Atrocities, Diamonds and Diplomacy

by Peter Penfold

  The aim of this scheme was to put individual schools in Britain in direct touch with individual schools in Sierra Leone. Initially schools in Britain would be able to render assistance through the provision, for example, of teaching materials, games equipment or clothing. But in time it would lead to an enduring relationship through which the pupils of the respective schools would get to know one another and learn more about each other’s country and environment. I had long believed that the more you can put people in touch with one another then barriers of ignorance and mistrust are broken down and all problems become resolvable.

  I again contacted Jane and Bernie Latham for their support at the UK end and we engaged the services of a number of friends and family in Britain to produce pamphlets advertising the scheme. Cardiff City Council helped by providing facilities and a UK office for the project was established. In Freetown I sought the support of the British Council and we established a committee comprising teachers, parents, and others whose task would be to identify which schools should be linked with which. We tried to match schools with similar interests. From the start we tried to keep bureaucracy and government involvement to a minimum.

  We launched the scheme in Freetown in April at the Prince of Wales School and a week later, the first ‘twinning’ was arranged – the June Holst Roness Primary School in Freetown, named after a former mayor of the city, with the Severn Primary School in Cardiff, which just happened to be my godson Jack’s school. President Kabbah joined me at the ceremony at the June Holst Roness School and, as we were videoing the ceremony to send to Cardiff, he surprised everyone by saying a few words in Welsh, which he had picked up when studying at Aberystwyth University.

  All schools were invited to join the scheme on a voluntary basis, including handicapped or special needs schools. Several links were established, including the Milton Margai School for the Blind with the Dorton House School in Sevenoaks, Kent. Once the link was established, it was left to the individual schools to decide how they wished to continue. This could take several forms but often the children in their respective schools would write to one another. The blind children corresponded in Braille and Tim Hetherington, the renowned photojournalist and a close friend, acted as ‘postman’. (Sadly, Tim was to die when covering the conflict in Misrata, Libya.) One of the teachers from a linked school in Nottingham spent part of her holidays teaching at her counterpart school in Freetown. The scheme eventually became part of DFID’s Global Partnership Scheme.

  This range of activities kept us very busy in the High Commission. David Hill returned to the UK. He had worked wonders but the constant demands for help had had an effect and he needed to have a break. We still did not have a full complement of staff. Colin Glass had joined me, minus family, soon after my return for a couple of months, but his tour had now come to an end. He was replaced by Steve Crossman, who was coming from Hanoi, where he had met his Vietnamese wife, Lan. Hanoi had been a tough post, so Steve had some idea of what he was coming to.

  Getting staff to come to Sierra Leone was not easy. The Foreign Office had to rely upon volunteers. The system with which I had been familiar in the past of being told at short notice to pack a suitcase and go to ‘Timbuktu’ had long gone. This was a pity in my view, both from the Foreign Office’s interests and for the officers concerned. I would never have dreamed of volunteering for Kaduna back in the 1960s, but it was this unexpected posting that had given me my first taste of Africa and had set me on a career that had been far more fulfilling than sitting in comfortable offices in Europe or North America.

  While in the High Commission we were doing what we could at grass roots level to help the plight of the suffering Sierra Leoneans, we were also heavily engaged at a political and diplomatic level in the efforts to find a lasting solution to the problems of insecurity and instability.

  Chapter Ten

  The Lomé Peace Agreement

  When the Ghanaian Kofi Anan had been appointed United Nations Secretary General at the end of 1996, many had hoped that this would be an opportunity for the UN to really focus on African issues. At first he appeared reluctant to do so. Perhaps it was because he did not want to be accused of bias towards his home continent, or he was still recovering from the abysmal failure of the UN peacekeeping efforts in Rwanda, which he had headed at the time. However, when the UN had to stand aside while NATO took the lead on Kosovo and people started asking why the protection of human rights was more important in Europe than Africa, Anan started to take a closer interest in Sierra Leone.

  In February 1999, following the Freetown invasion, Kofi Anan announced a ‘dual track’ policy towards Sierra Leone – one track was to help the legitimate Government of Sierra Leone to reassert its authority over the country and the other track to establish dialogue with the rebels. We fully supported this policy. On 2 March Robin Cook announced in the House of Commons a further package of UK assistance of £10 million, which would be used to provide nonlethal assistance to Ecomog and to help train a new Sierra Leone army. This would help to ‘roll back the rebels’, he informed the Members of Parliament.

  This seemed the right policy, though I was wary that the ‘dialogue’ should not move on too quickly to ‘negotiations’ and advised London so. At the time the Government of Sierra Leone controlled about thirty per cent of the country, mainly in the south and west, the rebels controlled about thirty per cent in the north and east, while about forty per cent was under no one’s control, nor had been for some time. It was important that, before the negotiation stage was reached, the government had indeed reasserted its authority over a bigger stretch of the country, so that they could negotiate from a position of strength and not from a position of weakness. This would have meant having to make concessions that would inevitably lead to problems in the future. Our assistance to Ecomog gave the West African force a fillip after their dismal performance in January.

