October 11, 2002
David Crane, the prosecutor for the special court for Sierra Leone, strode up the overgrown path to a single-storey blue building on the Tomboudou hillside and peered gingerly through the door. Grinning back at him from the floor were a dozen skulls. They were, however, not what he was looking for. This particular crime scene was, he said, "contaminated"; it had been tampered with.
In the diamond-rich east of Sierra Leone, Tomboudou was a key town in the 11-year civil war. Diamonds dug here by various factions were bartered for guns and food. Huge diamond pits, like bomb craters, filled with pale brown water are dotted around the town. It might as well have been bombed. Every building has been wrecked and burned, roofs ripped off, window frames and doors torn out.
People are now beginning to drift back and rebuild. Sahr Gbamanja, son of the local MP, fled an attack by the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in 1998. He saw them burn his 13-year-old brother to death in their house. The rebels, he said, tied people together in gangs and forced them to work or carry food and ammunition. Those who refused or were too weak to work had their hands cut off or were butchered. No one knows how many died because most people in the area fled across the border into Guinea.
Crane found what he was looking for among the reeds beside one of the diamond pits: a long bone that looked human. The returning villagers told him that in the pond were the bodies of between 400 and 1000 murdered people. He officially declared it a crime scene and the local police roped it off. Then he was shown a water pipe running through the town on which, he was told, the rebels forced people to place their arms before cutting off their hands.
The special court has moved quickly since President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah officially declared the war over in January. Set up in March by treaty between the Sierra Leonean government and the United Nations, it aims to avoid the cost and inertia of the Rwanda genocide tribunal. Operating with a $58-million budget, only one-sixth of the Rwandan tribunal's, and a much smaller group of staff, the court has a three-year mandate to find, arrest, try and convict those guilty of war crimes in Sierra Leone since November 1996. The Rwandan tribunal has convicted only eight in seven years.
Bulldozers are already clearing recently acquired land in the capital, Freetown, for a new court house and registry. The court is accountable to a management committee comprising states that have contributed to it, and it is not bound by UN employment rules or UN bureaucracy. If successful, it may become a model for future war crimes tribunals. Indeed the big number of Americans in senior positions may suggest that it is a United States attempt to thwart the setting up of a permanent international criminal court. Crane denies that interpretation.
Since arriving in Sierra Leone six weeks ago, the energetic 52-year-old former judge advocate in the US army has shown clearly that he is determined to complete his task in the allotted three years. He says he is here to listen to his clients, "the people of Sierra Leone". In his first trip outside the capital to visit the areas most affected by the war, he whizzed around Tomboudou, leaving his police escort and others puffing in his wake. Africa is not used to such hyperactivity.
The willingness of the local people to show him what happened might give Crane the impression that his task will be easy. Identifying the baddies should be straightforward because Sierra Leone is a small country of about five million people. It is hard to hide here. People such as Gbamanja are quite open about who ordered the massacres, rapes and torture. In Tomboudou, he says, it was "Staff" Al Haji Bayo. Everyone around us agreed. He should not be hard to find. He is an officer in the newly British-trained Sierra Leonean army.
This is where the real contamination starts. Bayo was not a member of the RUF. He had been an officer in the army. In 1997 junior officers overthrew Kabbah's government and teamed up with the RUF. Together they committed some of the worst atrocities. To complicate matters, the Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force, Ecomog, and the local civil defence militias also butchered people. In 1999, under a bizarre US-sponsored peace accord, an amnesty was granted to all and about 2230 fighters from the different factions were integrated unscreened into the new army. As a result, some of the worst killers are now defending the state. Crane is determined that he will simply go after "those with the most responsibility"; those who gave the orders, those who killed large numbers and the paymasters in Sierra Leone or elsewhere.
But the search for justice cuts across the new settlement. There is speculation that he might indict Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia who swapped diamonds for guns for the rebels and gave them a base in his country. The court could also indict ministers in the government, such as Hinga Norman, once the leader of a militia group known as the Kamajors, and still a close ally of the president.
Unlike Rwanda, Sierra Leone's war does not have one single source of evil. The whole society became contaminated. Crane will not find a clear line dividing government and rebels, order and chaos, good and evil. In Sierra Leone all is contradictory and grey. To try to get Sierra Leone's traditionally secretive society to open up and talk about what has happened for the past 11 years, the government has set up a truth and reconciliation commission similar to South Africa's. But it is infected with the same contradictory politics and is short of funds. There are also doubts about whether statements made in the commission can be used in the special court. Crane says he wants to build his own case and not use the commission's statements, but he will not rule it out.
The main culprit in the war, in the eyes of most Sierra Leoneans, is Foday Sankoh, the RUF leader. But even in his case doubts exist about a successful prosecution. He spent the worst period of RUF atrocities as a "guest" detained by the Nigerians. Now languishing in Pademba Road jail in Freetown, he has recently fallen ill with hypertension and is refusing medication. He may even die before the court is set up. Even worse, he could plead insanity or he may simply have terrified too many witnesses. On the other hand the most visible victims of the war, the War-affected Amputees' Association, is sending a confusing message to the court and the commission. Living with their families at a camp in Freetown, the 250 or so mutilated survivors with no hands or no feet say they do not want revenge. Indeed, there has been astoundingly little personal revenge since the end of the war, despite the victims and perpetrators living together again in the same streets and villages. It looks like superhuman forgiveness.
But at the same time the amputees want to be paid for giving evidence to the court. Though they are well looked after by local and foreign aid agencies, the association is demanding that the government gives them $100 and a bag of rice every month for life. Until it does, they are refusing to cooperate. Without the participation of these living symbols of Sierra Leone's suffering, or the trial and conviction of Sankoh, Crane and the war crimes court will be wasting their time.
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