All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
—Edmund Burke
The woman sat in the hot office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) facility, answering my questions about her journey through terror.
The room was humid, but her eyes chilled me. She looked through me, as if she could see beyond the cement to some monster lurking outside. I recognized the stare. She was only 24 years old, but she had seen enough horror for five life times.
She was the fourth person I had talked to that morning. Each had told tales that were remarkably similar, albeit each with its own wicked twist.
This woman had come from the village of Makeni, across the border from Guinea in Sierra Leone. She and her husband were small-business traders. When Revolutionary United Front (RUF)70 rebels had surrounded her village, she and her 3-month-old baby were able to conceal themselves. But from her hiding place, she saw her husband tortured and killed. She saw women—some were pregnant—gang-raped until they died. Villagers who tried to escape the onslaught were shot.
Once the rebels withdrew, she and other survivors retreated to the safety of the Guinea border. On her journey, her child died. She found two other children who had been abandoned, so she picked them up and was now caring for them. Her village was destroyed and her only relative, a sister, was somewhere in Sierra Leone—if she was still alive. The woman was obviously under great stress, her future uncertain. Still, she told me that, “Thanks to God and the UNHCR Health Center,” she was being encouraged to “live day by day.”
The small enclosed compound was a ten-minute ride down a busy street from UNHCR headquarters in Conakry, the seaside capital of Guinea. Run by UNHCR in partnership with the Guinean government and a German NGO, German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), its hallmarks were compassion and respect for human life.
There, I met Peter Kono, a Sierra Leone refugee, who ran the center and explained its function. Refugees from Sierra Leone who had been mutilated or psychologically scarred by RUF rebels were brought to the compound for medical treatment, counseling and for a measure of hope.
I had heard about the mutilations and the facility created to address them, but I could not understand why, if the stories were true, the world was sitting mutely by. As a soldier, I had seen the effects of torture, but what I had heard and seen this morning numbed me. I had spoken with 12 people who had been either tortured or mentally abused, half of the census at the center that day.
By 1998, Sierra Leone had been at war with RUF rebels for more than seven years. The situation escalated in May of 1997 when Sierra Leone army troops overthrew the democratically elected President, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. The insurrection leader, Major Johnny Paul Koromah, invited the RUF rebels to join him in the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown.
After fruitless negotiations, Nigerian-led army units, part of a West African peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG71, launched a counter-attack. ECOMOG succeeded in ousting the rebel junta and forcing RUF forces from the capital. President Kabbah was re-installed and remnants of the ousted junta and RUF forces fled to the diamond-rich northeast of the country, with ECOMOG forces in pursuit.
In the northeast, the ECOMOG troops and the rebels came to a stalemate. For three months, the rebels began a reign of terror on the innocent local population. In a “scorched earth” policy, villages were surrounded and their inhabitants massacred. A few able-bodied civilians were kept alive to serve as porters or were forced into the rebel army. Perhaps worst of all, some people were mutilated to serve as human signposts of the continued power of the rebel forces.
Doctors Without Borders reported in May of 1998 that as many as 128 mutilated victims had reached the capital of Freetown. According to Amnesty International, women and children were being rounded up and locked into houses that were then set on fire. There were widespread reports of gang rapes, as well as the mutilation of men, women and children, usually the amputation of an arm or hand. In some cases, rebels would amputate both arms OR hands.
As I interviewed the victims, I sat numbly as they related their tales of terror in the same passive manner as the 24-year-old woman. This was reminiscent of the bland, quiet way of telling stories of horror related to me by land mine survivors in southern Sudan. I could only hope that the damage to these people’s minds was not as severe as the damage to their bodies.
Here is some of what I heard:
A man who worked in the diamond mines was captured when rebels attacked his village. He was unsure of the status of his mother, father and sisters. He was used as a bearer to carry loot away from his village to a rebel stronghold. Of the 13 men captured from his village, four were released and five were taken away, never to be seen again. The four remaining prisoners were tied up. The rebel commander told them that they were to be executed. The 38-year-old miner was to be first.
The rebels brought them to a place where they said they killed people. Here, at these “killing fields,” the miner saw numerous corpses. The captives were told to stand and wait to be executed.
For some reason, however, the commander decided to mutilate this man instead. He was taken to a tree, and as one rebel held a gun to the back of his head, another put his right hand against the tree and chopped it off with a machete. Next they cut off his left ear. He was then told to run or he would be shot. He was instructed to go to ECOMOG and tell them that the rebels were ready for them.
The miner made it to an ECOMOG base and was transported first to Freetown and then on to Conakry for care. He knew that if he returned to Sierra Leone and was caught by the rebels, he would be executed. The miner did not know about his future since he was “right-handed and now that hand was gone.”
A 36-year-old farmer was captured by rebels while helping his brother with the farming. He was in a group of 12 with his father, mother and three sisters. He was forced to watch as rebels gouged out his father’s eyes, burned his face, amputated both his legs and eventually beheaded him with a machete. Eight others in the group were killed, including his mother and sisters.
