by Tim Butcher
The eastern approaches to the city were now passing outside the bus window, perhaps the most fought-over part of Freetown. Gunmen and soldiers had run riot here several times during the war, but the worst attack, one that is still remembered with horror by the locals who lived through it, came in January 1999 when RUF militiamen overran this area.
Coming from the Sierra Leonean hinterland, the rebels reached the eastern district of the city first and it was here, after fighting in the bush for years, that they vented their drug-fuelled hatred of the capital, its leaders and its people. Civilians were dragged out onto the streets where some were decapitated, others disembowelled and some burned to death, while all symbols of modernity and of law and order – police cars, council offices, shops even – were deliberately destroyed in a twister of vandalistic brutality. Over the eleven years that the war raged, it established a reputation as one of the world’s cruellest, but the events of January 1999 represented for many its nadir. Sitting in my comfortable, numbered bus seat, I saw evidence of the attacks spooling past my window like a film reel, with burnt-out buildings, one after the other, punctuated by other pieces of destroyed infrastructure. It was ten years since the attack but only now was the city’s eastern district police headquarters being rebuilt, the building and nearby clock-tower landmark splinted with bamboo scaffolding.
Somewhere out there to my right was a mass grave that dated from long before the war, from the corrosive, creeping decline of Sierra Leone in the 1970s when attempts to entrench the rule of law started to fail. The civil war did not spring out of nothing but from years of steadily worsening corruption and autocracy that created the conditions where anarchic, lawless armed groups like the RUF could exist. When dealing with complex African conflicts observers often seek refuge in categorisation, eager to put them in boxes marked tribal or ideological, mercantile or religious, references that outsiders feel they can understand. During the Cold War, African rebel groups were tagged communist or capitalist no matter their actual ideology because it tidied the analysis of tricky conflict situations.
But the truth about the RUF gunmen was that they defied neat labels. In Sierra Leone, journalists like me were guilty of striving to oversimplify the war, looking always to frame it in terms of government troops versus rebels. We tended to overlook the complex, systemic regression that had taken a country with a capital city once viewed as ‘The Athens of Africa’ and turned it into arguably the world’s poorest country. The regression did not lend itself to easy analysis. Sierra Leone has no iconic figure, no Nelson Mandela nor Patrice Lumumba, and no great symbolic turning point, no Sharpeville Massacre nor Wind of Change speech. Indeed, one of the country’s one-time heroes of the independence era, Siaka Stevens, whose name is still borne by the main street in Freetown leading to the Cotton Tree, blurred two separate identities as he was revered by some as a democrat loved by the people and decried by others as a murderous plunderer. For those who like tidy categorisation, Sierra Leone is a problem.
Its post-independence decay is captured beautifully in a book called The Devil that Danced on the Water, published in 2002 by a half-Scottish, half-Sierra Leonean writer, Aminatta Forna. The author describes her search for the truth about a single episode at the heart of this opaque and often-overlooked period of the country’s history, the arrest and execution of her father, Mohamed Forna. After the colonial period when Krios, the freed slaves, had prospered, Mohamed was part of an upwardly mobile generation of indigenous Sierra Leoneans, born and educated in the provinces, who saw independence as the arrival of a new age when their turn to thrive had finally come. For me, the book fills in much that is missing about recent Sierra Leonean history, describing the potential of the immediate post-independence years, a time of optimism and hope when families could live normal lives, saving money to send children to school, earning qualifications to get meaningful jobs with genuine career paths, dreaming of self-betterment and development.
Forna was one of the first from the provinces to qualify as a doctor, bringing modern medicine to rural Sierra Leone, something that had been done only modestly under British colonial rule. His work earned him a wide following and within a few years he was persuaded to move into politics alongside Stevens, then in his democratic, man-of-the-people phase. Forna rose to the position of finance minister, but his intolerance of corruption meant he fell out with the increasingly greedy Stevens clique. He was arrested repeatedly before being detained for the last time in 1974 on trumped-up treason charges and hanged the following year. His daughter’s elegant account of the destruction of her family’s life allowed me to picture the catastrophic void created in Sierra Leone by this period of political decay, when law and order collapsed and the pillars of society that I take for granted in a functioning state, such as the availability of fair-minded police or economic stability or unbiased journalism, crumbled away. These were the elements that created the vacuum in which the horrific civil war could develop.
