But the combatants I met weren’t clear on some of these details. They were under the impression that they’d be given the Sierra Leone equivalent of $300 once they were discharged, a fortune in bush terms. This had been the case for a short while, but then UNAMSIL discovered that for every rifle turned in to the UN, $300 would buy two or three more on the arms market. So UNAMSIL’s private sponsors that provided the cash—including the Soros Foundation and other philanthropy organizations—pulled their funding of the program. So the $300 was whittled down to $15, something few combatants discovered until they’d already turned in their arms. And they weren’t pleased with it.
“I have sent a letter to my field commander in Kambia telling him to stop the disarmament,” announced a young RUF commander, Lieutenant Mohammed Fofanah. Like many of the others, he was decked out in a Tupac Shakur T-shirt, Hawaiian shorts, and sunglasses. Also like the others, he was highly agitated at the decommissioning process. “I told my men to put down their weapons and trust that the DDR will do the right thing. This camp is fucking bullshit.”
Indeed, there was a long list of “bullshit,” which was shouted to me by an increasingly large and unruly crowd of ex-combatants. There were no medical facilities, not enough food, no video entertainment, no soccer balls for the younger kids, poor-quality flip-flops, and—most importantly—not enough money waiting at the end of the process. One kid was mostly agitated because he was promised a bicycle if he disarmed and he hadn’t seen one yet.
“What makes you think you’re getting a bike?” I asked him.
“It’s in Lomé!”
Of course, the peace accords mention no such thing, but the fact that this boy and others were so out of touch with the reality of what was happening did not seem to bode well for the peace process; where UNAMSIL was trying to end a brutal war that has killed and mutilated thousands of people, many RUF were acting like they were enrolling in summer camp. It was simultaneously frightening, amusing, and depressing to hear ruthless killers complaining that they didn’t have movies to watch or balls to play with. Frightening because it spoke to how tenuous the peace process was and illuminated the mentality of the fighters; amusing because the camp had almost everything they said it didn’t (including soccer balls, which were being booted about within sight of our gathering; medical facilities; and food delivered almost daily from the WFP); and depressing because you were reminded of how young most of the RUF’s soldiers were and how fundamentally they’d missed out on childhoods that most people take for granted. The kid who complained to me was probably no older than 13. He had likely killed people and could fire an automatic rifle in combat, but he’d probably never ridden a bike.
But there was little time to reflect on this at the moment. The crowd had lathered itself into a righteous froth about the perceived injustices of the camp and attacked a food-aid truck while we were talking. The hapless driver had just delivered sacks of rice and grain and was leaving for more when some former fighters surrounded the truck and began rocking it back and forth, threatening to topple it. Across the compound, the Nigerians looked on with amusement; seeing that he was in his predicament alone, the driver gunned the truck and plowed through the crowd, scattering women and children from its path.
“Ah! You see?!” shouted Fofanah, arms outstretched, his face incredulous. “He tried to run them over! We will never disarm if these are the conditions we must suffer under.”
We decided to leave; our very presence was inciting unrest that lacked only the spark to transform it into a riot.
A FEW DAYS LATER, I was typing in the lounge at the Mammy Yoko in Freetown when I was interrupted by a bedraggled Irish radio reporter. He’d just been held hostage for three hours, he said, at the Port Loko DDR camp. The camp residents had barricaded the gate and refused to allow anyone to leave until living conditions improved. The Nigerian UNAMSIL soldiers barely changed their postures during the whole ordeal, he said, and their captors finally grew bored and opened the gate for them. The camp has been the scene of unrest ever since, hosting riots, beatings, and often-repeated threats of further trouble. The source of the trouble is always the same: The RUF’s contention that the DDR and UNAMSIL have duped them into surrendering by making false promises.
