I had not been consulted about the Prime Minister’s message, but I kept up my flow of reports, passing on the concerns of the Sierra Leone people and expressing my own concerns about the way that the peace process was going. I said that we could live with another ‘non agreement’ like Abidjan or Conakry, but that the wrong agreement now could actually exacerbate the fragile situation. I suggested that Sierra Leone was being pressured with a choice of either peace or with democracy and good government, but that they could not have both.
My reports were not well received by the department. The department told me that ‘peace at any costs was better than no peace.’ This attitude totally ignored the sacrifices that the Sierra Leone people had made in their struggle for democracy. For nine months they had bravely held out against the ‘peace’ offered by the AFRC junta because they knew that the AFRC/RUF did not offer a lasting peace.
The references to Kosovo were symptomatic of the growing anger among Sierra Leoneans and many other Africans about the uneven-handedness of the West’s response to Kosovo as opposed to Sierra Leone and other African conflicts. To the department’s obvious annoyance I also drew reference to the stark differences in our reactions to Kosovo and Sierra Leone. I said that compared to the atrocities in Sierra Leone, Kosovo was like a Sunday school picnic. Thirty people had been killed in Kosovo and all of NATO had been sent in; 7,000 people had been murdered in Freetown in January and there had been barely a bleat from the West. Robin Cook had recently visited Kosovo, where he had seen a house with twelve dead bodies. He was quoted as saying that he had seen ‘a vision of hell’. If that was a vision of hell, then Freetown, where there were hundreds of dead bodies lying around, must be hell itself.
Over 150 years previously a naval captain visiting Sierra Leone had written:
I never knew and never heard mention of so villainous a place as Sierra Leone. I do not know where the Devil’s Poste Restante is, but the place surely must be Sierra Leone.
Captain Chamier, Life of a Sailor, 1883
This was now my post office box address, to which Robin Cook had sent me!
The rebels continued to attack villages and civilians, disregarding the ceasefire. One rebel leader was quoted as saying that the ceasefire only referred to ‘shootings’ and that it was still OK to maim, burn and loot. The original purpose for the meetings in Lomé had been to enable the RUF to get their act together and to allow the international community to apply pressure on them. This could then lead to ‘dialogue’ between the RUF and the Sierra Leone government. But with the ‘ceasefire’ imposed by outsiders the stage was now set for the negotiations between Kabbah’s government and the rebels to start in Lomé. To my mind it was a big mistake to rush into negotiations, but my views were ignored.
President Kabbah selected Solomon Berewa to lead the government delegation to the negotiations. Many eyebrows were raised at this choice. Berewa undoubtedly had unlimited patience, which would stand him in good stead in dealing with Sankoh and the RUF, but was it wise to select the man who had prosecuted Sankoh for treason? Berewa was not really a politician. Like Kabbah he was a lawyer and the two of them approached the talks as if they were arguing a legal case in court.
Alongside Berewa, Kabbah selected Sahr Matturi, the Deputy Foreign Minister, an SLPP MP, to represent Parliament, and Kadi Sesay. Making up the delegation was Sheka Mansaray, the National Security Adviser. Mansaray was among the brightest and most capable of Kabbah’s advisers. It was he who had been most closely involved in the negotiations leading to the Abidjan Peace Accord, experience that would be of enormous benefit in Lomé.
