Atrocities, Diamonds and Diplomacy

by Peter Penfold

  Most British diplomatic missions around the world had contingency plans to deal with deteriorations in the security situation leading, if necessary, to evacuation. They mostly followed a three phase plan:

  1. Stay indoors, keep your head down, keep in contact with the British Embassy/High Commission (often through a ‘wardens’ network), and listen to the BBC.

  2. Advise dependents, i.e. wives and children, plus those who can be considered ‘non essential’, to leave by commercial means.

  3. Close the mission and advise all the community to leave.

  For phase three there are usually plans to assist the evacuation, if necessary, using military resources if commercial means are no longer available.

  Of course, it was not always possible to go through these three phases in an orderly way. A sudden coup, as we had experienced the previous year, could mean compressing the phases. But my assessment was that we had not reached this stage in the run-up to Christmas. These were always difficult decisions to make and one should always err on the safe side when it comes to protecting lives. But I wished to avoid exacerbating the situation by announcing the total evacuation of the community. Such a move would create panic in Freetown and might actually encourage the rebels to launch an attack. I had already been involved in six previous evacuations in St Vincent, Ethiopia, Uganda (twice), Montserrat and Sierra Leone. All of them had been successful and therefore I felt that I knew what I was doing. Indeed, I doubted that there was anyone in the Foreign Office who had had more first-hand experience of evacuations.

  I recommended that we move towards phase 1 by advising the community not to move around the town unnecessarily and stay indoors after dark, and that we should consider going to phase 2, i.e. evacuation of dependents immediately after Christmas if the situation continued to deteriorate. However, I was overruled by London. They ordered the immediate and total evacuation of the entire community and were sending RAF Hercules aircraft out to facilitate it.

  I tried to argue that not only was the decision wrong but it was also impractical. When arranging evacuations it was not only necessary to plan how people would leave, but it was also important to have a rough idea of numbers involved and the ability to communicate with them. Because I had spent so much of the year being dragged back to London to appear before the various inquiries, one area of my responsibilities as High Commissioner on which I had been unable to focus much attention during the year was our consular evacuation facilities. For most of the year I did not have a consular officer so that our consular section had remained closed. It had amused me to see Robin Cook proudly telling Parliament that he had increased the number of staff working on Sierra Leone. What he did not point out was that all the extra staff were in the Foreign Office in London and most of them were actually assigned to dealing with the Sandline affair, preparing reports and statements and answering parliamentary questions and MPs’ letters on Sandline. In Freetown I was still waiting for a full complement of staff. As early as February I had alerted the office to our staffing needs. By December we still did not have an officer to deal with communications, filing or secretarial duties. An experienced officer, Alan Sutton, had been sent out temporarily for three months to help open the consular and immigration section. But he had just left and a young, keen but inexperienced officer, Alisdair Hamilton, had just arrived to take up the post.

  The previous year’s evacuations had gone well. At that time we had had some idea of the size of the British community and a semblance of a ‘wardens’ network’. The British community was large. The vast majority of them were what were known as British Overseas Citizens (BOCs) or British Protected Persons (BPPs). Many of them were Lebanese or Sierra Leonean. They had lived in Sierra Leone for years; some would have been born in the country. Most of them had never been to Britain. Their status as BOCs or BPPs did not give them right of abode in Britain. In fact, it gave them little else other than a British style passport and the right to register at the High Commission. However, when it came to evacuations, they were considered and treated as full members of the British community. During the previous evacuation many of them had left the country. Some had returned; others had stayed throughout. The wardens’ network had not been fully re-established. We therefore had little idea of exactly how many were in the country.

  There was a further complication over numbers. As we were the only European Union mission operating and, apart from the Nigerians, Ghanaians and Gambians, the only Commonwealth representation in the country, there were an undefined number of European and Commonwealth citizens who would turn to us for assistance in the event of an evacuation as we had done the previous year. Therefore, if we were going to mount a sudden evacuation we had no idea just how many people to evacuate.