As we drove out of Freetown I thought about his daughter’s long search and how it finally led here, to a once-empty piece of scrubland on the eastern edge of the city where Forna’s corpse had been brought following his execution. Under cover of darkness government soldiers had tipped the body into a mass grave and then, in a final act of cruelty, disfigured it with acid.
The sprawling muddle of Freetown has blurred the city limits but eventually the shanties disappeared and the bus picked up speed in open country heading towards the rising sun. Overhead, a flock of cattle egrets kept up with us for a few moments, flying east in formation, high enough for their white wings and yellow bills to dazzle in direct sunlight while we were still in shadow. A few moments later and the African sun reached us too, Sammy lowered his dark glasses into position, passengers fussed with curtains for shade.
After crossing a low ridgeline known as the Occra Hills, the road, refurbished by an Italian company which patched over the potholes left from the war years, swept down into the flatlands of central Sierra Leone, an almost unbroken expanse of low forest with an even skyline broken only by the raggedy heads of palm trees. Parched by the fierce dry-season heat, the bush was surprisingly barren in appearance, the mango trees fruitless, the verdant lustre of the vegetation washed pale, waiting for the rains to come. Traffic was sparse, with pedestrians – heavily laden with loads balanced on heads or strapped to backs – out-numbering vehicles. Sierra Leone is one of Africa’s smaller countries, less than 250 miles across at its widest point, covering roughly the same area as Scotland, and in the dry season it is possible to drive across it in one day. But in spite of its modest size man has made only a modest impact on its forest.
Cultivated fields of rice or cassava are rare and only occasionally would I see villages clinging to the roadway like clumps of mussels to an anchor line, a few mud huts clustered in the dirt between the tarmac strip and the green expanse of the bush. For most the highway represents a way of escape, a means to leave the poverty of the countryside and head to the capital city and even beyond. It means the settlements along the road have a left-behind air, simple buildings that are neither cherished nor developed but used as way stations for a desperate journey away from the countryside. An aid worker told me that a policy of taking graduates from the rural areas and training them as teachers in Freetown had to be stopped because few of them ever returned home. The city might be crowded and squalid but it still offers greater opportunities than life up-line.
The country’s main highway had been built along the route of the old railway track and several towns we passed through were old stations that retained their colonial-era names. In Hastings and Waterloo it was possible to still see old infrastructure that had served the rolling stock. The station sign for Waterloo stood right next to today’s road and in Hastings I spotted the sort of water tower I associate with Western movies, a large funnel-shaped structure with a swinging arm outlet at the bottom that was used to refill steam locomotive boilers. As we drove the modern road in open country
, it was possible occasionally to glimpse traces of the railway in the distance, with abandoned box-girder bridges still spanning gorges, metalwork rusty and concrete foundations blackened with age.
The landscape of central Sierra Leone is mostly flat, blanketed by low forest, an outlook Graham Greene found deeply uninspiring. Just as he disparaged the small-minded white expatriates of Freetown and their Krio underlings, he scorned an African environment made bland, as he saw it, by British colonialism.
Outside the dusty Sierra Leone countryside unrolled, like a piece of drab cloth along a draper’s counter, grey and dull-green and burnt up by the dry season which was now approaching its end … The bush was as ragged and uninteresting as a back garden which has been allowed to run wild and in which the aspidistras from the parlour have seeded and flourished among the brown-scorched grasses and the tall wrinkled greenery.
