By Mabinty Kamara
It’s been 25 years since the civil war first erupted in Sierra Leone, a war that unleashed terror and untold suffering on the people.
Officially it started on 23 March 1991 and lasted for the next eleven years; a lot of human rights violations and abuses ranging from killing, rape, looting, to amputation of innocent citizens were reported.
Eventually peace came, even if at great price. The basis of this peace was the Lome Peace Accord, signed on 7 July 1999, between President Ahmad Tejan Kabba and rebel leader Foday Sankoh, alongside international partners who’d helped negotiated it.
Fourteen years since President Kabba’s famous pronouncement: ‘The war don don’, some Sierra Leoneans have been reflecting on the peace process. It followed concerns about the state of affairs in the country with some people wondering whether the present government has taken full advantage of the benefit of the peace to build on it further.
For instance, Eldred Collins, a founding member of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, said the Lome Peace Accord has hardly been implemented.
“The only thing which we benefitted from is the transformation [of the RUF] into the political party,” he said.
The accord provided for the transformation of the rebel force into a political party so that it continued to channel its grievances, which were the basis of the war in, through the political system. This was how the Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP) was born. But it has not been able to make any mark on the political scene. Collins told Politico that the poor performance of the party could not be unconnected to the failures of the government to fully implement the Lome Peace Accord.
He cited Article Three of the document which obliges the country’s ‘Moral Guarantors’ [the UN, religious leaders, and other international partners, including African governments like Nigeria] to set up a trust fund that would enable the effective running of the party.
“But we are now bankrupt and are therefore having serious constraint with funding to support the day to day running of the party,” Collins said, adding that they have not been able to get any meaningful response despite series of letters and complaints.
Collins also noted that even the demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration program (DDR) was not in any way beneficial to the ex-combatants.
“How can somebody acquire training in construction or other trades that were on the programme within six month?” he said of the programme that was eventually implemented as part of the DDR programme which lasted for a few years.
Most of the ex-combatants ended up been Okada [commercial motor] riders. One of these ex-combatants is Sahr Kawa, a native of Kono district in the eastern region of the country.
Kawa, like many young people who found themselves fighting in the war, was conscripted. He had lost his parents and siblings to the war, and that, apparently made it easy for him to fit in.
“With the question of whether I benefitted anything from the peace process…may be our leaders benefitted but I did not benefit anything,” he said.
Kawa was one of hundreds of ex-combatants enrolled into the DDR programme. He said it was meaningless because he had nothing to show for it.
“If not for the Okada ridding most of us would have been thieves. What then were we fighting for?”
In spite of himself, Kawa prays that the country never experience what it went through during the civil war.
On the streets, ordinary Sierra Leoneans are no less conscious about the significance of peace, regardless of the current trend of dissatisfaction occasioned by the state of affairs and general hardship.
Sixty-five-year old Mariatu Kabba saw it all. She said she developed high blood pressure from the persistent shock she had having to endure the noise from Alpha jets, a light attack jet and advanced trainer aircraft co-manufactured by Dassault Aviation of France and Dornier of Germany.
“Even if we don’t have money but at least we can go to bed with peace and not thinking about when the next attack will be launched…today, our children can go to and from school without fear. So to me that is a great benefit we achieved from the peace process,” she said.
Over a thousand people were amputated by RUF/AFRC fighters. One of such people is Aminata. She doesn’t like thinking about it.
“Thinking of the moment my hand was amputated makes me feel sick,” she said as tears rushed down her cheeks.
Despite the indelible memories this has left on her conscience, however, Aminata is fine with the current status of the country.
“Now, as you can see, I can do some petty trading where I earn my living. If there was no peace I might have been dead by now. So I must confess that I am a beneficiary of the process no matter what,” she said.
Ahmad Bah, a trader at Lumley Street in Freetown, recalled the troubles they faced during the war. “Traders were attacked at ‘Orkra Hill’ and all their goods were taken away from them and some even lost their lives in the process. So if we can do our business today without any obstacle then we must thank Allah for that,” Bah said.
In a way the APC-led government is the biggest beneficiary of the whole peace process. The war had in fact been blamed on it because of its governance system which triggered widespread agitation, according to observers.
The SLPP-led government re-introduced peace to the country, and the APC came to power, taking advantage of the raft of opportunities that came with that peace.
Has the Koroma-led government utilised the opportunity well enough?
We tried to get the APC Secretary General, Ambassador Osman Yansaneh, but he said he was too busy to talk to us. We however, would welcome any opportunity to have them respond to the question about whether or not the Koroma-led government has utilised the post war opportunities.
But the the main opposition Sierra Leone Peoples Party said the answer was “no”. Its acting publicity secretary, Lieutenant (Rtd) Lahai Lawrence Leema, said the anniversary should be used to reflect on the things that caused the war and try to address them.
Bad governance and human rights abuses were they key factors that led to the war, Leema said, adding that these are more prevalent now than they were before the war.
“If we reflect to Foday Sankoh, he was arbitrarily removed from his job without justice and now that same thing is happening: a group of soldiers were forced to retire without benefit; a democratically elected vice president was sacked without any justice on his path; and a mayor has also been suspended unconstitutionally.”
Leema was one of several commissioned officers forcefully retired by the government recently.
“I can assure you that the APC are the greatest beneficiary of the peace process because they caused the war and left it unsolved. We inherited it from NPRC and continued from where they stopped with the peace process until peace was finally restored and today they are enjoying that peace which we labored for,” Leema told Politico in an interview.
The SLPP spokesman also spoke about resentment among students which has led to recurrent students protests.
“Late Siaka Stevens used the police to victimised and unleashed injustice on the people and the current APC is purchasing complex weapons for the police…,” he said.
Leema also said persistent hardship on the people was the result of the fact that the government was keeping the money to lavish it during elections.
“Certainly all these have the tendency to revert the country to that path which led to war. So we want to reflect the mind of the APC that this is the only country we have and as they have inherited a peaceful country, we asked that they work towards maintaining that peace until they go out.”
Several attempts to get the side of the APC proved unsuccessful.
(C) Politico 23/03/16