  The next problem was how to communicate with them. We could not rely upon telephones – many people did not have them and even fewer had telephones that actually worked. Through the wardens’ network we had established a VHF radio network. However, during the coup many wardens had had their radios stolen by the looters, so it was necessary to establish a new radio network. We had been pressing London for this for some time and I had been pleased to hear that a communications team was flying out before Christmas with equipment to set up a system. When they arrived they did not have the equipment for the wardens’ network and all they did was install some new radios in our vehicles and in the office.

  On 23 December we received the instructions from London to evacuate most of the staff and their families and all the British community. The Foreign Office put out a message on the BBC World Service advising all the British community in Sierra Leone to leave immediately. Two RAF Hercules would be flying in the next day. Because, apart from Alisdair, the close protection team and me, the rest of the staff were being evacuated and therefore packing their suitcases, we were fully stretched to inform the community of the arrangements for the evacuation. This was not helped by the fact that I was still banned from talking to the BBC so that when their West African representative telephoned me from Abidjan to ask about the evacuation, I was unable to pass on the details. Instead we had to make announcements over some of the local radio stations, which of course only covered parts of Freetown.

  The British, international and Sierra Leone communities were bemused by these events. Not a shot had been fired in anger in Freetown, not a rebel had appeared. They did not know what to make of the BBC announcement from London. Those who heard it contacted the High Commission to seek advice. ‘On what is this based? Have the rebels entered Freetown? Has the government collapsed?’ Such were the questions asked by people who had survived many coups and disturbances in the past. We told them that the advice was that they should leave immediately.

  The word of our proposed evacuation spread around the international and Sierra Leone community. President Kabbah telephoned to express concern. He sounded very tired. As a practising Moslem he was fasting for Ramadan. Although I admired and respected his devout views, I did wonder whether he should be weakening his physical and mental capacities at a time when there was so much going on around him.

  ‘So Britain, our closest friend, is abandoning us.’ I told him that we were concerned about recent rebel attacks and that we had a responsibility for our community. We did not want to be in a position of waiting until it was too late to evacuate. Kabbah said that we were playing into the hands of the rebels to create tension and panic and to weaken support for his government and people. He claimed that Ecomog had the situation in Freetown under control. More troops had been flown in and the CDF had now been brought in to clear the bush areas around Freetown. He denied reports that Makeni in the north had been attacked. The attack on Waterloo had been partly pre-empted by Ecomog who had picked up reports of rebels in the area and had come under attack when they had gone after them. Some of the rebels had been captured and the others beaten back. He claimed that those captured were in a very sorry state without food, clothing and had little ammunition.

  Julius S
pencer added his concern about our decision to evacuate. ‘If the British go then that’s the end of our country, and our attempts to achieve democracy.’

  With the RAF Hercules coming in for the evacuation I suggested to London that could they not at least pick up the Gambian contingent of troops waiting to come and join Ecomog in Sierra Leone? Setting off from Dakar they would have to over-fly Banjul. Nothing came of this suggestion so on Christmas Eve the UK staff and their families drove in convoy to the Mammy Yoko helipad to pick up the Paramount helicopter to whisk them off to the waiting RAF Hercules at Lungi. As they drove past the golf course, people were playing golf. All was peaceful and quiet.

  Celia had been most reluctant to leave, especially as I was staying. She insisted that this time the parrots would not be left behind so she left clutching two wooden boxes with two bemused parrots inside.

  We bade our farewells at the helipad. It was very difficult. Instead of wrapping Christmas gifts, checking the food for Christmas dinner or doing the countless other things we would normally be doing on the day before Christmas, here we were saying goodbye to one another with no clear idea when we would be seeing one another again. I said goodbye to the others – Colin and Ruth and their children, Andrew and Rachel, who had been so excited at the thought of spending Christmas one last time in Freetown. Now they did not even know where they would spend Christmas. Also, Alison and Graham, who had been looking forward to their first Christmas in Sierra Leone. I felt particularly sorry for Alisdair as he said goodbye to Erie, his new wife. This was to have been their first Christmas together and now she was going alone to Britain, where she had no family or friends. Alisdair and I and the close protection team drove back to the compound feeling very miserable as the helicopter took off.

