Memories of war in Sierra Leone: The August 18th uprising

Twelve rainy seasons have passed since youths and students all over the major cities in Sierra Leone came out to protest against one of the most brutal military regimes ever seen in Africa. Led by university students, youths and ordinary workers took to the streets on 18 August 2007. They engaged in running battles with junta forces led by Major Johnny Paul Koroma. The ruthless soldiers had occupied strategic locations, especially in Freetown, as students demanded an immediate return to democratic rule and a halt to the gross human rights abuses in the country.

The democratic struggle led by Buddhist monks in Myanmar during 2007 against an equally brutish junta is well-known. More recently, the student-led uprising against the oppressive Iranian theocracy was well-publicised. In both these scenarios images of the protesters were beamed to a global audience by major international news channels.

Unfortunately, this is not the case in Sierra Leone. Apart from the BBC’s Africa service coverage, the uprising against Johnny Paul Koroma’s vicious junta received little or no coverage by the world’s media outlets. But for those of us who were involved in that uprising, the memories will live on forever. To us it was as important as that of Iran in 2009, Myanmar in 2007 and indeed the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989. Our minds will forever continue to be filled with the remembrance of the sheer brutality and wanton orgy of blood-letting that was visited upon us by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council–Revolutionary United Front (AFRC–RUF) alliance.

The violence by the junta left ordinary people shocked and dumbstruck. The exact number of people killed is not known to this day. At least two students were known to have been killed, some say mutilated to death. Hundreds of female students were captured, distributed among the various military camps and subjected to two weeks of gang rape by rebels and soldiers. They were then released physically and psychologically damaged, carrying their pains alone to this day.

Other demonstrators, mostly students, were arrested and locked in shipping containers at the Cockerill Army headquarters in Freetown. The containers, which were without any ventilation, had been used to deliver arms and ammunition for the army before the coup.

The day itself broke with a sombre morning, enveloped by the grey rainy-season skies, filled with melancholy and the foreboding mourning that awaited us. Voices of fierce-looking soldiers and rebels looking for students to kill, the clatter of menacing fresh new machetes and the cocking of AK-47s rifles still echo in our minds today. The rumble of a helicopter gunship hovering overhead still lingers. Their aim that day was to crush us like ants. Why? Because students dared to raise their opposition against an illegal military junta that had taken power three months earlier, a year after the return to representative democratic rule for the first time in 30 years.

So it was amidst this Hobbesian ‘state of nature’, where life looked ‘nasty, brutish and short’, that I left my family home in the far east of Freetown and ventured into the city centre. I was armed with two teargas canisters, which I had secured from a pro-democrat police officer the previous night. In my naivety at the time I thought that the junta would send in the police armed with teargas to disperse us. I hoped that I would be able to throw my own teargas at them whilst escaping theirs. How I was mistaken.

The soldiers came out in full force, fully prepared for war, perhaps even for a massacre of those students 'who oppose our government'. As the soldiers sharpened their shiny and newly acquired machetes, preferring as they said not to waste bullets on 'bloody civilians', we, the would-be demonstrators, remained defiant. We looked for the slightest opportunity to converge, unfurl our banners and start our chanting against the junta. I stood at Kissy Road watching a soldier chasing a suspected student. The young would-be demonstrator, dashed into the nearby compound by the Clock Tower roundabout. The soldier followed him closely, albeit struggling to carry himself as he was overloaded with ammunition, an AK-47 and a machete in his hand. The machete-wielding soldier shouted as he rushed into the courtyard waving it in the air menacingly. Another soldier followed behind closely. 'If you don’t produce him, all of you are dead meat', he added, doing a little war jig whilst brandishing his weapon, a semi-automatic machine gun with bullets wrapped around his half-naked body.

Eventually the young man escaped with the help of an old lady who hid him away in her house. No matter how stubborn the soldiers became, the old woman would not budge, maintaining her frail but firm voice that the boy was not in the house. Such was the level of solidarity among ordinary people, who defended the students by all means. They showed us shorter escape routes and provided information to help our hasty retreat when soldiers were closing in. Ordinary people did this in the face of brutality and at the risk of their own lives. Later I learnt that the first batch of students in the city centre, on being chased by soldiers, sought refuge in hospital wards, among the sick in the main referral hospital. It was also reported by patients that when the soldiers entered the hospital, they rampaged through the wards, beat up sick patients and ripped off IVs looking for escaping students. No one was spared, not even the bed-ridden.

My first close shave with death on that ignominious day came when travelling in a taxicab through 'up-gun' roundabout, where the demonstration was planned to start. I had just listened to the exiled President Tejan Kabbah on the clandestine 98.1 FM radio. He urged students to go out and show the world our disapproval with Johnny Paul Koroma’s junta and our stance on democracy. Alie Bangura (then using his alias Abdul Hakim Sesay) was also on air, egging us on by calling students heroic and the demonstration historic. He was made minister of trade upon the restoration of the Kabbah government to power.

