by Ross, Hamish
Returning to the mines after the holidays, our life continued in the normal way. The expatriate and local families stayed, children went back to school and there was no panic or fear.
We at Sieromoco had security arrangements with the Sierra Leone military and the paramilitary unit, the SSD. We were led to believe that everything was under control and the RUF would not dare to come close to the mine. This was totally misleading, and turned out to be an error. And anyway, we had our own security contingency plan: phase one – women and children to be evacuated, and so on up to phase four – everybody should leave the area. But we started with the unplanned phase five – too late!
While we were continuing with our work, and while life was more or less normal, we could hear the sporadic gunfire. News arrived about one week before the attack on Sieromoco that Njala University complex, about 20 miles from the mine, was under attack by the RUF. We saw helicopters flying over our compound and smoke coming from the direction of Njala University. However, the Sierra Leone army commander, Capt Yajar and Inspector Gblah of the SSD, both in charge of the security of the mining area, assured us that we were safe and had nothing to worry about.
In the early morning of the day of the attack on Sieromco, Wednesday 18 January 1995, we could hear the gunfire coming closer. Later we learned that Kabaima village, just 5 miles away, had fallen into the hands of the RUF. We continued with our office work, children went to school, and the wives did their work at home. The three auditors of KPMG were checking the annual accounts; two British computer consultants continued cleaning our computers, but, luckily for them, by 10:00 hours they decided that they had completed the job, and one of our cars took them back to Bo. My secretary, Brimah, joined them to settle some family matters in Tajama and afterwards return to the mine. Unfortunately, the car was ambushed by the RUF on the way back not far from the mine, and Brimah was killed.
About lunch time, the Managing Director, James Westwood, and I were busy preparing a presentation to the Board of Directors to be given the following Monday at our head office in Zurich, when we heard gunshots only about 200 yards away. One hour earlier, Capt Yajar and Inspector Gblah reassured us that everything was under control. That was the last we saw or heard from them. Outside the camp, government soldiers stopped our vehicles from leaving the mine to travel to Freetown. We were trapped. But they all ran away when the RUF was approaching. Inspector Gblah was probably the bravest of all. He left last, while his SSD men and all the military soldiers had already run. I still see Inspector Gblah these days, but we do not talk much about the past. Capt Yajar was later promoted and transferred as Chief Military Officer to the diamond area in Kono district.
When the gunshots came closer to our works’ compound, I had already packed my briefcase with documents, some cash and personal items, for example, my Nikon F3 camera – which I saw later in the hands of Foday Sankoh! I rushed in my company car, a Citroen 2CV, to the main gate to enter our residential compound, just next door, to support my wife. Too late! Groups of RUF ‘boys’ with red headbands, firing gunshots into the air, were blocking the main gate. What to do? Back to the office! Within a few minutes, about eight of my colleagues assembled in my office, probably because my office was the last one of the whole block and considered to be safer.
Suddenly, it was dead quiet. No voices, no shooting, no birdsong. This continued for approximately ten minutes. These minutes were terrifying; no way to escape; no place to hide. We had heard stories of RUF burning houses while people were inside, committing atrocities or just killing innocent civilians. Then we could hear the noise of breaking doors by force – we had wooden doors. It started at the other end of the office block. They were coming closer, door by door. There was no screaming or shouting! My wife called me from the residence, asking what to do and what to pack. ‘Just keep calm and pack what we enjoyed most, and things to remember.’ She did very well. My office door split within seconds. We were expecting the worst. In came a boy of about 15 years, an AK-47 in his hands and obviously surprised to meet so many people in the room. We immediately raised our hands and whispered ‘surrender’. The boy looked at us and replied, ‘Don’t be afraid, I am your friend. Please come out and join me.’ This was the beginning of a ninety two-day journey across Sierra Leone of about 250 miles, walking in the shoes I was wearing, mainly at night over long distances for 12 hours or more with no rest, and in between, long periods of idle time in various RUF camps.
It was obvious that the RUF had good information about our village, Mokanji, and our works and residence compounds. When we were taken out of the compound and met our other colleagues from Sieromco, who were also taken: eight Sierra Leoneans, including the three KPMG auditors, who later had to serve special functions and training, and five Europeans. We feared that the rebels would enter the residence compound where the women and children were, but luckily they passed by, obviously by instruction of Foday Sankoh. Later we learned that he had given orders to take only a few, maximum four, hostages. Apparently his men on the ground were too enthusiastic.
