Hello there! Get your VCR ready for this one.
CNN will be showing a documentary on Sierra Leone entitled "Cry
Freetown" in the US on Sunday, February 20th at 10:00 p.m. on
CNN [I assume this is Eastern Standard Time] -- CL]CRY FREETOWN
Risking his life to film the systematic murder of his fellow
countrymen during the civil war, Sorious Samura describes in Cry
Freetown, (CNN International, Thursday 3rd February) what he
calls "a nation in dire need, a nation that was being murdered,
a country that was dying, that was being left to die by the
western world, by the so called developed world".
"Kill every living thing", demanded the rebel forces as they
entered Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, on 6th January
1999. As the world's media fled, local freelance journalist
Sorious Samura captured on film the awful truth of what much of
the world was ignoring.
"In this madness my job was to record the history happening in
my country, when random roadside justice was the order of the
day", says Sorious Samura. "Personally I felt that this was the
only way people would be able to see what was happening in
Sierra Leone. When they see the truth, the real pictures, thebrutality.
It was a very dangerous thing to do at the time."
Captured and threatened by the rebels, Samura, escaped and
during the next few days, while battle raged between rebel and
Nigerian 'peacekeeping' forces in his country's civil war,
Samura took his handheld camera and captured on video some of
the atrocities committed by both sides as almost every-day actsof war.
Now the award-winning cameraman returns to Sierra Leone in Cry
Freetown to relive the story of the country's civil war that he
risked his life to document. Cry Freetown includes much of the
graphic and disturbing footage that Samura shot last year - and
raises important questions about how much of the reality of war
should be shown on television.
The former British colony of Sierra Leone suffered a vicious
civil war for a decade which has claimed the lives of an
estimated 50,000 people, left some 10,000 without hands or arms
and made more than one million of the population homeless.
"There was a silent majority suffering for things that they have
no idea about. People living in this country don't care about
the politics, they don't even know about the diamonds", says Samura.
"Ninety percent of the country has never seen a diamond and they
were having their arms and limbs chopped off for nothing that
was of their own making".
While most of the atrocities were committed by the Revolutionary
United Front (RUF), whose calling card was to hack off the hands
of its victims, the Ecomog peacekeeping force - composed mostly
of Nigerians - also had a brutal reputation.
Sorious Samura revisits the site of the house set alight by
rebels with local people still inside. He explains how Nigerian
so-called peacekeepers, assisting government forces, trussed up,
beat and almost killed a boy with learning disabilities because
he was in a building they suspected of housing a sniper.
The material that he shot won him both of last year's most
prestigious awards for the work of freelance camerapeople in
news and current affairs, the Rory Peck Award and the Mohammed
Amin Award. No-one has won both awards before.
The reason so much of Samura's footage is so powerful is also
what makes it untranslatable on normal news bulletins. But does
this self-censorship of the television industry - by both
regulators and broadcasters themselves - enable groups like the
RUF to be even more brutal because they know that broadcasters
will not show it. It is this point that lies at the heart of
this powerful documentary.
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