  Also now playing a crucial role were two helicopter gunships, Mi-24s, which had been acquired in the Ukraine by the Sierra Leone government to form an air wing for Ecomog. Armed with S8 rockets and a 12.7 Gatling gun operated by Fred Marafono, they were flown by Juba and Neall Ellis. This awesome firepower began to inflict heavy losses on the rebels and allowed Ecomog to go back onto the offensive. They started making preparations to retake Lunsar and Makeni.

  In establishing a dialogue with the rebels, the first question to be answered was with whom did one talk? Sankoh was still in detention in Freetown, but did he really control all of the RUF? It was now over four years since Sankoh had actually been in the bush with his boys. Bockarie, out in the east in Kailahun, had got used to running the show and was forever making statements on his own behalf. Even if the RUF were united, it was questionable how much the ex-AFRC /SLA recognized Sankoh’s leadership. Johnny Paul Koroma was still being held hostage and tortured by Bockarie.

  To demonstrate this disunity Sankoh said that he would need to speak face to face with his supporters before he could tell President Kabbah what the RUF wanted. It seemed strange that a revolutionary movement that had been fighting for eight years did not know what it wanted. However, it was also a reflection of how little contact Sankoh had had with his boys in the bush. He needed to find out just how much control he still had.

  I warned London that we should be careful how far one went in negotiations. Peace at any price may be no peace at all. I also reminded the department that for any peace agreement to succeed, it must have the full support of the people of Sierra Leone. What did the people want?

  To find out, a ‘national consultative conference on the peace process’ was organized by the National Commission for Democracy and Human Rights, under its chairman, the small but energetic Dr Kadi Sesay. The purpose of the conference was to give the Sierra Leone people a chance to voice their views on what they wanted from the peace process.

  The conference was held from 7 – 9 April at the Sierra Leone Commercial Bank complex at Kingtom in Freetown under the chairmanship of Professor Stras
ser-King, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University. Around 300 people took part, with representatives from all the civil society groups – students, teachers, women’s groups, paramount chiefs, religious leaders, trade unions, ex and serving members of the army, civil defence forces, parliamentary parties, the amputees and the displaced – an impressive cross-section of society. Although mainly Freetown based, some groups were flown in from Bo, Kenema and Lungi. DFID agreed to part fund it, along with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The President opened the conference and the Vice President closed it, but otherwise the government stood back and allowed the civil groups to make the running.

  In his opening address President Kabbah noted that whilst achieving lasting peace was a process, it was not just a question of giving ministerial appointments to the disgruntled. He noted that he already headed a government of national unity; were the people prepared to reward those who invoked terror, and maimed and killed?

  The most moving and best received of the addresses was made by Mrs Lottie Betts-Priddy speaking on behalf of all the civil society groups. She noted that it was the ordinary people who had suffered most from the continuing fighting and therefore they must have a say in the peace process. Peace should not mean merely the present crop of politicians keeping their jobs. She denounced the RUF for brutalizing the people and accused the international community of double standards – what price did they put on an African life, she asked.

  Francis Okelo, Joe Melrose and I were asked to deliver statements on behalf of the international community. Francis called the conference a milestone on the path to lasting peace and noted that its pursuit must be irreversible. Joe quoted Abraham Lincoln and Bob Marley on the way to attain peace. I said that the international aid community was getting fed up with seeing so much of its tax payers’ money being wasted in countries like Sierra Leone because of coups, instability and corruption. We all wanted to see lasting peace and not just a quick fix. We needed to analyse why the previous peace agreements had failed. I liberally spliced my remarks with quotes from Robin Cook’s and Tony Lloyd’s statements in the Commons and ended by quoting from Tony Blair’s recent letter to President Kabbah, in which he had said that we wanted to see ‘a Sierra Leone that stands on its own two feet as a prosperous, democratic and peaceful country’.

  Foday Sankoh had been invited to the conference. He did not come, but he sent a message reaffirming the RUF’s continuous commitment towards genuine and lasting peace. He described President Kabbah as ‘genuine, sincere and committed to peace and development’ and said that he was ‘genuinely sorry for all the pain and grief that my revolution has caused you. Let us now put all our hurt behind us and forge ahead.’ This was the first time that Sankoh had offered any sort of apology to the Sierra Leone people. He was clearly trying to curry favour in order to be released from detention so that he could go off and meet his followers.

  After three days of debate and discussion the conference set out its various conditions for the start of negotiations. These included a cessation of hostilities, RUF recognition of the government, no demands by the RUF for the withdrawal of Ecomog, the unconditional release of abductees and, picking up the strongest theme throughout the conference, no power-sharing with the RUF.

  President Eyadéma of Togo had assumed the chairmanship of Ecowas and he offered his capital as a venue for Sankoh to meet his supporters. It was ironic that Eyadéma was now helping in the struggle for democracy in Sierra Leone. He was hardly the most democratic of African presidents. He had shot his way to power in the 1970s and rigged every election since then. At the previous Togolese election, when he had been defeated by his opponent, Sylvanus Olympio, he had declared the results null and void and just carried on in office.