The government representative at the mine, Mr Sannoh, was not so lucky. He was in the office of our vehicle workshop together with the Swiss engineer and some other people during the attack. The RUF fired into the door and Mr Sannoh was killed by a stray bullet. He was the only casualty.
The whole ‘exercise’ from the attack to our being taken – and this meant the closure of the bauxite mine in Sierra Leone, with its 1.5 million tons of export and a turnover of US $30 million – took less than two hours.
The first night we were locked up in a small house in the village of Ngerihun, about two miles from Mokanji in the direction of the Sierra Rutile mine. On the way to the village, there was some confusion and sporadic gunfire with a few Sierra Leone army soldiers. I tried to escape twice, hiding in the bush, but I noticed that two SBUs (Small Boys Unit) were taking personal care of me. No chance! I remember one boy saying, ‘Please Papi, don’t do it again.’ It also became clear to me that these SBUs had lost their childhood. The gun was the family. One of my ‘caretakers’ found a little toy car in the village; he looked at it for a few minutes, and then destroyed the toy.
Early the following morning, Thursday 19 January, we had to walk toward Sierra Rutile about 15 miles from Mokanji. It was very hot, no food or water. One of our hostage colleagues, Raman Abdullah, the Chief Chemist of Sieromco, who was heavy and overweight, found it very difficult to continue walking, so he just lay down in the grass, pleading that he couldn’t walk anymore. A young SBU came up to him, saying, ‘Papi, you either get up and walk or I’ll shoot you.’ You can imagine how fast Raman got up and continued walking. He made it to the very end of our journey and his physical condition was much better afterwards than before.
On the way to Sierra Rutile, we saw abandoned military equipment left by the Sierra Leone army. When we were passing through the villages of Moriba Town and Mobimi, people were watching us but couldn’t do anything. As we came closer to Sierra Rutile, we found ourselves facing some resistance from the army. Rocket propelled grenades were flying over our heads, and I remember Eldred Collins, one of the RUF commanders, saying, ‘Ah that’s music, let’s go to the fire.’ We feared that the RUF would use us as human shields, but luckily we were covered among themselves. After one hour’s fight, the Sierra Leone army abandoned their position and ran away. The Sierra Leone army commander was the Naval Wing officer from Bonthe (Sherbro Island) Capt Gilbert, a known and disliked figure. He was later executed by the Kabbah government for treason, together with the AFRC/RUF helicopter pilot, Victor King, and some others when they were intercepted in an Ukrainian-piloted helicopter close to the Liberian border.
We were taken to the hills, covered by thick forests just outside the Rutile mine, where we spent five days. More hostages from Sierra Rutile joined us. Among them were: Personnel Manager, Peter Wight (British); Chief Security Officer, Andrew (Andy) Young (an ex-Rhodesian Police cop, who gave us many problems during the journ
ey); old Alfred (Alf) Conte, an ex-Sierra Leone Police officer, who was known to many RUF boys; Dr Wai, the company doctor; Koji, the electrician, who later died in captivity due to malnutrition and starvation; and some others. At Rutile we lived quite well. The company supermarket provided enough food. I personally preferred the food from the Malaysian food store (there were about 50 Malaysian contract workers on the mine to build up a dredge). New clothes came from the looted residence houses. We could even submit shopping lists to the RUF boys and they supplied promptly. Only the beers and whiskies they kept for themselves – and not to mention that a close look at the RUF girls was also taboo during the whole journey.
On Friday 20 January, the Sierra Leone army under the command of Col Tom Nyuma, with the support of the Guinean army, regrouped and tried to recapture Sierra Rutile. Heavy gunfire and artillery started early in the morning. During the day air support came from Ghanaian and Nigerian Alpha jets. The fighting was concentrated on RUF positions at the mine site, but stray artillery shells often landed very close to our bush camp. In our Rutile camp we foreign hostages were separated from the Sierra Leonean hostages. Among the Sierra Leonean was the Sieromco Company Doctor, Mohamed Barry, a German-trained physician. Before he was employed by Sieromco, he worked and lived in Kailahun, which was the first area in Sierra Leone occupied by the RUF. Dr Barry obviously knew some of the RUF boys, one of whom was a huge man known as ‘ECOMOC’, who provided personal security to Dr Barry. Not surprisingly, Dr Barry later became the unofficial spokesman for the RUF.