Port Loko isn’t the only trouble spot and the RUF isn’t the only group complaining of underhandedness by the peacekeepers. A few days after visiting Port Loko, I took a helicopter to Daru with New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks and French freelance photographer Patrick Robert and ended up accidentally spending the day at the DDR camp there. Tyler and I had planned to fly to Tongo Field, a strictly controlled RUF diamond district about 30 miles northwest of Kenema, but at the last minute the RUF changed their minds about allowing the UN to land. We diverted to Daru, where we found ourselves trying to hire a car to take us to nearby Kenema. We quickly learned that the only vehicles in Daru that hadn’t been rendered skeletal by looters were those owned by the UN and none were going to Kenema. Our plans foiled, we tagged along with Patrick to the camp, where he was hoping to photograph a group of Kamajor fighters who’d been picked up and disarmed a week earlier.
Patrick had more than just a passing interest in this group of Kamajors: He’d met them months before while working on a photo story about Sierra Leone refugees escaping to Guinea and quickly developed a friendship with the commanders. The Kamajors were in Guinea, he learned, to rest and rearm in preparation for an assault on the RUF in Kono, entirely disregarding the peace process and the efforts to disarm those fighting in the bush, Kamajors included. They invited Patrick to join them in the bush, and for the previous month, he’d been hiking with them through the jungle to the battleground. He endured shootouts with the RUF, sleeping in the open on the jungle floor, and mysterious magical rituals that the Kamajors performed before battle. Once, a sacred totem that they carried before them into battle blew over in a high wind and their advance was delayed for days while they prayed to the god it represented for forgiveness for allowing it to touch the ground. During one ceremony, the Kamajor commanders decided to put a spell on Patrick so that he would be allowed to physically touch the members of the Kamajor unit. According to their superstition, it was the worst of luck for a non-Kamajor to touch a Kamajor who’s prepared to engage in battle.
They’d fought their way through the jungle to the outskirts of Koidu, where they positioned themselves along one flank of a three-pronged assault. They were the outer circle in a series of concentric forces: In the middle were the RUF, surrounding them was a battalion of Bangladeshis with UNAMSIL, and the Kamajors surrounded them. According to Patrick, the plan was to demolish anything within their circle to reclaim the diamond district, including UNAMSIL if they fought back. On the eve of battle, Patrick’s unit dispatched a runner to flit through the forest and report to two other Kamajor units that they were in position and ready to attack.
Somewhere along the way, things went awry. Morning came and there was no signal to attack. The commanders sent scouts to probe the front lines, and before anyone knew what was happening, a fleet of UN helicopters had whirled in from overhead, foiling the attack at the last moment. The Kamajors took up defensive positions and the UN personnel who disembarked from the helicopters engaged in brisk negotiations with Patrick, who spoke on behalf of the Kamajors since he could communicate with them the best in his native French. What happened next depends on who’s telling the story. According to Patrick, he was told by the on-scene UN commander that the RUF in Kono had agreed to disarm that very day and that according to the peace deal signed in May, the Kamajors were also required to lay down their rocket launchers and shotguns. The UN maintains that no one ever promised that the RUF in Kono would disarm that day, only that the agreement called for their eventual demobilization.
Either way, much to Patrick’s professional disappointment—he’d invested a month living in the jungle only to have the bloody finale of his story torpedoed by the UN—the Kamajors agreed to hand over their weapons. One hu
ndred and sixty-one Kamajors were disarmed, and eight RUF fighters turned over their weapons. Patrick was shipped to Freetown and kicked out of the Mammy Yoko as a pariah. As far as the UN was concerned, he had all but helped orchestrate the attack. He spent a week moping around Freetown without a visa or a press card, broke except for a gold nugget given as a gift from the Kamajor commander. Tyler and I did our best to cheer him up, but Freetown’s only distractions are nightmarish beach bars filled with child prostitutes, drunken aid workers, deafening pop music, and marijuana-crippled former combatants. It was clear that we had to help him get to the DDR camp in Daru where the Kamajors were sent so he could salvage his story.