My attitude towards this landscape could not have been more contrasting. It still made me feel edgy. The road might now appear a dull strip of tarmac but nine years earlier it had been a very different proposition. The only real route out of Freetown, it was down this road that journalists had to come to report on the fighting as RUF gunmen threatened the city. Timid reporters like me only came a few miles, never venturing beyond the Occra Hills. But Kurt Schork and Miguel Gil Moreno went further and paid for it with their lives.
After they were killed on Wednesday 24 May 2000 I was initially too overwhelmed to focus on the details. It was after sunset that day when word got back to Freetown that some journalists had been hurt, possibly killed, upcountry and I can remember the reception of the UN headquarters echoing to a howl of anguish from a BBC colleague, a woman who had already lost a journalist friend in Sierra Leone the year before. It’s a clear double standard but for a long time I, a journalist who reported countless times on the suffering of people at moments of death, displacement or crisis, found it too difficult to think about what had happened to my colleagues that day. I blanked it from my mind, refusing to consider what it might mean for the life I had chosen to lead.
I had known Kurt for longer but was closer to Miguel. His eyes would sparkle when we talked about the books we shared a love for, and he had a passionate, unpredictable streak that made him a magnificent cameraman. One day in northern Bosnia he left the handbrake off in his jeep, causing it to roll down a slope and hit a farmer’s prized plum tree. The Bosnian grabbed Miguel’s video camera, saying he would only return it when damages had been paid. To a cameraman the loss of a camera is like the loss of a limb and I can remember Miguel getting more and more desperate, his pleading more and more pathetic and his sotto voce curses more and more blue, as he negotiated its safe return.
No matter my relationship with Kurt and Miguel, the key thing was that the day they died they were not doing anything particularly different from what I have done in my work countless times, driving along a road threatened by rival forces. To deal with the anxiety in these situations, I had my own private and very childlike mental procedure, telling myself on roads in Congo, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Algeria and elsewhere that if I get to the next bend all will be safe – and then the next big tree, the next landmark and so on. By breaking the journey down into little sections I would get through the danger zone, convincing myself I was in some way in control. It was nonsense, of course, just a way of dealing with fear. It was, very simply, luck that kept me alive, the same luck that abandoned Kurt and Miguel that day while at the same time protecting one of their colleagues, Yannis Behrakis, who somehow survived the ambush even though he was sitting in the same car only inches from Kurt when he was killed.
I heard about Yannis’s remarkable escape at the time, but was too muddled in my mind to focus on it. It was only nine years later when our career paths brought us to the same city, Jerusalem – Yannis as chief photographer for Reuters and me as Middle East Correspondent for the Telegraph – that I had the chance to talk to him about what happened.
Yannis and Kurt were close colleagues and closer friends. In Sarajevo during the toughest years of the Bosnian War they developed one of the great double acts of 1990s foreign reporting, Kurt doing the words and Yannis the pictures for one of the world’s most demanding news agencies, Reuters. Greek by nationality, Yannis described his own character as in many ways opposite to the non-drinking, vegetarian, former Rhodes Scholar from America, but the opposites clearly had an attraction. Greyer than I remembered him from Bosnian days, a few moments after we met up at his Jerusalem office Yannis pointed to the watch on his wrist.
‘It’s Kurt’s,’ he said. ‘His girlfriend wanted me to have it.’
Yannis explained how the Sierra Leone trip was the team’s first foray into Africa. At an awards ceremony in New York in April 2000, where they were honoured for their work in Kosovo the previous year, they both agreed they wanted a break from the Balkans.
‘It was the Millennium, a new century, and we decided Africa was where it was at,’ he said. ‘We agreed that when the first big story broke in Africa, we would go. A few weeks later and the United Nations mission in Sierra Leone was going to shit so we headed to Freetown.’
I recognised perfectly his description of those chaotic, exciting days in Freetown because we had covered many of the same events. But as the city stabilised the story moved down the road to where troops loyal to the government of Sierra Leone were trying to take back territory from the RUF.
