As the regional representative of Human Rights Watch, it was her job to check on all reports that emerged as a result of the war, and she was particularly scathing about some of the Liberian and Nigerian excesses. While organisations like Human Rights Watch are usually circumspect about their comments, Corinne Dufka was not afraid to call a spade a spade. Nellis comments about her:

I would return from a mission and if I spotted something unusual … [I would] get on the phone and tell her immediately, particularly once the RUF moved into its destructive second phase and started destroying villages and killing their inhabitants. You really couldn’t miss it from the air because there would invariably be bodies strewn about all over the place.

Corinne was one of those rare individuals who would listen carefully to everything that emerged. Then she’d record the detail in her files and later, when a village was reported destroyed or possibly torched (the rebels would quite often claim I’d shot the place up), she’d refer back. A sharp lady, she always made up her own mind about these things and wasn’t shy to ask questions that could make you squirm if you weren’t being direct.

It didn’t take Ms Dufka long to accept that Neall Ellis, for all his other faults, was meticulous about the way he waged his war. By his own admission, he never targeted a village unless he had prior information that the rebels were using the place to their own advantage or he saw evidence of unauthorised military activity. If he did unexpectedly come upon a group of men in the field, he would first check them out carefully for the kind of uniforms they wore and whether they carried weapons. Nellis recalls:

Most of the time, the rebels would hear the Hind approach and they would quickly scoot into the jungle … then, I knew I was onto something. One incident happened when we were returning from a sortie north of Makeni, the biggest town in the central region. I happened to fly over an RUF stronghold … I’d do so quite regularly just to wind them up. This didn’t exactly go down well with the local UN command because they claimed I was antagonising the bastards, and of course they were spot on. That’s what this was all about.

It was also one of the reasons why the UN was so fucking useless in Sierra Leone. They were terrified of the rebels and would back down every time they encountered them in the interior. More than once the RUF would surround groups of UN soldiers and demand that they hand over their firearms, which they would do without argument.¹

I didn’t listen to the UN, in fact nobody did. So I went about my business and the next time I flew over Makeni, I spotted four brand new vehicles parked next to the market, two with 12.7mm heavy machine guns mounted on the back. The other two were crowded with RUF troops and they had a 14.5mm gun there as well. We subsequently understood from a capture that they had originally come from Liberia and had either just returned from a raid or were in the process of going out on one. The bottom line here was that I caught them totally by surprise.

Of course, with all that firepower, they immediately opened up on us and the game was on, good and proper. They had suddenly presented us with some of their moveable assets, which were just too valuable to ignore. I wasted no time, and in my first pass I let rip with a clutch of rockets. This completely destroyed two of the trucks and, from what I gathered afterwards, killed quite a few of their occupants.

A few days later, a complaint was lodged by the rebel command through their unofficial representative in Freetown. It was claimed that I had bombed a market and killed dozens of unarmed civilians. Fortunately, I had detailed the attack in a dispatch to Corinne after I got back to the office and I had told her exactly what had taken place. She called me back some days later and repeated the same story, but obviously from the rebel perspective. Then a special court was convened in Freetown and I was told by UN officials that my name had been put forward for human rights abuses.

Nothing came of it in the end because Ms Dufka was called to testify and she obviously mentioned Nellis’ earlier report. Another independent source had said she had seen the vehicles that the gunship had destroyed, together with the heavy weapons. ‘I still keep in e-mail contact with Corinne. She is an all-round lovely person’, says Nellis.

Much of this adverse publicity, some of it clearly linked to enemy misinformation that could be tied to people with rebel connections, came at a time when the Kamajors were at their best as a counter-insurgency force.

Officially termed Civil Defence Forces, these resilient fighters gave as good as they got, and then some, according to Nellis. It helped, of course, that they were extremely professional when it came to handling firearms, which was one of the reasons why the Nigerians included them within the ranks of ECOMOG. ‘Though why Kholbe and his people subsequently subverted all Kamajor efforts remains a mystery’, comments Nellis cynically. He believes that it was all part of the ongoing West African imbroglio that included Nigerian efforts to prolong the war, remain in Sierra Leone as long as possible and get a grip on the diamond industry.