  Only fifty members of the community had heeded the advice to leave. Most were not prepared to believe that the situation warranted such a sudden departure; many others had not been contactable in the short time available or had not heard the announcements.

  It was assumed that people would be evacuated to the UK, but at the last minute we were informed that the RAF flights would not be returning to the UK but would dump the passengers in Dakar, Senegal. Our colleagues in the embassy in Dakar had to turn out to look after the evacuees from Freetown, few of whom were prepared for a stay in Senegal. They had no friends there, no visas and little money. Most caught flights to Paris. When Celia arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport on Christmas Day with two parrots, the French officials would not let her board the connecting flight to Heathrow with them. She refused to leave the parrots at the mercy of the French authorities. She flew on to New York.

  Officials back in London were surprised at the low number of Brits who had taken part in the evacuation. We tried to explain that with no sign of any disturbances in Freetown, most people, including members of the community, felt that the decision to order the closing of the mission and the total evacuation of the community was an overreaction. They were used to threats from the rebels, which rarely came to fruition and never at the time indicated. This was West Africa, where everything took longer than expected.

  London decided to send the two RAF planes back to Freetown the next day to pick up any more Brits who wished to leave. The planes flew into Lungi again on Christmas Day. There was no one to pick up. They flew back to Dakar empty.

  While the people of Freetown celebrated Christmas, we spent the day in the office trying to bring some order to the chaos caused by the sudden departure of the staff and families. I told Osman at the residence to go ahead and cook the turkey and in the afternoon those of us who remained went up to the residence and tucked into a hasty Christmas dinner. It was a sombre Christmas celebration but at least we were getting one, which was more than those who had been flown out the previous day.

  As I climbed into bed that night I had rarely felt so miserable. Celia’s and my gifts remained under the Christmas tree. I had not felt like opening mine on my own. Christmas Day had come and gone without any sign of rebel attacks. I had no idea where my wife was. I had not even been able to ring my mother to wish her Merry Christmas. I had a strong impression that officials back in London had been determined to get the evacuation out of the way so that they could enjoy their Christmases with their families with little thought to the disruption that they were causing to us in Freetown or to those who had been delegated to assist, such as our colleagues in Dakar or the military personnel. Clearly little thought was given in London to the spiritual significance of Christmas.

  For the next few days there was a frenzy of activity in the office. As the word spread that the British High Commission staff had fled, people became increasingly nervous. Freetown was peaceful but the underlying tension had risen. Increasing numbers of the Sierra Leone and the international communities wanted to leave. The Sierra Leoneans flocked to the High Commission to acquire visas for the UK. One effect of the RAF planes having been flown to Lungi was that all commercial and charter flights had ceased operations. Airline companies took the view that if it had been necessary to use military aircraft to get people out then it was obviously unsafe for commercial aircraft to come in. Thus our hasty evacuation had actually made it more difficult for people to leave, including the hundreds of members of the British community who were still here. They received no comfort from our announcements that there would be no further assisted evacuations.

  With the threat of further fighting increasing, Ecowas called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in the Ivory Coast. The head of the African Department was going to fly out to Abidjan and it was agreed that I should also attend. Francis Okelo was going to fly up in his UN executive jet and I was able to hitch a ride. As I was going to be away for a few days, there seemed little point in the close protection team staying behind as there would be no one for them to closely protect. I suggested that they be given a break and fly off to Conakry for the weekend. They could come back when I returned from Abidjan. Dave, Batch, Craig and Paul flew by Paramount helicopter and I flew with Andy to Abidjan. I locked up the office and told Solomon I would be back in a couple of days. I could see the look of apprehension on his face. We had been through this before. Last time I had said that, it was nearly ten months before I saw him again in Freetown.

