run, and Sam Hinga Norman, the leader of a pro-government militia who happened to be interior minister when he was detained. There are persistent rumours that the chief prosecutor, an American called David Crane, is seeking to indict Charles Taylor. 

Despite the fact that their government asked for the court, many Sierra Leoneans have serious doubts about the wisdom of all this. "It was a time of madness. People want to put it behind them," says Sami, a Liberian businessman whose family have been in the country for four generations. "Raking it all up now could do tremendous harm. These people are history, but this way they'll get another big chance to inflame their followers. This country has other ways, tribal ways, traditional ways, of dealing with them. God or Allah will judge them." 

In the court's defence, its registrar, a Briton called Robin Vincent, quotes an old man who told him at a Freetown public meeting not to let sleeping dogs lie. "He said, and I couldn't put it better: 'Those dogs are not sleeping, they just have their eyes closed,' " Vincent says. 

But my driver in Sierra Leone, Mr Barrie - who also told me that "Aw di bodi?", or "How's the body?", is the frequently inappropriate way to ask "How are you?" in Sierra Leone - had worked out that if the court prosecutes 20 people, it will end up costing $3m per case. What couldn't the country do with that money? 

In Graham Greene's day, there was a song that the colonial boys used to sing to the tune of the Mountains of Morne. It went: "Oh Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone/Thousands of miles from Sierra Leone/I shall be happy wherever I roam/If I'm thousands of miles from Sierra Leone." On the whole, over half a century and the world's largest peacekeeping mission later, it could still serve as a fitting refrain for most of this country's people

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~