Atrocities, Diamonds and Diplomacy Page 2

  My return to Freetown, five days previously, had been made possible thanks to the British warship HMS Cornwall, whose helicopter had picked me up from Conakry, the capital of neighbouring Guinea, and then sailed me into a devastated and traumatized Freetown. Following my evacuation from Freetown in June 1997, I had spent most of the previous ten months in Conakry, in room 503 of the Hotel Camayenne. It was the hotel in which I had stayed when I had driven along the West African coast in March 1997 to take up my post as British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone. Arriving in Freetown then there was nothing to suggest the dramatic events that were about to unfurl.

  Chapter One

  Welcome to Freetown – 1997

  The sign said ‘Welcome to Freetown, Capital of Sierra Leone’. I glanced at the milometer – 1,963km since I had left Dakar. Now, where to go? I wound down the windows of the Land Rover and absorbed the exhilarating sights, sounds and smells of African life. Following what appeared to be the main road into the city, I found myself in the middle of downtown Freetown. The road had petered out and I was surrounded by stalls and market traders selling anything and everything from onions and tomatoes to used clothes and toothbrushes. Everyone was very friendly. I stopped a passing policeman and said, ‘I’m the new British High Commissioner but I don’t know where I live. Can you help me please?’ He looked at me in disbelief and started to walk on but I managed to persuade him that I was serious. He jumped into the Land Rover and directed me out of town and up one of the steep hills that surrounded Freetown. As we drove he told me that he was Sub-Inspector Mambu and that as a member of the police band he had often been to the High Commissioner’s residence to play his cornet.

  We drove into the residence. The management officer, Dai Harries, was there and a telephone call quickly brought Colin Glass, the Deputy High Commissioner, to the house. They were surprised to see me. Apparently they were not expecting me until that evening. The residence was in a degree of chaos with the painters in and furniture scattered around. But I had arrived. I was excited and ready to start work as the new British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone – the 12th High Commissioner to be appointed by Her Majesty’s Government since Sierra Leone’s independence in 1961. I sent off a telegram to London the next day, 10 March, which said: ‘I crossed the Guinea/Sierra Leone border yesterday morning and reached Freetown having driven 2,000km. I have assumed charge.’

  The journey to Sierra Leone had been interesting. I had boarded the MV Repubblica Di Amalfi, an Italian container ship, two weeks previously in London’s Tilbury Docks, together with my new Land Rover Discovery. The ship had been built to carry both passengers and freight but it turned out that I was the only passenger – clearly freight was more profitable and less hassle than cruise passengers. I was mainly left alone by the all-Italian crew during the day and joined them for dinner at night, when vast quantities of pasta were consumed. Football was the main topic of conversation so fortunately my support for Chelsea allowed me to contribute the odd Italian word like Zola, Di Matteo and Vialli. Thanks to satellite, Italian television was beamed straight to the ship and most evenings were spent watching Italian football. On one evening when we were watching a match between Napoli and Inter Milan the reception was so poor that the officers decided to alter course to get a better picture. For one and a half hours we steamed towards Brazil instead of Senegal!

  The Bay of Biscay had been quite rough but as we skirted the Mauritanian coast we entered the calmer waters of the Atlantic. As we crossed the Tropic of Cancer the ship was surrounded by a thick mist. This was the Harmattan, the desert wind that blows across the Sahara picking up sand and depositing it along its trail. We approached Dakar port through the haze, passing Gorée Island on our port side – the infamous island where the slaves were assembled like cattle before being shipped off to the West Indies. Today it is visited by tourists who can inspect the cramped holding cells, where the manacles on the walls cry out of past slaves awaiting their fate on the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to a life of slavery and hardship on the plantations in the Caribbean and the United States. The Dakar pilot came on board and slowly and skilfully manoeuvred the ship through the breakwater and into the port, where I looked down to see Andrew Murro waiting alongside the quay. Andrew was an American friend who had flown across from New York to join me for part of the drive through West Africa.