We were also introduced to the second in command of the RUF, who was responsible for the Sieromco/Sierra Rutile operations, Mohamed Tarawally, a short man, about 30 years old, Libyan-trained, and always very friendly to us, much like Eldred Collins. Tarawally was later killed by Executive Outcomes (I think) during their attack on the RUF main camp, ‘Zagoda’, after our release.
It must have been the third day at Rutile, when it suddenly became hectic and there was great tension in the camp. The commanders were not around, they were engaged in combat. A group of RUF soldiers came to us non-Sierra Leoneans, shooting live bullets around our feet, and ordered us to undress naked, and pointed pistols at our heads. What had happened? Apparently one of the Alpha jets had a well-targeted strike, killing ‘ECOMOC’ and several other commanders and RUF soldiers. Mohamed Tarawally escaped by inches. We, the white hostages, were blamed for having directed the Alpha jets to the target, using the small FM radios which were given to us by the RUF to listen to the RUF success story on BBC Focus on Africa. These were probably the nastiest moments during our captivity. Particularly the behaviour of the women was very aggressive. Some of my fellow hostages fainted away as some rebels presented broken glass bottles in front of them. I attracted the attention of a young RUF soldier, from the shape of his face, he must have been a Malian or Burkinabe. He was sharpening his long bush knife in front of me, obviously to cut off my head, which I found to be a bit nasty. Luckily it did not come to that and we all survived. The commanders came back later and apologized. We had long and, in a way, amazing discussions and arguments with the RUF soldiers afterwards:
8.– you white people are supplying the aircraft,
= but your black brothers are flying the aircraft and dropping the bombs,
– you are responsible for the killing of our brothers,
= what about the AK-47 in your hands, made by white people but you are shooting with them,
– that’s different.
Any form of discussion was impossible with these people. Only some commanders, for example, Tarawally and Collins were different and more educated.
With the ongoing artillery shelling and aircraft bombardment, the situation was not safe for us. Upon instruction from Foday Sankoh we left the Rutile camp after five days and the long march started.
We were passing deserted and destroyed villages, many of them well-known to us from before: Taninahun (the home village of Maada Bio; we saw the RUF burning Maada Bio’s family house), Serabu, Sumbuya and Koribundu (I think the camp was called Camp Cuba, with Morries Kallon its commander. He was recently sentenced by the UN Tribunal and is now serving a long imprisonment in Rwanda). Interestingly, the Nigerian army had a military base not far from the RUF base, and occasionally we could hear the sound of their vehicles. There must have been some kind of gentlemen’s agreement between the two parties, don’t-disturb-me-and-we-won’t-disturb-you. We were passing Blama until we reached the RUF headquarters, Camp Zagoda, south of Kenema. Here we had the pleasure of staying for seven weeks.
Before we entered the five-mile security zone of Camp Zagoda, the three KPMG auditors were separated from us and transferred to an RUF training camp located in an abandoned agricultural training complex, approximately 20 miles south of Camp Zagoda. These three KPMG auditors were supposed to be the future financial brains of a Foday Sankoh government in Sierra Leone. They had to spend almost two years in captivity.
Passing through the five-mile security zone, we saw many human skulls stuck on wooden poles, a warm welcome to Foday Sankoh’s military headquarters. The camp was cleverly located at the end of a V-shaped chain of hills south of Kenema. A river fed from a spring was flowing through, providing good water for drinking and washing. In the camp, we were first met by two young British VSOs (Voluntary Service Overseas), Robert (Bob) de Cruz and Calum Murray, who were both kidnapped in Kabala in November 1994. They had had a hard time walking all the way from Kabala to Camp Zagoda, most of the time blindfolded and with no proper shoes, sometimes even barefoot. Calum had only arrived in Sierra Leone two weeks earlier, and it was his first time in Africa. What an experience and shock. Calum was quiet, but a great guy and respected.
