The heartlessness of the matter
David Caute
SOLDIERS OF LIGHT by Daniel Bergner Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 202, ISBN 0713997478 OPERATION BARRAS: THE SAS RESCUE MISSION SIERRA LEONE 2000 by William Fowler Weidenfeld, £16.99, pp. 214, ISBN 0297846280 The West Side Boys had subjected their bleeding slice of Sierra Leone to a long reign of terror, murder and kidnap, the local dish being mutilation and hand-chopping of anyone who vexed their ganja-inflamed minds. In the humid afternoon sunshine of 25 August 2000. 'Brigadier' Foday Kallay's drugged West Siders were offered a surprise bonus of prime beef on the proverbial platter when young Captain Marshall led an unsuspecting patrol of the Royal Irish Regiment into a village close to the muddy waters of Rokel Creek. Disarmed, Marshall got a humiliating beating. Soon the soldiers' purloined watches and wedding rings reappeared on Kallay's wrists and fingers. Eleven taken hostage, panic in Whitehall.
Four years later, after a civil war costing 50,000 lives, 500,000 reportedly homeless, and 10,000 mutilated, some 13 men now stand indicted of atrocities before a United Nations-backed special court. (The notorious RUF leader Foday Sankho had died in good time.) The court began its deliberations in Freetown inauspiciously when the defence challenged the impartiality of the presiding judge, Geoffrey Robertson QC, author of a book reportedly prejudiced against limb-chopping, sewing up vaginas with fishing lines and the padlocking of mouths. Evidently Judge Robertson has described Charles Taylor, former president of neighbouring Liberia, who played a prime role in Sierra Leone's diamond wars, as a 'vicious warlord'. It is said that Taylor, now exiled in Nigeria, might be brought before the war crimes court in Freetown if only Judge Robertson can be persuaded to understand that the Strand stops short of Fleet Street.
The British colony of Sierra Leone was founded in 1787, partly as a refuge for freed slaves. In December 1941 Graham Greene, putting fiction and film criticism temporarily behind him and braving the Uboats, sailed for Sierra Leone on a clandestine mission for HMG. The result was The Heart of the Matter, published in 1948, and the unhappy Major Scobie of the colonial police, who dies with the words 'Dear God, I love...' and we will never know who. Greene was coy, in the style of a British gentleman spy pitting his wits against Nazi and Vichy agents, about his nameless 'African colony' being Sierra Leone, and did not want his fictional officials to be mistaken for the real ones, doubtless forerunners to High Commissioner Peter Penfold, described by William Fowler in Operation Barras as playing a crucial part in the evacuation of foreign nationals in 1997 and in the efforts to assist the restoration of 'the legitimate government of President Kabbah' (more accurate would be the 'invisible government of the unseen president'). Greene's world-weary Major Scobie, down to his last ounce of God, had perhaps foreseen it all:
Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do 1 love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth ... Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst.
I recall reading Greene's novel under a sluggish fan on humid Takoradi afternoons while playing soldier in the Gold Coast Regiment (the Ecole Normale Superieure, as it transpired, of a fine tradition of Ghanaian military coups, dictators and crooks of generally less impact than Liberia's Charles Taylor). Greene's colonial Sierra Leone again came to mind when reading Daniel Bergner's Soldiers of Light, a painful report of the post-colonial, diamond-greedy civil war which ended in 2002. Bergner's merciless descriptions of the rebels' indiscriminate hand-chopping, taken together with Panorama's latest report on Mugabe's boy-soldier training camps and torture chambers in Zimbabwe, may well cause one to wonder about the 'black majority rule' we would once have given our lives for. (This foolhardy commitment, of course, was by no means universally shared by The Spectator c. 1980, when a word in favour of Mugabe was likely to earn some brusque hand-chopping.) Greene's God could. I suppose, 'love' his little hand-choppers, those saucer-eyed militia boys wielding guns larger than themselves, but Greene's 'knowing the worst' amounts in the light of recent knowledge to foresight of genius.
Daniel Bergner, a gifted New York reporter who risked life and sanity by repeatedly returning to Sierra Leone, offers a quietly intense and acutely distressing account of the years of horror which began in 1991. We come to know Lamin Jusu Jarka, he of the metal claw who lost his hands because he frustrated rebel soldiers' designs on his 14-year-old daughter.
And meanwhile throughout the area similar weddings were taking place. Next to a nearby roadblock a female soldier checked the virginity of her captives, prodding with her fingers after the girls were stripped naked and pinned to the ground. Then she made her suggestions to the senior officers of the unit.
We also meet Komba Ghanya, son of a part-time tailor who spent his time digging for diamonds in the moonscape of craters at the edge of town, 'pouring sweat all day long and standing thigh-deep in pools of parasite-infested khaki-coloured water'. Komba, who has done 'beaucoup killing, beaucoup-beaucoup' (he may imagine himself in Haiti), becomes a child soldier and cannibal at the expense of a Nigerian peacekeeper whom he slits open with a bayonet. 'I killah, pull de livah. I take de dead liver, de heart. I boilah. Chop dat.'
Bergner infers that many of Sierra Leone's natives long to be recolortised by Mr Blair — indeed they compose their patriotic hymns in English. They love Tony as we all should. In May 2000 Britain had sent in 800 commandos and anchored warships with battle-ready aircraft off the West African coast. 'We welcome your excellency the peacemaker, we love and respect you, trust and support you,' read a sign hanging from a ramshackle school when the great war leader came to collect his accolade in Freetown (I owe this to John Kampfener's Blair's Wars). Perhaps this was the moment Blair decided to cry 'Terror!' whenever letting slip the dogs of war (again).
Bergner is respectful of the British role while William Fowler's eulogy of the 'SAS Rescue Mission' leaves only the adult part of me unaroused. Heavily illustrated with armaments, rotor blades and muscle, Operation Barras contains a picture of Deputy Saviour John Prescott inspecting a guard of honour in a wrong shirt moments after learning that this was somewhere called Sierra Leone. And what happened to the men of the Royal Irish Regiment taken captive at Rokel Creek by the West Side Boys? Read on.
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