  We spent a day and a half sorting ourselves out, including clearing the Land Rover through Senegalese Customs, and set off. Our first night’s destination was Banjul, the capital of The Gambia, the former British colony. We reached Barra, the ferry terminal across from Banjul, in good time and we seemed to be in luck as the ferry had just arrived. However, the ferry terminal gates were closed and we were told that we needed a ferry ticket, which we would have to obtain from an office in a village that we had already passed 2 kilometres back. We went back and bought a ticket for me and the Land Rover. Using a machine that looked like an abacus, the heavily pregnant ferry official explained that she could not issue a ticket for my passenger; this must be obtained at the ferry terminal. Back at the terminal we tried to enter but were told that we had the wrong ticket – my ticket was for a diplomatic vehicle resident in The Gambia; we were just passing through. We drove back to the ticket office. The right ticket issued, we drove back to the ferry terminal and reached the gates, only to see the ferry pulling away. We were told that the next ferry would be another three hours.

  This was Andrew’s first time in West Africa so I told him about WAWA – ‘West Africa Wins Again’. Any time that something does not go as planned you merely shout ‘WAWA’ and put it down to experience. It was one way to preserve one’s sanity in West Africa.

  We shouted ‘WAWA’ many times over the next few days, especially when crossing the borders between The Gambia, Senegal and Guinea, but we finally arrived in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, where Andrew had to fly back to New York. I checked into the Hotel Camayenne and met up with Val Treitlein, the Honorary British Consul. We had closed our embassy in Conakry back in the 1970s and Val kept an eye on British interests. She and her German husband were old African hands and I much enjoyed their company. Val told me that she planned to write a book about life in Conakry that would be entitled Just One More Signature. She told of the endless succession of businessmen who came to Guinea to clinch that one big business deal that would make them rich. They arrived smart and eager and checked into the best hotel. After meeting the Guinean officials they would relax around the pool of the hotel just waiting for one more signature to clinch the deal. A few days later they would still be waiting around the pool, a little redder in the face but still confident of getting that signature. A few weeks would go by; they were now very red and somewhat dishevelled in their crumpled tropical suits. By now they had spent so much money on expenses that they dare not return to their head offices without the business deal, which required just one more signature.

  I left Val and the Hotel Camayenne for the final leg of my journey to Sierra Leone, not realizing just how much they would become part of my life later that year.

  This was not my first time in Sierra Leone. I had previously visited Freetown in the early 1980s when serving as the Sierra Leone desk officer in the West African Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Even then Freetown was showing signs of wear and tear from the affluent days of immediate post-independence, when Freetown was regarded as the ‘Athens of West Africa’.

  Sierra Leone’s wealth was derived from an abundance of natural and mineral resources – dense mahogany forests, rich coastal fishing waters and fertile soil producing acres of rice and other crops that enabled the population to easily feed itself. The first diamond was discovered in 1930, and the rich alluvial deposits were augmented by deposits of gold, bauxite, iron ore and, especially, rutile. It is from rutile that titanium dioxide is produced, which aids the pigmentation process in paint. Sierra Leone boasted the most profitable rutile mine in the world, which, when it was working,
contributed thirty per cent of all government revenue from royalties. However, years of corruption, inefficiency and mismanagement had set the decline of Sierra Leone’s once healthy economy.

  On independence, in 1961, it was richer than countries like Malaysia and Singapore but by 1977 Sierra Leone found itself ranked as the second poorest country in the world, according to the league table produced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Gross National Product per capita was less than $200. Seventy-five per cent of the five and a half million population lived in poverty, two thirds in extreme poverty. Life expectancy was forty-two years, infant mortality 162 per 1,000. Sixty per cent of the population had no access to safe and potable water. Illiteracy was eighty per cent. All these figures were far worse than the averages for Africa as a whole.

