Volume 3b: Chapter 5: Youth: Sierra Leone Truth & Reconciliation (TRC) Report

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The Final Report of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone

Volume 3B

Volume 3b: Chapter 5: Youth
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CHAPTER FIVE
Youth

Introduction

1. In Sierra Leone, the youth is the lifeblood of the nation. Every Sierra Leonean between the ages of 18 and 35 years old is considered to be a youth. According to a government paper of 2003, youths constitute forty-five percent of the country’s estimated 4.5 million population.

2. In the conflict, youths were both victims and perpetrators of human rights violations on a massive scale. It was a dual role to which youths had become accustomed in post-independence Sierra Leone: on the one hand, they were abused; on the other hand they became the abusers. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the one-party system became increasingly tyrannical, youths formed the only viable opposition to the ruling All People’s Congress (APC) because the other political parties had been co-opted and assimilated into the government. When institutions and their leaders in so many sectors of society failed to speak out against the injustices of the APC regime, invariably it was the voice of youth that called for accountability. Conversely, though, youths were often the instruments of oppression, acting as vicious thugs to influence the outcomes of elections and put down anti-government demonstrations. In times of transition, Sierra Leone’s youth has always struggled to find its rightful place in society.

3. Testimonies received by the Commission indicate that the majority of participants in the war were youths. Many of them were children at the time of their recruitment. Others joined voluntarily in protest against the social and political ills of the day, or in the name of defending their communities. They all lost their youth to a career of fighting and violence. Some are now exporting their combat “expertise” to neighbouring countries in conflict. The experiences and prospects of youth in Sierra Leone require careful consideration.

4. In the course of the war, youths committed brutal and malicious acts against their family members, communities and fellow Sierra Leoneans. Their experiences during the war have disrupted their lives and traumatised them. Many youths are currently drifting without direction, unable to access education or employment. Some are so disillusioned with their environment that they are desperately seeking a way out and would readily resort once more to violence.

5. Sierra Leone faces the daunting task of reclaiming a “lost generation” of youth. The “youth question” is therefore central to lasting peace and development in the country. This examination of youth participation in the war will enable the Commission to make detailed recommendations on how to respond to the challenges created by misguided youth in the past and how to restore youths as productive members of their communities.

6. In his statement to the Commission, Brima Vandy, who was 30 years old at the start of the conflict in 1991, made this confession:

“When I was in the bush… I committed many violations and abuses. I killed innocent people, took away their property by force… asked them to leave their houses for me to sleep inside… and forced their women to make love to me.”

7. In her testimony to a closed hearing of the Commission, a young woman in the Koinadugu District told of her experiences:

“Upon our arrival (at their base) we were distributed to different rebels to become their wives… when we refused, they flogged us. We were raped by two or three men daily… when we fought back, they threatened to kill us. We eventually got married to them. They gave us drugs like marijuana to smoke. When the roads were free, we pleaded for them to release us to go back to our relatives… but they refused. Commander Sofila pleaded with them to release us but they threatened to kill us if we tried to escape. Commander CO Ray inscribed RUF on our bodies. They looted properties whilst we carried their ammunitions.”

8. Similar narratives by youths, both as victims and perpetrators, abound in the testimonies, statements and interviews gathered by the Commission. In addition, the youth question has stimulated considerable analysis and debate among academics and writers on the conflict. One Sierra Leonean historian, Ibrahim Abdullah, has described the war as the high point of a rebellious Freetown youth culture of “rarray man dem” that started in the 1940s. Another Sierra Leonean historian, Ishmael Rashid, has detected a strong impetus for the war in the convergence that took place in the 1970s and 1980s between these rarray man dem and groups of radical students influenced by leftist ideologies. British anthropologist Paul Richards has traced the cause of the war to a patrimonial crisis, sidelined intellectuals, violent films and a desire by youths to manage the resources of the rain forest more equitably. Finally Jimmy Kandeh, a Sierra Leonean political scientist, has noted that the atrocities committed by youths during the war stemmed from the “subaltern” appropriation of what was previously the violence of the elites.