We were directed to huts with six bamboo stick beds in each. We made ourselves comfortable – as much as we could; although even today I still prefer a spring mattress to the bamboo mattress.
At the beginning of the journey I organized myself with a military backpack, toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and towel, blanket, toilet rolls, metal cup, water bottle, some spices to make the food tastier and, the most important item, a spoon, commonly called ‘ID-Card’. Before an item was finished, I put it on the shopping list and within a short period it was delivered, either from the Sierra Rutile stores or from an ambushed vehicle on the Bo-Kenema road.
Late afternoon of the day of our arrival we met Foday Sankoh in person. Some of us were of the belief that he was already dead, but here he was, fit, cheerful and lecturing us about himself and the better life we would have after had had taken over power in Sierra Leone. This lecturing and also discussion took place almost every day, following the morning and evening prayers. He was obviously in need to talk about politics, his time in the British army and the aim of the RUF. His own soldiers were not the right partners for this kind of discussion.
After five days, another hostage joined us, Roger Graf, a Swiss national working with Panguma Sawmills, north of Kenema on the way to Tongo Fields. Roger was ambushed and kidnapped on New Year’s Eve 1994, on the way from Panguma to Kenema, where he wanted to buy drinks for the New Year’s Eve party. Unfortunately, he had given a lift to one SL army soldier, which made the RUF decide to ambush the car. The soldier was killed instantly.
Since officially, we all were Foday Sankoh’s VIP guests, they had problems feeding us accordingly, because we were just too many. It also created jealousy and tension with the RUF people in the camp. In the morning we normally had some tea, one tea bag for ten cups and dry bread. The evening dinner, served around five o’clock, comprised a tray of rice with the normal cassava leaves, sometimes with small pieces of unidentified meat or fish, to be shared among ten people. Each corn was counted. The enjoyment of the morning tea was rotated – whoever had the tea bag first in his cup for a few seconds. The RUF people lived much more simply. We saw them eating rats and mice.
Camp Zagoda was quite a big camp, although we could never figure out how many people were actually living in the camp. It had a
hospital where wounded fighters were treated. It was well equipped, considering the circumstances. Before our Dr Barry volunteered, a trained nurse was in charge doing all kinds of surgery. I wonder how many have survived? The camp had a school for the many young children of the female auxiliary soldiers and wives. These women were also in charge of preparing our food.
There was not much for us to do. We could not leave our section of the camp unless we had to fetch water, bathe or wash our clothes. Guards were permanently around us; even when we took our daily bath, a guard with an AK47 was watching.
We knew that Camp Zagoda was not the end of our journey. Foday Sankoh obviously wanted to keep us alive and at the end to get rid of us as fast as possible. Some of us volunteered to fetch the water every day from the river, a few hundred yards down hill. Physical exercise was on the programme; we improved the living conditions in our huts; the rest of the day we were playing cards or resting. Two or three of us, including the ex-Chief Security Officer of SRL, took it too easy and just lay down, smoking self-made cigarettes: tobacco was supplied by the RUF, and an old bible was misused to provide the paper. Shame on us! When we finally had to leave the camp and walk all the way to Kailahun and the river Moa, our ex-Chief Security Officer was more or less unable to walk. The RUF organized a small motorbike, but it did not work out. A funny episode was the sedan chair: eight RUF men were allocated our ex-CSO in a sedan chair, four carriers at a time, with a change-over every ten minutes – it was not easy to carry 119 kilos or more for a longer period. When we were a good distance away from the camp, the carriers stopped: ‘No more; the times are over for carrying white people in a sedan chair! You either walk or we shoot you.’ Andy made it finally, but he delayed our release by more than a week.
Foday Sankoh was in regular contact at specific times with his commanders. His radio station, powered by solar panels (probably stolen from SierraTel transmitter stations), was not far away from our huts and we were able to listen to his communication. We even heard him one day talking to Charles Taylor. He was using an old British military code system when he was giving commands and instructions. His strategic military chart was a Shell Road Map of Sierra Leone, available in most book shops. Coloured stickers marked the position of his troops. The same Shell map with coloured stickers I was to see later in the office of the Nigerian ECOMOG commanders at 1st Battalion Wilberforce Barracks in Freetown.