Sheka came round to the residence on the Sunday morning just before he flew off to Lomé. We went over what to expect in Lomé. I suggested that the first thing the government delegation should do would be to ask Sankoh for whom did he speak. Kabbah had missed a useful trick by not making Brigadier Mani, one of the leading AFRC/SLA commanders, a member of the government delegation. This would have exposed Sankoh to how little he could claim to speak for all the rebels but Kabbah, encouraged by the Americans, did not want to expose the different factions on the rebel side. They felt that it would be easier to secure an agreement if only one signature was required on behalf of all the rebels. We discussed what other precedents could be called upon to help with the negotiations. It was important to recognize that, unlike many other conflicts, in Sierra Leone there was a legitimate, democratic, internationally recognized government on one side. The nearest equivalent was Mozambique, where Renamo had waged a guerrilla war against the government. After years of fighting where awful atrocities were committed on a scale similar to what the RUF and AFRC had done in Sierra Leone, a peace agreement had finally been achieved. The UN had played an important role, indeed James Jonah had been the UN’s representative. However, in that agreement there was an important difference. There had been no power-sharing. Renamo had accepted a cessation of fighting and democratic elections in which they took part. Their fighters were disarmed and demobilized in a World Bank programme. Renamo did well in the elections, but not well enough to form the government. They instead formed an active opposition in the Mozambique Parliament. It was also significant that the Renamo commanders had gone around the country apologizing for their past misdeeds. If such an agreement could be reached in Sierra Leone, there was a chance of lasting peace. Sheka went off to Lomé under no delusions of the difficulties they would face.
A number of representatives of the international community were attending the negotiations. Francis Okelo fielded a large UN team. The UN were effectively organizing the meeting, although the Togolese took the limelight. The Ecowas Secretary General, Kouyaté, was there, with delegations from Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Burkino Faso and Liberia, as well as the hosts, Togo. Gaddafi sent some Libyans. The OAU Secretariat was represented and the wily and experienced Moses Anafu flew out from London to represent the Commonwealth Secretariat. The Americans were there in force. My American colleague, Joe Melrose, who had scarcely spent more than a couple of months actually in Sierra Leone, was sent to Lomé, to be joined by a team of US lawyers to help with the drafting.
Surprisingly, I was not asked to go to Lomé. Instead, Paul Harvey, the deputy High Commissioner designate for Nairobi, was asked to attend. Paul, who had previously served in the African Department in the FCO, but not on the West African side, had been appointed the Secretary of State’s Special representative for Sierra Leone, taking over from John Flynn. Paul was a very capable officer but, given the lead role that the UK played in Sierra Leone and the complexities of the background to the troubles, I was surprised that it was not felt in London that my experience would be useful in Lomé. When I raised this with the department, I was told that I was needed to stay alongside Kabbah in Freetown.
Without a resident embassy in Lomé, Paul was in a similar position to what I had been in Conakry with regard to reporting on developments. Most of his reporting to London was done over the telephone. The occasional written report managed to filter through to us in Freetown, but usually too late to offer any substantive comment. Sheka rang me from time to time. He said that the talks were going frustratingly slowly. The quality of the RUF team was very poor and they kept going back on matters that it was thought had been agreed in previous sessions. The Chairman, Koffigoh, the Togolese Foreign Minister, appeared to be biased towards the RUF. Omrie Golley had appeared, funded by the Americans, to act as the RUF’s legal adviser and spokesman. Sankoh himself did not take part in the talks. He remained in his hotel suite. But all decisions had to be passed by him, which accounted for the slow and painful progress.
Notwithstanding the clear views of the Cabinet, Parliament and people that a power-sharing agreement would not be acceptable, Berewa’s delegation found itself under enormous pressure to offer ministerial and other government positions to the RUF. The pressure was strongest from the Americans but others such as the Togolese, Nigerians and the UK added their weight. To his astonishment Sankoh was asked how
many Cabinet positions he wanted. He was well aware of the strength of feeling from the Sierra Leone people and felt before the talks got underway that the most he could hope for was an amnesty for himself. As a sign of good faith President Kabbah had presented him with a passport, a diplomatic one, to assure him that his execution for treason would not be carried out. Faced with this attitude of the international community and playing on the weakness of Kabbah, Sankoh said he would settle for the vice presidency, ten Cabinet ministerial posts, five deputy ministers, six ambassadorships and the heads of eleven parastatals.
The RUF propaganda machine, which had always been more effective than the Sierra Leone government’s, had created an image that they controlled seventy-five per cent of the country. To the uninformed, like the Americans and the Togolese, it therefore seemed quite reasonable of Sankoh to ask for only half the government. They therefore continued to apply pressure on the Sierra Leone government delegation to give Sankoh at least half a dozen ministerial posts.
