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| Africa: Subsaharan |
| Survivors recount [Sierra Leone] atrocities in court |
| 2004-07-24 |
| Witness TF-1196 told her story: Rebels used machetes to hack all movement and life out of her husband. Then a rebel young enough to be her child raped her. She raised the rounded tips of her arms to show why she had not signed her statement, delivered before a U.N.-backed war crimes court for the diamond-rich west African nation of Sierra Leone. "After they had killed my husband, a rebel ... chopped off my right and left hands with a cutlass, into four bits," TF-1196 -- a middle-aged, downcast village woman -- told the court. Survivors this week and last have started telling their accounts in one of Africa's most heartless wars: a 1991-2002 campaign by rebels who killed, raped, kidnapped and hacked to pieces hundreds of thousands of civilians in hopes of terrorizing Sierra Leone into ceding permanent control of its government and diamond fields. Rebels, many of them children as young as 5, followed Foday Sankoh, whom they called Pappy. Sankoh gave his fighters AK-47s, marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines -- and encouragement to kill in the most brutal way their immature minds and unmolded judgment could devise. The majority of the rebels' campaign played out in Sierra Leone's countryside, leaving even the death toll uncertain. Victims' accounts likewise are attracting little world notice, in contrast to war crimes trials for conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But the stories -- coming out in a sterile, specially built courtroom in a country that is officially the world's least-developed -- stand up to any in testimony to the reaches of human cruelty. This "diamond-rich west African nation" ranks as the "world's least-developed." Go figure. Follow the money and find the true criminals. |
| Posted by:Zenster |