9. Combining these perspectives, it is possible to build a picture of the origins of violent behaviour among youths. Members of the political elite deployed “subalterns”, or rarray man dem, to silence their opponents during the days of the APC one-party state. Youths learned violence from their masters and developed violent reactions to the injustices and frustrations they encountered in their daily lives. As the conflict arrived, youths used brutality not to prop up the political elites, but to accumulate resources and power that had been denied to them previously, attacking the very foundations of the elites’ society. The major difference between elite-orchestrated violence and subaltern violence, however, was that the latter made no distinction between public and private property. The violence of the youths was largely indiscriminate.

10. This chapter builds on these perspectives and makes use of submissions, testimonies and interviews gathered by the Commission to analyse and report on: the nature, causes and extent of the violations and abuses perpetrated and suffered by youths; the context of these violations; and the impact on of the conflict on youths. The chapter concludes by considering current interventions geared towards addressing the youth question in Sierra Leone.

Youth Categories and Violence

11. Youth in Sierra Leone can be roughly divided into two categories: mainstream and marginalised youths. These categories can be further sub-divided to take into account the geographical locations and associated characteristics of youths. Thus there are mainstream urban youths and mainstream rural youths. The same distinction can also be made for marginalised youths.

12. The defining characteristic of mainstream urban youths has always been their access to formal western-type education. They would typically be secondary school or university students, expected to take up white-collar jobs upon completion of their studies. They belong to the world of the law abiding - those who play by the rules. Rural mainstream youths equally abide by long-standing traditions. They respect their elders and work on the farms.

13. In Freetown before the conflict, there was a particular category of marginalised youths, referred to above as the rarray man dem. They constituted a predominantly male-specific, oppositional sub-culture, prone to violence and other anti-social behaviour such as drug dealing, petty theft and riotous conduct. Mostly illiterates, they were economically insecure. They survived by moving in and out of casual jobs as domestic hands, night watchmen and labourers. They lived on the margins and were alienated from mainstream society. The violence they committed was mainly within their potes (enclaves or ghettos for marginalised youth) and on festive occasions when they moved around the city with their “masquerades”, or processions, known as odelay. Their violence mainly involved chuk (stabbing with a knife) and was of a non-political nature.

14. The utilisation of the violence of marginalised youths for political purposes started with the 1969-1970 by-elections, when the APC rallied soldiers, the police and rarray man dem to intimidate members of the opposition SLPP. The rarray man dem were mobilised by the APC strongman S. I. Koroma, who later became Vice President after the promulgation of the Republican Constitution in 1971. Koroma’s cynical tactics transformed rarray man dem into “thugs”.

15. In the common parlance of Sierra Leone at the time, “thugs” came to mean youths who were utilised for political violence. The word “youth” itself became a synonym for the unemployed young person who was vulnerable to manipulation. Youths were considered to be auxiliary troops for political parties. During elections, or crises, they did the dirty work for the politicians. Payment was often made in the form of drug supplies or token cash handouts. The violence offered youths an outlet for acting out their machismo, which although loathed by society was encouraged by the political elites.

16. A few leaders of the rarray man dem were eventually rewarded with high positions (one was made a minister, another an ambassador), but most thugs were unceremoniously dumped after the completion of their violent assignments. The majority of youths remained unskilled and impoverished.

17. In the provinces, marginalised youths were known as “san san boys” and “njiahungbia ngornga”. San san boys were marginalised youths eking out a living in the “sandpits” of the diamond mines. Most of them never fulfilled their dreams of becoming wealthy through diamonds. Instead, they became part of a harsh, greedy and adventurous way of life. Later they became easy prey as recruits for the purveyors of state and counter-state violence.