Word of these shenanigans reached Sierra Leone. A demonstration was held in Bo attacking Kabbah and declaring that they would fight any power-sharing arrangement. In Freetown a twenty-four hour ‘stay at home’ was organized by the civil society groups on 17 June. It was a remarkable show of people power. With less than twelve hours’ notice people were urged to stay at home to demonstrate their opposition to power-sharing. Freetown was effectively shut down for the day. The markets remained closed, the taxis stayed off the roads, offices and businesses were shut down. The British High Commission was open, but I chose to work from home that day.
The organizers of the ‘stay at home’ met with President Kabbah and warned him that the demonstration was just a taste of things to come if he entered a power-sharing agreement with the RUF. He gave them assurances that this would not happen. A group of them, including members of the influential Inter Religious Council, then flew to Lomé to talk to the negotiators.
Jackson telephoned Kabbah to put more pressure on him to accept the RUF proposals. Kabbah told him that he would be signing his own death warrant if he did so. Kabbah told his Cabinet that the maximum number of RUF ministers he was prepared to accept, as part of the policy of ‘inclusion’, not power-sharing, was two.
Although most attention was focused upon the number of ministerial positions for the RUF, there were other aspects of the negotiations that were of concern. A key to the implementation of any peace agreement would be the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, or DDR, programme. A programme, devised by the World Bank and ourselves, was already in place and had been accepted by the international community. However, with so many people in Lomé who had no real knowledge of the situation on the ground in Sierra Leone, they started rewriting the DDR programme, including, controversially, the ‘encampment’ of the CDF. There was a proposal to establish a ‘human rights commission’, but one already existed; similarly a ‘council of chiefs’, which also existed. There were plans to establish a special position for Sankoh. The American team of lawyers produced a draft form of words, in effect putting Sankoh in charge of the diamonds, which was crazy.
My concerns were multiplied when I heard that Paul Harvey was going to have to leave Lomé for a while and his place as UK representative would be taken by Craig Murray – he of Sandline fame, who was now Deputy High Commissioner in Accra. It seemed to me that Murray had tried back in 1998 to sell out to the RUF. What damage could he do now?
A Lomé ‘Facilitation Committee’, headed by Koffigoh, the Togolese Foreign Minister, and including Kouyaté, the Ecowas Secretary General, and representatives of the UN, Commonwealth Secretariat, OAU, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, US, UK and Libya arrived on a four-hour visit to Freetown on 22 June to put more pressure on President Kabbah and his government. A meeting was arranged at Hill Station Lodge, where they met Kabbah, Cabinet ministers, leaders of political parties and representatives of the paramount chiefs and civil society.
Speaking in French, Koffigoh said that the talks in Lomé had reached deadlock over two issues – the withdrawal of Ecomog and the participation of the RUF in government. He noted that the RUF had lowered their demands and that the government had increased their offers, but there was still a gap to fill. He looked to Kabbah’s government to make further concessions so that the peace agreement could be signed. All the Sierra Leoneans present questioned the sincerity of the RUF. The NUP leader noted that at the last count 2,756 innocent civilians had had their limbs amputated and that 531 cases of AIDS as a result of rape had been counted. He asked, ‘Can we trust the RUF to behave like human beings?’
I listened carefully to all the comments being made. I found it somewhat bizarre that here was another African, who had never visited Sierra Leone before, lecturing to a group of distinguished Sierra Leoneans about the future of their country and doing it in French to the English-speaking assembly.
There was a dramatic moment during the meeting when President Kabbah read out a fax he had just received from Dr Peter Tucker, the distinguished Sierra Leonean who had been the architect of the 1991 Constitution and was a mentor and family relative of Kabbah’s. He had also served as Chairman of the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality. Tucker, who had fled to London during the fighting in January, urged Kabbah to withdraw his offers of ministerial and other positions to Sankoh and the RUF. He said that this was Kabbah’s ‘last chance to honour his country.’ Tucker’s words had a deep impact upon the Sierra Leoneans present but they seemed to wash over the visitors. Kabbah was also somewhat dismissive of them. He told Koffigoh that he was prepared to increase his offer to three Cabinet ministerial positions and three deputy ministers. The delegation flew back to Lomé.