  Within the first month of my arrival I sent, as was customary, a ‘first impressions despatch’ to Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State at the time. I said that it would take a miracle to get Sierra Leone back on its feet. I took my cue from a sign painted in white on the side of one of the numerous churches driving into Freetown – ‘Expect a Miracle’. But I noted that a miracle had already taken place in Sierra Leone – the elections in 1996.

  The 1996 Elections

  Miracles are ordinary events achieved in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Against all the odds, not least the ongoing rebel war and a further coup just weeks before polling day, democratic elections had taken place in Sierra Leone in February 1996. The determination of the people to hold the elections was truly amazing. After years of corrupt, inefficient and military governments, Sierra Leoneans had decided to embrace democracy. In the face of pressure both from within the country and from the international community, Valentine Strasser’s NPRC military government, which had come to power in a military coup in 1991 by removing the government of President Momoh, had agreed to step down and hand over to an elected civilian government. Sierra Leoneans from all walks of life had decided to grab this opportunity to rid themselves once and for all of military governments.

  In the forefront of the moves towards democracy were the women of Sierra Leone. As in many other African countries women were not expected, nor encouraged, to get involved in politics, which were traditionally a male preserve. However, a few brave women, including a dynamic civil activist, Mrs Zainab Bangura, had helped organize the various women’s groups. Married to a senior politician, she had studied in Britain and then worked in the insurance business in Sierra Leone. But she became increasingly active in civil society and headed an organization called the Campaign for Good Governance. Zainab told me how she would visit the various markets dotted around Freetown and identify the various ‘leaders’ among the market women. She would then get them together and explain about the constitution and their democratic rights. The women responded enthusiastically. These mostly illiterate and uneducated women quickly grasped the fundamentals of democracy and referred to the constitution as their ‘book’. Other civil leaders, trade unionists, students and teachers did likewise, creating a groundswell of grass roots public opinion in favour of democratic elections.

  Sierra Leone’s widely respected civil servant at the United Nations, Dr James Jonah, was brought back to organize the elections. As an Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, who had been to various trouble spots around the world, he was no stranger to difficult tasks. At one stage he had been considered a candidate to succeed Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General, until the Ghanaian Kofi Anan had become the agreed choice. Most of the international community, led by Britain, supported the elections and the British Government put up £3 million to pay for them.

  Although Strasser was committed to holding elections, not everyone shared this view, either in the army or outside. A huge conference was held at the Bintumani Conference Centre, built for when Sierra Leone had hosted the Organization of African Unity (OAU) conference in 1980 (and in so doing had crippled the economy), to debate whether the elections should go ahead. All parliamentary parties, civil and professional groups, the army and the police attended. Dr Jonah, recognizing the strength of feeling from the women, skilfully insisted that they should be adequately represented. Another leading female activist, Mrs Shirley Gbujama, was selected to chair the conference. (Both she and Zainab Bangura were later to become foreign ministers.) Despite many attempts to push through resolutions to stop or defer the elections, the majority of the people, led by the women, insisted that they should go ahead.

  The RUF sent delegates to the conference. Under the leadership of Foday Sankoh, a former corporal in the army and erstwhile photographer, they had been waging a rebel war in the country since 1991. Sankoh, who had participated in a failed coup attempt against Siaka Stevens in 1971 and had spent most of the 1970s in jail, had previously fought alongside Charles Taylor, the rebel warlord in Liberia. The roots of the RUF were closely linked to Liberia and to Gaddafi in Libya, where both Taylor and Sankoh had received training in insurgency tactics. The RUF claimed that they were fighting for democracy and for the removal of the military government. However, they did not support the call for elections and carried on fighting in the bush. This gave the opponents of the elections the excuse to argue that there should be ‘peace before elections’.