Our taxi (like all other taxis heading into the city that morning) was stopped at Ferry Junction by heavily armed soldiers. It was a do-or-die affair as I had my teargas canisters with me, which I quickly hid under the driver's seat. I had to wait for the other two passengers to get out first so they would not see my ’weapons’ being hidden, just in case they were not 'pro-democrats'. Then I quickly jumped out of the taxi to be searched. Thinking about it now, I was very lucky because none of the soldiers bothered to search inside the taxicab, they just searched the booth. Any peep into the taxi by the soldiers would have been it … sure death. In the haste and panic, I left one of the teargas canisters protruding out from under the seat. Surely the junta propagandists would have had a field day with headlines, where teargas canisters would have turned into a taxi-load of grenades. My next encounter with the soldiers was at Connaught hospital.

I still remember the red-eyed soldier approaching me, looking fierce and drugged, so deadened by drugs that he could barely open his eyes. He demanded to see our ID cards after having rushed into the main gates of the Connaught referral hospital by the outpatient department in central Freetown. I was standing among the group of people (mostly female students from the school of nursing) who were pretending not to be part of the demonstration. There were also doctors, sick people and families of patients milling around as they attempted to catch a glimpse of the shocking brutality meted out on students.

The soldier was from the military police (MP) with the usual red armband matching drug-induced, equally red eyes that competed for attention. Of course I had only my student ID card with me, the discovery of which would result in either the death sentence, or a sure reason for arrest and merciless beating if one was lucky. But perhaps even more dangerous was the fact that I still had the teargas canisters on me – a sure reason for mutilation to death if found. Luckily for me, I was standing some distance from the last people in the crowd. This, in addition to the fact that the soldier was so drugged up he could hardly see anyone, led him to turn away from me instead asking for the dreaded ID card.

As the soldier turned away, I shuddered then felt relief. I could not believe that I was lucky the second time. It felt like a container-full of iron rods had just been suddenly lifted of my shoulders. This second lucky escape left me so psychologically shaken that I retreated to our base (Abdul Rashid’s house on Mountain Cut) to care for my wounds and ponder the next moves.

VAFFIE KONNEH

With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps it was foolhardy of all those involved to have gone so far as to put their lives on the line for such a hopeless and scornful ruling class, one that has since not even acknowledged the contribution of the martyred student activist Vaffie Konneh. Vaffie was a final year Environmental Science student at Njala University, who was captured by soldiers whilst trying to mobilise students near Connaught hospital (where I luckily escaped). He was then reportedly tortured, beaten with gun butts, mutilated and then chopped into pieces.

To this day, his family has not seen Vaffie’s body. Not a single member of the Tejan Kabbah-led administration even visited his family after their return to power, let alone create a monument in his honour. His family was left alone to pick up the pieces. They have never been compensated. This action by the ruling class begs the question: Will anyone risk their lives in the future event of a military/rebel coup like that of the AFRC? Once back in power, the Kabbah government continued to engage in business-as-usual, deriding any claims by young people for dignity and recognition as equal citizens.

BETRAYAL

After 10 years of misrule by the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and two years of equally less promising All People's Congress (APC) leadership, the situation of young people has not changed for the better. They are asking themselves, given the betrayal of the SLPP and APC, whether it was worth risking their lives in the name of democracy when all that politicians showed them was ingratitude and scorn.

Other students I spoke to recently think the so-called international community should bear some responsibility for perpetuating the biggest lie of our generation, that it was the British intervention in 2000 that ‘saved’ Sierra Leone from 'limb-hacking and arm-chopping rebels'! Of course the Sierra Leonean ruling class has supported this narrative mainly to receive the crumbs Britain calls ‘aid’. In the case of Sierra Leone the ex-British prime minister – notorious for his lies and propensity to 'spin' news to suit his policies – tried to use this 'humanitarian intervention' to cleanse his blood-stained hands, dirtied by adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I will handle this subject separately in a future piece).

THE NEW CHALLENGE

For the students and youths of Sierra Leone today, 10 years on, the struggle for democracy started in 1997 and will continue to press for true social change and freedom for the youths and all the 'wretched of the earth' in the country. Today Sierra Leone is the poorest country in the world, with the condition of its youths worsening day by day, not to mention the appalling condition of rural peasants, women and workers. Students should take their rightful place as a vanguard in our people’s fight for social and economic justice.

The issues to be addressed are numerous, evidence of which can be seen all around the country. One might highlight for example the disgraceful national health situation, the massive youth unemployment, the unjust 'justice' system, the oppression of rural youths by chiefs and the outdated chieftaincy institution, the lack of basic services like clean water and free, quality education. While the people languish in obscene poverty and squalor, the looting of our national wealth by Western multi-nationals (with the collusion of our politicians and their Western backers) goes on. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank continue to impose poverty-inducing policies like privatisation and the over-taxation of the poor while mining companies are given 'tax concessions'. The list goes on.

In sum, students should be at the forefront of our people’s right to dignity, to live as human beings while being able to reach their full potential. This is the ‘mission’ of our ‘generation’. Progressive elements within the students' movement should keep Vaffie Konneh’s spirit alive by rising above 'black man' vs. 'white man' parochialism and demand social justice and the redistribution of national wealth, which belongs to all and not just the elites.

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* Karim Bah is a pan-African community activist for social justice, journalist and film maker.
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