MEDIA & SOCIETY Open Letter to the Special Court for Sierra Leone Posted by on Jun 4, 2008, 01:18

30 May 2008

I am a Sierra Leonean who has been out of the country since the end of the invasion of Freetown in 1999, by the RUF rebels.  I lived in Freetown then and I was working for the UN. I decided however to leave the country after I deduced from what transpired that Sierra Leone had no hope.  I lost property during the invasion, and was only lucky not to have been abducted or killed, as my family and I came face-to-face with the RUF rebels, when we were ordered to evacuate our homes.

I have really not been following the proceedings of your court as I felt that you would have the good sense to mete out justice only to those who initiated and committed atrocities against civilians.  But lo and behold that has not been the case, as I have just read that you have decided to increase the sentences of two CDF/Kamajor fighters.  THIS IS A GRAVE INJUSTICE and I strongly believe that it is specifically because of actions like these that we had the civil/rebel war in the first place.  Please note that I lived through the entire invasion of Freetown, sleeping with my family on the floor, underneath a flight of stairs for more than a week.

I came into contact with both the RUF rebels and the CDF fighters.  The RUF rebels selected me from about 15 people and ordered me to give them everything I had on me or face grave consequences if I allowed them to search my pockets and my person themselves.  I gave them what I had including a not insignificant amount of hard currency.  They mumbled that I looked like those who were supporting the Nigerians troops in the country so I had to hand over all I had fast or else.  I survived that encounter to tell this story simply because of divine intervention and nothing else.   I also came into contact with the Kamajors just after our area of town was liberated by the Nigerian troops.  This happened when I had to attend to some urgent official issues and my colleagues and I needed a truckload of Kamajors for our protection.  They gave us protection at a time when there were still remnants of RUF rebels in the surrounding areas.

Now, as a Sierra Leonean who really did not understand the need to prolong the rebel war in the first place, or why the RUF rebels were attacking primarily civilians instead of the government they were fighting, I was eternally grateful for the protection of the CDF fighters and their presence in our part of town brought a welcome relief to all and sundry, irrespective of ethnicity. So, you can see how diametrically opposed my experiences with the two sides were. It is my strong belief therefore, and that I believe of the majority of Sierra Leoneans, that without the Kamajors and the Nigerian troops, there would have been horrendous atrocities perpetrated on the people of Freetown and possibly the entire country.   Now, you people in your comfortable offices sit to pass judgment based on some law originally designed by white people for people who are literate.  You apply foreign ideas that clash with our African experiences and then you end up convicting innocent men that were only defending themselves and their communities.  You have possibly inadvertently established a reason for yet another future rebellion in Sierra Leone and you have not helped our cause one bit.  It is injustices like these that convince people like me to never return to Sierra Leone.  It is obvious that governments in the country who are relying on people like you will NEVER be able to turn the country around, NEVER.  Sierra Leone will always remain a basket case, because of the cumulative actions of people like you.

The war in Sierra Leone was not a conventional war as people of your kind will define it.  It was not a war between two states, and so most of the Geneva Conventions would probably not apply. This was simply a bloodletting African-style fought between mostly illiterate or semi-literate people with no officially-recognized military training.  The majority of the combatants, with the exception of the Nigerian troops, were not recognized military forces.  These are the type of people America today refers to as 'unlawful enemy combatants'. And this has given the Bush administration the right to commit all kinds of torture against them. Why? Because they are defending the American people against unconventional combatants. Now, I don't see any court in the world trying the Americans and convicting them.  But yet, you came out of the blue and convicted people who were probably acting just as the Americans are acting now.  Why were you able to do that?  Because Sierra Leone is not America; Sierra Leone is banana republic. That’s why.  Sierra Leoneans do not have the resources that Americans have to mount a challenge to such a travesty of common sense and justice.

You surely would have known by now that the Kamajors were defending the majority of Sierra Leoneans against a well-armed group of drug-crazed vagabonds.  What do you expect them to have done with the RUF rebels and their collaborators who initiated the atrocities in the first place?  Read the constitution of Sierra Leone or the Geneva Conventions to decide how to fight them?  How do you expect people with minimal education and no formal training as soldiers to understand such documents? 

The RUF rebels were illegal combatants, plain and simple, and they together with Charles Taylor’s men would have wrecked such havoc on the country that you would not even have had the stomach to constitute any sort of special court.  Any attempt to have fought them as literate white people would fight a war, would have been seen as a sign of weakness and would have doomed the entire effort of the CDF fighters.  Whatever actions were taken against the RUF rebels and their collaborators in defending a people that had lost all hope were necessary for the CDF to prevail, and cannot now be judged as war crimes.  Or are you imagining that these semi-literate or illiterate fighters should have devised some other strategy to prevail against the RUF?  

Do you really think that would have been possible? Do you have any precedence where poorly educated people have observed the ‘nice’ conventions of war?  How would anyone expect such people to know about such conventions in the first place?  What about wars in the past where the victors committed atrocities but no one ever convicted them because they were seen to have been fighting for the common good?  

Your judgment therefore is a disgrace and a shameful crime against the humanity of all Sierra Leoneans who had to endure the atrocities of the RUF. It is a crime against our humanity insofar as that humanity, above all, consists of an eternal sense of gratitude to the CDF.  People who were not trained militarily but who nonetheless rose to the challenge of defending their country.  Your judgment is a crime against our sense of justice and fair play insofar as you have punished the aggressors as well as the victims who were only defending themselves.

Again, you are able to treat these people like this just because they are poor and not highly educated, irrespective of whatever legal representation they might have had. The 28th of May 2008, the day of your judgment is therefore a sad day in the history of Sierra Leone.  I am sure that while you are still around, we will have many more sad days to come, as you care only about sending a message that impunity will not be tolerated.  You do not care about the common good of a nation that is teetering on the brink.  The difference between the RUF and the CDF was that the latter were fighting for the common good, while the former were half-baked criminal’s intent on wrecking the country because of some perceived injustices previously committed against them.  The CDF could not have fought the RUF like ‘nice’ white people who are the source of the laws that you used to convict the two men.  They should not have been charged to begin with, let alone have their sentences increased.  This is all surreal to me