When they got back to Lomé, Sankoh issued a statement, probably drafted by Golley, rejecting the latest offers and saying that he was still demanding eight Cabinet posts, the dissolution of the government and of all political parties and a four-year transition government. The tension in Freetown heightened and the number of calls asking if our visa section would open increased.
There were two more important visits at this time. President designate Obasanjo of Nigeria flew in for the day. He spent most of his time with the Nigerian troops, but at a meeting with Kabbah he again exerted pressure to reach an agreement at Lomé.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, also visited. Her visit coincided with the release of the detailed and graphic human rights report by Human Rights Watch, entitled ‘Getting Away with Murder, Mutilation and Rape’. The former Irish President was taken around the amputees camp at Murray Town. Visibly moved, she described the atrocities carried out in Freetown in January as ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ and worse than those in Kosovo. Her words were covered widely by the international media.
Those of us living in Sierra Leone did not need Mary Robinson’s visit, nor indeed the Human Rights Watch report, to reveal the extent of the atrocities. We continued to live with them daily. Just before the Robinson visit Celia and I received a visit at the residence from Yabomposse Kabba. She was the wife of a former paramount chief, whom we had befriended in the past. Since the death of her husband she had been running a gara (local cloth) dyeing and printing business from her home. As the wife of a paramount chief she had a certain standing in the community. When the junta had taken over in 1997 they had looted her business and publicly humiliated her. She was just getting back on her feet when the rebels entered Freetown in January. We had not seen her since then. Sitting in our living room she recounted her story of what had happened to her on 6 January.
Mrs Kabba, who was in her fifties, went to her mother’s house where other family members and friends had gathered. A young rebel, aged around twelve, wielding an AK47, came into the house. He ordered Mrs Kabba’s brother to rape their aged mother. The brother refused. The young boy pointed his gun at the brother and threatened to shoot him. The brother said, ‘I will not rape my mother, you will have to kill me first.’ Without a moment’
s hesitation, the boy shot the man dead in front of the family. He then threatened the rest of the family. He forced Mrs Kabba to strip naked down to her panties. Stuck inside her panties was her ‘poshi’; resembling a fly whisk made out of animal skin and hair, this signified her status as the wife of a paramount chief. When the young rebel discovered that she was the wife of a paramount chief, he said he would kill her first. She fell to her knees and, even though she was a Moslem, she started chanting the psalm The Lord is my Shepherd. Another rebel came in at this moment and told the boy to let her go. Bundling up her clothes, she ran out into the street in her panties She ran back to her own house and found it burnt to the ground. Outside the house was the head of her brother-in-law. He had been found in the house by the rebels. They had chopped off his head and thrown it out of the window. They then set fire to the house. His burnt body was found in the embers. Mrs Kabba buried her brother-in-law’s head under a nearby mango tree. The rebels had taken her three teenage children away with them. Mrs Kabba had not seen them up to the time she recounted her story.
Celia and I comforted the sobbing woman. She was appalled at the thought of the RUF being given any position in government. She said that if she saw Foday Sankoh on the street she would kill him or willingly die in the process of trying. I reported the story to London as yet another case history in the human tragedy of Sierra Leone, but it did not dilute the enthusiasm to reach an agreement in Lomé with the RUF.
The chairmanship of Ecowas was usually rotated among the member states every twelve months and President Eyadéma’s tenure was coming to an end at the end of June. He was desperate to see a peace agreement signed in Lomé in order to help rehabilitate his image internationally. Several late night sessions ensued. The quest to agree a form of words took precedence over the wishes of the Sierra Leone people and the situation on the ground. The 30 June deadline came and went but, although President Konaré of Mali nominally became Ecowas Chairman, it was agreed that President Eyadéma should get the credit for hosting the peace talks.
Atrocities, Diamonds and Diplomacy Page 23