‘On the Tuesday we drove as far as the town of Rogbere, which by then was in the hands of the army,’ Yannis remembered. ‘We met their commanders and they showed us some of the remains of UN peacekeepers killed in the town by the RUF. There were femurs lying around and some uniforms and blue helmets. It made a story and Kurt tried to get in touch with the UN command to see if they would check it out. The army commander told us that the next day they would try to take back the next town further east, Lunsar, so we told him we would be back the following morning and to expect us.
‘The Wednesday began as normal. In town we bought food, cigarettes and booze because, as you know, we could need them as gifts for soldiers. There were four of us in our Mercedes, the Sierra Leonean driver, Kurt, me and Mark, the video cameraman. When we got to Rogbere late in the morning we found Miguel already there in his own little jeep, something like a Suzuki, with a Sierra Leone driver.’
Lunsar is about 10 miles due east of Rogbere, and shooting could be heard coming from its direction. The journalists discussed what to do, a scene I found horribly familiar, where bravado, joshing and fear all mix together to deliver an almost inevitable decision to push on. Yannis said the two local drivers chose not to come, so the Mercedes took the lead, with Kurt driving, Mark in the passenger seat and Yannis in the back sandwiched between two Sierra Leone army soldiers. A couple more soldiers jumped on the bonnet and one on the back bumper.
‘The commanders in Rogbere knew our faces from the previous day so we had a kind of relationship. I never like to sit in the back of a car, especially in the middle seat as it is hard to shoot pictures from that position. But the guys who came with us were kind of officers and they sort of ordered me to sit there.
‘The road was completely empty. I can picture it in my mind right now. It was the start of the rainy season so it was sweaty, much too hot to wear body armour or helmets. There were clouds, and the tarmac was wet with rain as we drove along. We were on alert, high alert as the shooting in the distance got louder and louder, but I remember thinking, I am going to shoot some fucking amazing pictures today.’
The two-vehicle convoy, Kurt driving up ahead, Miguel behind, stopped after a short distance at the shell of a burned UN vehicle. Yannis took some photographs. The sound of fighting intensified and so did the air of excitement as they drove on, senses heightened, eyes sweeping empty huts as they drove past an abandoned village.
‘We were just about to make a right curve when suddenly I saw these guys just thirty or forty metres away standing up and shooting at us from the left side of the road. I felt t
he car being hit time after time, pock, pock, pock, but somehow the windscreen did not shatter. “Come on,” I shouted, but instead of speeding up to get away the car just kept driving towards them, slowing steadily. It was terrible. We just kept on moving towards the shooters. It made no sense and then I saw Kurt, his face covered in blood, his foot nowhere near the brake.
‘Still the bullets came. There was a whoosh and a rocket-propelled grenade went over our heads. The soldier next to me on the right was dead, with blood all over the place and the other soldier, the one to my left, just threw his gun out of the window and climbed like a mad thing over me, over the dead man and out the right window. I remember feeling so very disappointed that the soldier did not fire back. He just ran.’
Kurt had been fatally hit but what saved Mark and Yannis was the way Miguel’s car then drew the fire of the ambushers. As the Mercedes glided to a halt on the left verge of the bend, Mark ran for cover among the trees while Yannis wrestled the right-hand door open and pushed out the corpse of the dead soldier.
‘I must have had just a few seconds when the shooting was focused behind me but I fought my way out over the dead body. A strap on one of my two cameras caught on the door frame and I dumped it and then ran for my life across the verge and into the bush. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, I don’t know how long it was but I got a little bit away from the car and hit the ground crawling into the thickest bush I could find.
‘I was wearing a white T-shirt so that did not help. I started rubbing shit onto it and onto my face, leaves, dirt, anything to break up the white. The shooting was still going on so I composed myself, got control of my breathing. I remember peeing. I was proud of that, of not having peed myself during the ambush. With the shooting continuing, I kept crawling and crawling, keeping to the thick bush. My belt had pouches on it for lenses and other gear and it was catching on the bushes making a terrible noise, so I took it off and buried it under some dirt and leaves. I kept going, all the time trying not to make a sound and all the time expecting them to come look for me.