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Return of Sierra Leone's lost generation

This article is more than 24 years old
Aid workers strive to rehabilitate child soldiers brutalised and brainwashed by years of civil war

Background: Sierra Leone's troubled times

Three hundred children spill out across the dusty courtyard, playing ball with homemade bundles, wrestling, running, exuberant. A month ago they were child soldiers with guns and ammunition deep in the bush of Sierra Leone, often wreaking havoc in their home villages.

"There are five-year-olds here who can fire a gun, seven-year-olds who have been longer with the rebels than they were with their own families," says one of the Sierra Leonean aid workers trying to reclaim this lost generation.

Only a handful of these children can be sent home after six weeks of intensive debriefing at this centre for ex-combatants. They come from the northern and eastern diamond areas still under rebel control, and no one can be confident that they will not suffer the same fate as other youngsters and be re-enlisted.

Foster families

Instead, they are sent to local foster families who, encouraged by the local mosque and Christian churches, take them in, despite their own extremely difficult circumstances in an economy destroyed by the war. "The communities have to accept them; they're not from the moon, they're from Sierra Leone, no matter what they've done," says one social worker.

A fragile peace ending the seven-year civil war has been in place since last July. A United Nations peacekeeping force, Unamsil, is in place and will see its numbers increase to 11,000 in the coming weeks.

But in recent days armed rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) have blocked Indian and Ghanaian UN troops from deploying in the diamond areas, and, in separate incidents, Kenyan and Guinean peacekeepers have had large amounts of military equipment seized by guerrillas.

On the route north out of the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown there are roadblocks of sandbags or logs every couple of miles. Most are erected by government soldiers, but some are set up by the RUF. Brutal incidents of looting and rape by the rebels and their bands of abducted children are still taking place, especially at night.

One boy in the centre pulls up his T-shirt to show the letters RUF cut into his chest. Many girls who have made it back after being abducted show similar scars, which their school uniforms do not cover.

"We tell them they have to learn to live with it; they can't cover their arms for the rest of their lives," says one teacher. But it is the unseen marks inflicted during their years as combatants that cause the greatest concern for the future of their society.

One seven-year-old in the centre is nicknamed Mike Tyson. He is a tough, stocky little boy, but one who has no memory of true family life. He can only remember life with his RUF commander. The boy has a big wound on his head where he was hit with a rifle butt, but like every child you talk to, he will still tell you how much he loved his commander. "We tell them, those commanders have gone, now these aunts and uncles in this centre are your commanders," says the director.

Commanders bring their children into this interim centre - run by the Caritas aid agency - to be demobilised. The Sierra Leoneans who run the centre are tough too. They need to be.

"These kids have been through outrageous, phenomenal brainwashing, but with a very strong team you can turn them around," says Leonard, the team leader.

Many of the children suffer drug withdrawal symptoms. Some have been using marijuana, but others have been on "blue book", a kind of cocaine.

One 12-year-old boy arrived, claiming to be a lieutenant colonel. He was accompanied by a 40-year-old man carrying his luggage, saluting him, and calling him sir. "It took him quite a few days of long sessions talking to us to see that things were going to be different here," says Leonard. Another boy came in as a supremely self-assured "major". Two weeks later he apologised for his behaviour.

One child, who was abducted when she was only eight months, was held until she was 18 months old by a commander and his girlfriend, who posed as the child's mother. But Caritas staff who saw the couple in the centre suspected that the girl was not the mother, and in a tough confrontation the commander not only ad mitted to Leonard that he had stolen the child, but he also identified her home village.

"That was a really emotional day when we took that baby for a reunion with her mother and grandmother - the old lady literally fainted with shock. The commander had used the baby as bait, hoping the mother would follow it into the bush," says Leonard.

The children have fought not only with the RUF, but also with the Sierra Leonean army's various splinter groups. In many cases, all of their relationships with adults have been based on violence.

"At first I cried for my mother, then I forgot about her and my commander taught me we were fighting for land and to free our people," says one former fighter, aged 16.

"If we won, my commander was going to be president and always take care of us," says a younger boy.

"My commander was very kind. He never allowed the bigger boys to beat me," says a third. Most of these boys come from families of peasants or diamond diggers. None can predict how or when they may fit back into their former lives, nor whether the men who manipulated them so ruthlessly are themselves ready for a future without war.

Tough line

For the UN the stakes are very high in Sierra Leone. UN peacekeeping disasters in Angola and Rwanda are recent memories in Africa. The peace agreement which brought the rebel leader, Foday Sankoh, into government in Sierra Leone was bitterly contested by western human rights groups mainly because it contradicted the principle of no impunity for war crimes, embodied in particular by the UN war crimes tribunals on Bosnia and Rwanda. Many people also believed the new set-up could not work.

But the UN secretary general's special representative, Oluyemi Adenji, a Nigerian, shows every sign of taking a far tougher line with the rebels than was the case in either Angola or Rwanda.

Moreover, the UN is committed to spending $30m (£19m) this year on a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programme. The programme is aimed at helping 45,000 former fighters, hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps in Guinea, and 1m displaced people.

Most Sierra Leoneans believe the peace has to work, whatever its price. No one can travel along the road from Freetown airport without seeing the camp for the 400 or so amputees whose stumps are the rebels' signature of horror. Children, including a baby too young to walk, have been mutilated for life.

But the chairman of the camp, Moktar Jallah, who has lost an arm and an ear, speaks for most - though not all - of those who have suffered such traumatic injuries when he says: "We have accepted the amnesty in the name of peace, I know the men who did this to me, I've seen them, and I've told them I want no revenge."

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