  It was my first visit to Abidjan. It was such a contrast to Freetown. The Ivory Coast was considered to be one of Africa’s success stories – a stable, well ordered and economically developed country, the jewel in the francophone African empire. There was a story, probably apocryphal, that as both Ghana and Ivory Coast had moved to independence their respective leaders, Nkrumah and Houphet-Boigny, argued about which would be the best way forward for their respective countries. Nkrumah’s watchwords had been ‘political freedom for the masses’; Houphet-Boigny had said ‘economic development’ should come first. They agreed to differ and would compare notes after ten years of independence to see who had been the most successful. The ‘winds of change’ blew in Africa, but Nkrumah only lasted a few years and was removed in a coup and poor Ghana went through years of turmoil. Meanwhile, Ivory Coast under Houphet-Boigny and with the close involvement of the French went from strength to strength and became one of the richest economies in Africa, based on cocoa and coffee.

  The French had been very smart. As in their other former colonies they had carefully groomed the future leaders. Houphet-Boigny, for example, had been a minister in the French Cabinet in Paris. From the British point of view it would have been unthinkable to have seen someone like Nkrumah as a minister sitting in the Cabinet in London. Only Sékou Touré in Guinea refused to go along with the French controlled decolonisation plan, and poor Guinea suffered dramatically as a result of saying ‘non’ to De Gaulle. Houphet-Boigny had died and his successor, Konan Bédié, had continued the same policies in Ivory Coast, but perhaps with a less sure touch. Nonetheless, Abidjan was like a successful thriving French city with sky-scraper buildings and smooth roads.

  Andy and I checked into the plush Inter-Co
ntinental hotel where the meeting was to take place the next day. That evening Francis Okelo and I were invited round to the home of the Ivorian Foreign Minister, Amare Essy, for a quiet supper. Lansana Kouyaté, the Ecowas Secretary General and Joe Melrose, my new American colleague, were also there. The home was dotted with beautiful African paintings by Essy’s wife.

  Essy had been very much involved in the negotiations leading to the Abidjan Peace Accord. As a result he had spent a lot of time with Foday Sankoh, who throughout the negotiations had been living in luxury in Abidjan. It was when Sankoh had slipped away from Abidjan without telling Essy to go to Nigeria to clinch an arms deal that he had got himself arrested by the Nigerians. Essy claimed that he did not like Sankoh. Nonetheless, he had always been a strong propagandist for the RUF and a strong source of influence on the neighbouring Ghanaians. Essy appeared reluctant to accept that the RUF had no popular support in Sierra Leone and instead focused on the weakness of President Kabbah.

  The meeting got underway the next day and it was clearly a Nigerian orchestrated show. The Sierra Leone delegation led by Sama Banya, their Foreign Minister, and Sheka Mansaray, the national security adviser, were seated opposite us. They remained silent most of the time. Any casual observer would not have realized that it was their country that was being discussed. The Nigerians made their usual late entry, keeping everyone waiting. They were there in force: the Ecomog generals led by Shelpidi, and the new Nigerian Foreign Minister, Olisemka. He did not have the charisma of the flamboyant Tom Ikimi, but here was a more serious and level-headed foreign minister. The Nigerians had been doing their lobbying behind the scenes to bring everyone to order. They wanted increased Ecowas support for Ecomog and public castigation of Charles Taylor for his support for the rebels. They got it. Although Africans, like others, argued amongst themselves in private, in public they would usually put on a united face and very rarely would they publicly criticize one of their fellow heads of state for acting out of order. But in the public communiqué issued at the end of the meeting Taylor was specifically named for supporting the rebels. When the Burkinabé Foreign Minister, who had arrived late, tried to defend Taylor and by implication, his own government, he was rounded on fiercely by the Guinean Foreign Minister, Lansana Kamara: ‘Shut up, you don’t have your troops dying for the cause of democracy.’ Of course there were Burkinabés dying, but whilst fighting alongside the rebels. It was quite outrageous that Burkino Faso, the country holding the chairmanship of the OAU, a body committed to non-interference in other countries, should be actively supporting the destabilisation of the sub-region.