Which is how the three of us ended up at the camp, encircled by joyous Kamajors who were happy to see their friend again. Not even the Ghanaian camp adjutant whipping residents with a reed took the smiles off their faces.
“So how are things?” Patrick asked one of the fighters.
“No problem,” the boy smiled back. “We get small-small rest, small-small food and when we leave we will be prepared to fight again.”
That mentality illustrates one of the main problems with the peace process: The Kamajors, although loyal to the government, are controlled by no one. They operate according to their own rules and during years of combat have become as enamored with diamonds as the RUF. There is suspicion among some in the UN hierarchy that operational control over the Kamajors is indeed in the hands of the Sierra Leone military, which claims the group as allies when it’s favorable to do so and distances itself from them when it’s not.
“The SLA can turn the [Kamajors] on or off as it wishes,” one UN official confided in me. “When they want them to run roughshod over the RUF, they claim they’re beyond control. When the time is right to reel them in, they can do that too.”
EVEN THOUGH THE KAMAJORS continued to stage such bold assaults against the RUF and the rebels continued to mine diamonds, both actions in violation of the peace agreement, the news wasn’t all bad. In fact, despite the obstacles yet to be overcome, the peace process in the summer of 2001 was further along than any previous attempt to end the war in Sierra Leone. And I had many conversations with people in the DDR camps and elsewhere who were all too happy to retire from the RUF and try to make a legitimate living. Twenty-six-year-old RUF Lieutenant Mohammed Morrison was 19 when he left the ranks of the SLA and joined the rebellion. His reason for joining was the same as his reason for leaving for the DDR camp in Daru, and he sounded sincere when he said his goal all along had been to “make the country better for me and my friends.”
In the early years of the war, the RUF dogma, outlined in a manifesto called “Footpaths to Democracy” penned by RUF leader Foday Sankoh, seemed to poor and illiterate blue-collar workers like Morrison to be a reasonable alternative to poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and governmental corruption. A jumbled mixture of patriotic and Maoist rhetoric, Sankoh’s passage that comes closest to offering an excuse for the rebellion reads:No more shall the rural countryside be reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water for urban Freetown. That pattern of exploitation, degradation and denial is gone forever. No RUF/SL [Sierra Leone] combatant or civilian will countenance the re-introduction of that pattern of raping the countryside to feed the greed and caprice of the Freetown elite and their masters abroad. In our simple and humble ways we say, “No more slave and no more master.” It is these very exploitative measures instituted by so-called central governments that create the conditions for resistance and civil uprising.2
Although the RUF’s raison d’être proved to be little more than a cover for plundering the diamond fields for the sake of its commanders and their Liberian patrons, it’s easy to see how uneducated youths with few prospects for the future could be lured into armed rebellion and brainwashed into thinking that they were fighting for a better future. Morrison spoke with pride about his command of fifty soldiers in the RUF’s 5th Battalion, D Company, which fought near Yengema in Kono.
“Sometimes we’d go out on patrol and if we heard about government movements, we’d lay our ambushes and put the situation under complete control,” he said, making a motion with his hands as if he were smoothing out bedsheets. The purpose of his unit was purely combat, providing forward and perimeter defenses for the diamond operations in Kono. The short, beefy commander had never even seen a diamond, he said, but he’d been a beneficiary of their revenues. His company was often resupplied with ammunition, food, and marijuana by the human mule-trains ferrying diamonds to the Liberian border. Most of their other supplies were stolen from SLA and ECOMOG units they ambushed. But after seven years in the rebellion without seeing any tangible political or social benefits, he had grown disillusioned with the cause. No one in command seemed interested in political dialogue, just diamond sales, he said. He thought about deserting, but had been in the RUF long enough to know what that meant if he were later caught.