  President Kabbah agreed to the meeting and on 18 April Sankoh, still a condemned man but looking very dapper in a smart blue tailored jacket, flew off to Lomé. On arrival he was greeted at the airport by five Togolese ministers and driven in cavalcade to his five-star hotel, where he waited for his RUF commanders. They were being flown up to Lomé from Monrovia by the UN. Sankoh was ensconced in a suite in the hotel and indulged himself in an orgy of food, drink and sex. He was to run up a hotel bill of over $400,000 in the short time he was there. The UN was expected to pick up the tab.

  The RUF immediately started demanding a ceasefire. They were aware that Ecomog were now preparing to advance on Lunsar and Makeni. The RUF were not well equipped to defend these strategic towns but they did not want to give up any of their territory. Eyadéma and Taylor supported Sankoh’s call for a ceasefire and started putting pressure on Kabbah. On 27 April in his message to the nation for the thirty-eighth anniversary of independence, Kabbah challenged the RUF to renounce violence and terror and to meet in the polling booths in sixteen months time. Two days later he wrote to Eyadéma setting out his conditions for a ceasefire, namely the vacation of the highways and mining areas by the RUF, that the ceasefire be part of a comprehensive peace agreement and that it be monitored by an adequate number of UN personnel.

  Another figure entered the stage – Reverend Jesse Jackson, the American civil rights campaigner, whom President Clinton had appointed as the US ‘special ambassador for democracy in Africa’. He had flown to Accra to attend an Afro-American conference to which President Kabbah had also been invited. In Accra, Jackson persuaded Kabbah to fly with him to Lomé to talk to Sankoh. James Jonah and Julius Spencer had accompanied Kabbah to Accra, but the Americans told Kabbah that there was no room on the plane for them to Lomé. The Americans considered that both Jonah and Spencer were ‘hawks’ and did not want them around the President. So Kabbah arrived in Lomé on 17 May accompanied only by Solomon Berewa and Maxwell Khobe.

  President Eyadéma had laid on a guard of honour for President Kabbah at the airport, but Jackson, the great showman, had leaped up onto the dais uninvited to inspect the guard of honour. Within an hour of arrival Kabbah was being handed a ceasefire agreement to sign. The Americans had clearly been working behind the scenes with Sankoh, and the first draft unashamedly talked of it being arranged under the auspices of Jackson without even mentioning Eyadéma or Ecowas. Both Berewa and Khobe advised Kabbah not to sign it without further consultation back in Freetown but, under intense pressure from Jackson and Eyadéma, he put his signature to the document the next day.

  The reaction back in Freetown was muted. Not many Sierra Leoneans had known that the President had flown to Accra yet alone Lomé, and therefore they were taken by surprise. The opposition leader, Raymond Kamara, criticized Kabbah saying that his signing of the ceasefire was contrary to the undertakings he had given Parliament. As an indication of how rushed the ceasefire had been, Major General Felix Mujakpuero, the new and impressive Ecomog Force Commander, issued a statement saying that Ecomog had not been told about the ceasefire and that he was awaiting a directive from Ecowas. This was a subtle way of pointing out that Kabbah did not actually control the forces fighting for him.

  Kabbah was convinced that Sankoh was sincere, a view not shared by some of his ministers. A number came round to the residence for a private chat. Each one of them said that they felt that they would have to resign, especially if the ceasefire led to a power-sharing arrangement with the RUF. In the event not one of them did resign.

  The reaction from the international community to the ceasefire was more positive. Tony Blair was one of the first to send a message welcoming it. Addressing his remarks to the government, the people and the rebels, he said:

  There can be no military solution to your problems. Making peace means making hard choices. It means talking to the rebels. It means being ready to accept back into society those who fought against you. And, where they have genuine grievances, it means addressing these. We in Britain know how hard this is. The search for a lasting peace in Northern Ireland is demanding. We have to make tough decisions too. But it is worth it.

  Tony Blair’s message,
though welcomed by Kabbah, did not go down too well with the people of Sierra Leone, not least because it fell short of promising real help other than platitudes. It invoked a response from the leading civil society group, the Campaign for Good Governance, who sent an impassioned and graphic letter back to the Prime Minister saying:

  We are asking you Mr Prime Minister where is that gentleman’s agreement we signed [a reference to the support given for the 1996 elections] in which you promised to be there for us and with us? Our freedom is being snatched from us. Please do not let them do that to us. Help us before the flames of democracy which you helped to kindle are extinguished forever.

  The letter went on:

  We watch with pride as your Foreign and Defence Secretaries speak for the Kosovo Albanians that there cannot be peace without justice. We want them to say the same for us – small poor Sierra Leone. Milosevic is now a war criminal, but he did not amputate hundreds or even thousands of limbs, arms, heads etc, including those of eighteen-month-old babies. He did not force mothers to eat the hearts of their children raw. He did not slit the stomachs of pregnant women. He did not gang-rape children as young as thirteen and send them back home to die. He killed masses of people, but at least he had the decency to bury them in mass graves, ours were left in the streets to rot. Today he is a war criminal; ours is staying in a five-star hotel depriving us of peace. You and the British people stood up in Kosovo for the principles of truth, justice and respect for human rights. We are asking you and your people to do the same for us.