The single biggest issue that faced the Kamajors, a Mende tribal people from the south and the east of the country, was that they were not militarily trained. For that reason, regular troops tended to look down on them and consider them the African version of country bumpkins. At the same time, although they were largely illiterate, they consistently outfought and outperformed both Fodah Sankoh’s rebel forces and the RSLAF.

Another rumour that did the rounds, which was also fallacious, was that the Kamajors were ill-disciplined. They obviously had some bad apples, as do most military units, commented Nellis, but he recalls working with them during the second invasion of Freetown by Foday Sankoh’s irregulars. While ‘Bokkie’ was still in use, he’d drop small groups of Kamajors and Nigerian soldiers, usually with his partner Hassan in the lead, and they would deploy against fairly substantial groups of RUF rebels who sometimes outnumbered them by 20 to one.

‘It was rare that our guys came up short. The Kamajors weren’t only good fighters, they were utterly fearless and they didn’t take an awful lot of casualties either’, said Nellis. They also took no prisoners, he told me much later. Nellis put the Kamajors way up there with the Gurkhas when it came to rating their efficiency in battle.

Earlier in the war the term ‘Sobels’—soldiers by day, rebels by night—had been coined. Many critics of Kamajor prowess maintained that these tribal fighters were among the worst offenders, a claim Nellis dismissed out of hand.

‘Sure,’ says Nellis, ‘there was the occasional Kamajor among the very irregular “Sobels”, but almost all of these renegades were government troops on the plunder … I saw them myself, and there was no question about who were the apprentice turncoats’, he declared. He added that when Chief Hinga Norman—the Kamajor spokesman, protector and mentor— unexpectedly died in a Dakar hospital after surgery (the family maintains, with some justification, that he was poisoned) there was nobody powerful enough in Sierra Leone to take up their case. ‘That was when the Kamajors were quite openly accused of “pillaging, terrorizing and killing”.’ They were also accused of recruiting youngsters under the age of 15, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. The truth is that the majority of the rebel forces were under age and almost nobody was brought to book on that issue after the fighting had ended.

Many stories about the Kamajors emerged during the war, some based on fact, others apocryphal. Shortly after the Makeni incident, Nellis and his crew were tasked to go to Moyamba to uplift as many of the Kamajor bush fighters as possible and fly them to Freetown. The rebels were marching towards Freetown and the intention was to deploy the tough and aggres sive Kamajors in the defence of the approaches to the city. Nellis recounts:

We’d earlier lost our one rear door and I had the other removed as well. The result was that we were flying with the back of the aircraft wide open, which was not a good idea. We would have no control over people who might have been trying to get on board in a chaotic situation. Also, we were aware that EO had lost one of their helicopters due to ill-disciplined soldiers running away from battle. When we finally did land at Moyamba, however, we had the Kamajors storming us for a different reason. They were all eager to go into battle against the rebels and we had been sent by their jungle gods to take them there.’

Ellis said that it felt as if an entire company of Kamajors had squeezed on board. Worse, not one of them would get off although the crew begged, pleaded and even tried bribery. In fact, they did a count afterwards and found that there were 91 of them in the helicopter. As these men were considered by one and all as a bunch of mean bastards if they believed that you were opposed to them, the crew were in something of a Catch-22 situation.

They refused to budge and there was no way I could take off … we had reached stalemate. Basically, the LZ was a small football field surrounded by dozens of tall trees, some more than 100ft high. Also, the outside air temperature was about 38 degrees Centigrade. While ‘Bokkie’ wasn’t underpowered, the Mi-17 definitely didn’t have enough engine power to get itself out of a relatively confined area with so many people on board, the total weight was roughly three times over factory limitations.