The three remaining captives were kept alive and forced to serve as bearers and—in case of an attack by opposition forces—human shields. The farmer was bound for three days, the bindings so tight that blood circulation to his hands was cut off and his hands became deformed.
Mutilated refugee.
The rebel commander gave the three prisoners a choice of death or mutilation. They chose mutilation. One man’s lips were cut off. The other’s ears were cut off. The farmer’s finger was cut off and his hands were put in a fire. The men were instructed to run to ECOMOG to serve as a warning that the rebels were still active in the area. They were told that if they were seen in the area again they would be killed. The farmer did not know if he would be able to ever use his hands. Conakry did not have the medical expertise to do much more for any of the patients than keep them alive.
A 28-year-old farmer from Lelehun village was captured with two others in a rebel attack. Because he belonged to the Mandingo tribe, the tribe of the current Sierra Leone president, the rebels beat him with their gun butts until they thought he was dead. He lay motionless for a long time and after hearing no movement around him decided to try and escape. Rebels were still in the area and when they caught him they threw acid in his face. Then they told him to run. The farmer could see little through his acid-scalded eyes. He took off and wandered until he was found by ECOMOG forces.
According to people at the UNHCR facility, the acid did not totally destroy his eyes but did weld his eyelids together. There was a chance that he might see again, if he had access to a medical facility that could provide the kind of care he needed.
I also spoke with an unmarried 27-year-old man from the village of Kabala who worked in the diamond mines. Rebels killed his father during the 1996 elections because of his involvement in the democracy campaign. Now, in 1998, rebels had captured him during a pro-democracy rally and amputated his arm.
As a father, possibly the hardest story for me was that of a 5-year-old boy from the village of Igbeda. The boy was in a house with 19 members of his family when rebels attacked. The rebels rushed the house and opened fire with machine guns. The father of the boy threw his body over him and died in a burst of bullets. When the attack was over, villagers came to the house and found the wounded boy crying, lying under his father’s body. All the others in the house were dead. In a matter of seconds he had lost his entire family, including his father, mother, four brothers and eight sisters.
As I left the compound, most of those I had interviewed were gathered together in a small courtyard, talking. My last view of these souls was the man who’d had acid thrown in his face. He was standing there clutching a Bible he could not read. The murder of civilians and the torture and maiming of these people brought no strategic gain or tactical advantage to the RUF rebels. No intelligence was gathered. The opposing forces were not weakened by these acts. They represented man’s inhumanity to man at its most raw.
The 20th century saw two world wars and hundreds of other conflicts. The end of the Cold War did not bring peace, but merely fomented hot geo-political conflicts. In Africa colonialism was replaced by violent tribalism. Humanity seemed to be crawling into the new millennium unable or unwilling to learn from past mistakes.
The U.N. and NGOs have often been criticized for not doing enough for those savaged by war, even of creating more harm than good. I have sometimes been one of those critics. To me there is a vast difference between the staff that sit in international headquarters and those who do the dangerous humanitarian work, such as Mr. Kono at the Refugee Counselling Office in Nongoa, Guinea.
I am not an expert on U.N. policy, but efforts I witnessed from the U.N. and several NGOs in this case during my short trip to Guinea were nothing but commendable. The government of Guinea, one of the poorest countries on earth, was a gracious host to one of the highest concentrations of refugees in Africa, caring for as many as 600,000 Sierra Leoneans and Liberians who were forced to flee their homelands.
After my interviews, I stopped by the UNHCR office because I wanted to shake the hand of the U.N. protection officer and commend him for the job he was doing. He sadly announced that he had just received a report that five more mutilated persons had crossed the Sierra Leone border into Guinea. I had come to realize in this trip that the criticism of others, myself included, leveled at the U.N., international governments and NGOs often is directed at the executive level of these groups and some field leaders driven by ego and power instead of humanitarian concerns. At the field level there are often found the unrecognized heroes of humanitarian efforts.
I am a professional refugee worker and former soldier who had seen much of the terror and brutality of war. But that night at dinner, sitting by myself in my hotel, I was unable to shake the horror of what I most recently seen and heard.
After the Holocaust, the Jews said the world must “never forget.” Had we forgotten? Or was it too easy not to notice?
70 Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was a rebel army that fought a failed eleven-year war in Sierra Leone, starting in 1991 and ending in 2002. It later developed into a political party, which still exists today. The three most senior surviving leaders, Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon and Augustine Gbao, were convicted in February 2009 of war crimes and crimes against humanity.[1]
71 In an attempt to end the bloody civil war in Liberia, in August 1990, a group of West African nations under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) took the unprecedented step of sending a peacekeeping force into Monrovia. This force, known as the Economic Community Cease-Fire Monitoring Group, (ECOMOG). “Waging War to Keep Peace 1993”, https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/liberia/.