So when he heard that a peace deal had been signed by Sessay and UNAMSIL in March 2001, he ordered his men that day to unload their weapons and travel with him to Daru. Out of the fifty under his command, only eight complied. Several of them I met in Daru were barely capable of articulating why they obeyed Morrison’s order, their reasons for wanting peace being as mysterious and esoteric as their reasons for going to war. “Now they say it is time for us to come in from the bush,” explained 19-year-old Mammy Massaquoi, a second lieutenant. Her face was covered in acne, accentuated with a shrapnel wound perforating her left cheek. “All is the work of Satan. That is why brother fought brother, but now the Lord has come and brought peace.”
All of them fear reprisal for leaving the rebellion’s ranks, a trait they shared with the Kamajors who lived side by side with them in the camp. On their own initiative, about 300 combatants and their families had received permission from the UN to construct a village next door to the camp, a sort of temporary home while they waited for their former villages and towns to be disarmed. Surprisingly, former RUF and Kamajor fighters seemed to live quite peacefully in the geometric grid of stick-and-mud homes.
While Patrick mingled with the Kamajor fighters from the unit he’d marched with, Tyler and I strolled through the town, dubbed Peace Village by the residents. We met retired combatants from both forces who seemed to have accepted the new reality of living side by side with those they’d been trying to kill only weeks before. Their conversion appeared so complete that it was difficult to believe. A Kamajor named Lahaji Bila hunted RUF in Kono; now he was the village’s blacksmith. RUF Major Daniel Kallon defected from the Sierra Leone Army to the RUF after Kamajors killed his brothers in Yengema, but now he was building houses for his former enemies. I didn’t understand how the members of the two forces could so easily forget, or at least overlook, the brutality of the war in which many of them had fought for years until I spoke to the camp adjutant. Ghanaian Lieutenant Charles Bendemba summed up his theory simply: “Hunger makes men see maybe war is not so good.”
Could it be that simple? The prospect of regular meals for six weeks in the equivalent of a detention camp—even if it was simple rice and cassava leaves—could entice battle-hardened men and women to lay down arms and live in harmony? Bendemba wasn’t being quite that simplistic, of course, but what he meant was clear enough. The RUF war was conducted not for any ideological dogma, noble cause, or even for retribution by a long-aggrieved people, but purely for the economics of diamond mining. Even the brainwashed could see that a choice between suffering in the jungle and risking death for the financial benefit of their commanders or taking the opportunity to try and live a normal life wasn’t a difficult choice at all. In the end, many fighters were simply too tired to keep on battling one another. The civil war had reached the fatigue point for many. Morrison, for instance, had seen combat and death for almost eight years and was ready for a change. “It is not worth my life anymore,” he said. “I am young. I am strong. This is my country and I want to make use of it now and make a better life.”
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nbsp; But if all it takes is a hot bowl of rice to convince fighters to stop fighting, it probably wouldn’t take that much to change their minds and decide to once again start carrying weapons. Bendemba was worried about the future waiting beyond the camp gates for his charges. Fifteen bucks didn’t seem like much of a financial incentive to keep former fighters who had been protecting millions of dollars in diamonds on the straight and narrow. He equated fighting with the RUF with a drug addiction. If all your friends are addicts, you live in a crack neighborhood, and all you’ve known for years is getting high, it wouldn’t take much to shove you over the edge once out of rehab.
“You go from here with an empty stomach and empty pockets,” he said. “You must depend on your parents, your friends or maybe you have some precious stones for survival. Someone who is 18 and a general or a major in the bush thinks that he is a big man. He can have women, drugs, money, respect. Once you leave here, you’re just like every other man.”
When these men and women leave the DDR camp, the options are to head to their former homes, most of which in Daru’s district were are still armed and dangerous, or to head to the capital to avoid retribution from those who kept their AK-47s.
“Me and my men are going straight to Freetown,” said Morrison.
HE’S HARDLY ALONE. Freetown’s population of former and current RUF combatants is rivaled only by the population of the RUF’s victims. The RUF has formed a political party, the RUFP (the Revolutionary United Front Party), and although its headquarters is in Makeni, its campaigners are by necessity in Freetown. Freetown is now home to nearly a quarter of the country’s population.
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