  Just weeks before elections were due Strasser announced that he intended to stand as ‘a civilian candidate’. This prompted his removal in a palace coup by his deputy, Brigadier Julius Maada Bio. Strasser, who sported his Ray-Ban sunglasses on every occasion, had been the world’s youngest head of state. He was sent into exile, initially to Guinea and then to the UK, where he was given a scholarship to study law at Warwick University. He ended up living on the dole in North London. Under Bio’s leadership, the military government started manoeuvring to cancel the elections. The people, with the women in the lead, marched on the government and demanded that the elections should go ahead in line with their constitutional rights. Carrying copies of the 1991 Sierra Leone Constitution in their hands, the market women told Bio he ‘must not touch their book!’ Bio backed down and allowed the elections to take place. But on polling day, as thousands lined up to cast their votes, the army turned out in force on the streets and tried to intimidate the people by firing at them. The people bravely stood fast and voted, and then resolutely guarded the ballot boxes to prevent them from disappearing and reappearing stuffed with forged papers, an altogether too common occurrence in African elections. A number of international observers from the UN and the Commonwealth were in Sierra Leone to monitor the elections. Despite some irregularities, they all declared them to be as free and fair as the prevailing circumstances allowed.

  Fifteen parties had contested the elections, which, as usual, were dominated by a north/south divide. Prior to the 1991 coup the government had been the northern dominated APC (All People’s Congress), the party of the Siaka Stevens and Joseph Momoh, but this time the northern vote was split between the United National People’s Party (UNPP), the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the APC. This allowed the southern based Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), the party of the founding father of Sierra Leone’s independence, Sir Milton Margai, to win the election with thirty-six per cent of the votes cast.

  The slogan for the elections campaign had been ‘the future is in your hands’ and this had led to the gruesome practice of chopping off people’s hands. As elsewhere in Africa, to show that a person had voted and in order to prevent them from voting twice, a mark in indelible ink was put on a finger. If a person was found with such a marking, the RUF rebels hacked off the hand. One such victim was asked how he now felt about voting. Proudly waving his stump, he replied that he had another hand and would use that one the next time to vote. When I heard such stories, it had a profound effect on me. In Britain and in other countries, we took our democracy for granted. How many people in Britain would vote if, in doing so, they risked having their hand chopped off? In Africa great sacrifices were made in the cause of democracy. In South Africa Nelson M
andela endured twenty-seven years in prison for the right to vote; in Sierra Leone people lost their hands.

  For the elections the SLPP had chosen as their leader Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. He had been working with the UN in New York for over twenty years after having served as a district officer in the Sierra Leone Public Service. He had little experience of Sierra Leone politics but he was widely regarded as honest, sincere and incorrupt. After years of corruption and inefficiency, he was seen by the people as the one person who could bring Sierra Leone out of the morass into which she had sunk. Kabbah was a Mandingo and a Moslem, born in the north but with tribal roots in the south. Tall and handsome, in his mid sixties, he was a lawyer by training and married to a fellow lawyer, Patricia, a Catholic Christian. This unusual combination of circumstances made him acceptable to a wide range of the population. He failed to achieve the necessary fifty-one per cent in the first round of voting for the presidency but in the presidential runoff he secured fifty-nine per cent to defeat the veteran politician, John Karefa-Smart, of the UNPP.

  President Kabbah set about healing the wounds that had divided the country. He brought into his cabinet some of those who had run against him in the presidential elections, including Thaimu Bangura, the Temne leader of the PDP who had come third in the presidential race. Karefa-Smart chose not to join the coalition but instead formed the official opposition in Parliament.

  Kabbah also set about ending the rebel war with the RUF. The latter had come very close to Freetown but in 1995 the NPRC government, unable to secure any help from any Western or African government and faced with imminent attack, had engaged the services of a South African based private security firm, Executive Outcomes (EO). Thanks largely to EO’s assistance, the rebels had been repulsed. With less than 200 men, they had retaken the diamond mining area of Kono and by the following year, the RUF had been pushed back against the border with Liberia.