18. “Njiahungbia ngornga” is a Mende phrase meaning unruly youth. This group included semi-literate youths in the provinces who loathed traditional structures and values. They saw “the rebellion as an opportunity to settle local scores and reverse the alienating rural social order in their favour.” Freetown youths referred to the marginalised youths of the provinces who had adopted Freetown lifestyles and world-views as bonga rarray man dem or upline savis man dem.

The Increasing Marginalisation of Youths and the Convergence of Educated and Uneducated Youths

19. The country’s deteriorating economic and political situation from the 1970s onwards saw an increase in the number of school dropouts. Education was no longer a right for all, but a privilege for the few. Employment and the grant of government scholarships were dependent on APC party allegiance and what Sierra Leonean youths referred to as “connectocracy”, meaning personal connections to a political patron or senior public servant. Most youths could never fulfil their ambitions because they were not “connected” to the political system. Only the wealthy could provide a reasonable education for their children. The children of politicians and government officials attended private schools, often travelling overseas, while the government schools were totally neglected. The number of school dropouts increased annually as the education system deteriorated, swelling the ranks of the marginalised youths in the potes.

20. In the provinces, traditional political and judicial authorities served the interests of the local elites. Political marginalisation and harsh judicial penalties for the breaching of traditional norms pushed many youths to the margins of their societies. Some youths in provincial urban settings like Bo and Kono also set up potes akin to those of their Freetown counterparts.

21. The stagnating economy increased the numbers of even well educated youths who could not find employment. Western-type education no longer guaranteed employment. Graduates found themselves exposed to the same harsh economic realities that had long been experienced by the uneducated marginalised urban youth.

22. This convergence of the material conditions of educated (mainstream) and uneducated (marginalised) youths provided a basis for the convergence of their lifestyles and world-views. Many of the educated but unemployed youths started frequenting the potes. Unemployment induced in them the habits of the marginalised youth. They were frowned upon by mainstream society, but their visits to the potes gradually elevated their social status amongst their uneducated peers. With the increase in the number of marginalised youths came a corresponding increase in the number of potes. The peddling of drugs became a form of full-time employment for many youths. University students also joined the drift to the potes. Student activists began establishing potes on their campuses and the drug culture started to gain a grudging acceptance in the society - it became a sine qua non for radicalism and non-conformity.

23. The newcomers to the potes were au fait with unfolding world events and were more politically conscious than the original marginalised youths. Many had read revolutionary texts from which they had developed new political ideas. They took it upon themselves to “conscientise” their “less fortunate brothers” while in return they were themselves gradually absorbing and adopting the style and language of the “ghetto”.

24. This transformation was also influenced by contemporary music, particularly reggae music by Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. The lyrics of their songs depicted realities of the day - hardship, degradation and oppression - in a style of social commentary known as “system dread”.

25. The new groups emerging out of the fusion of educated youths and their uneducated peers in the potes were not involved in petty theft or political thuggery, at least at first. The potes became rallying points for alienated, unemployed youths and an arena for political discussion centred on the corrupt practices of the dominant political class and the stifling political atmosphere under one-party dictatorship.

Repression of Student Demonstrations in the 1970s and 1980s and the Evolution of Revolutionary Thinking

26. Student leaders were conversant in theories of liberation and spiced up their discussions with quotes from revolutionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Wallace-Johnson, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X and Steve Biko. Students and school leavers read extensively and intensively outside their fields of study in order to contribute meaningfully to philosophical debates and discussions that lasted far into the night. Another significant influence was the presence of refugees from Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia on almost all campuses. Their experiences as freedom fighters made them influential in student circles and they occupied leadership positions in some student union executives.

27. Student thinking and the campus climate were ripe for protest action. Hindolo Trye was elected president of the Fourah Bay College (FBC) student union in 1976. The student motto “The Self” implied the importance of self-esteem and dignity, the awareness of the right to liberate oneself and the right of the collective self to initiate liberation. The students’ first direct confrontation with the APC came in 1977, when President Stevens was humiliated while delivering his speech at the annual university convocation ceremony.

28. The APC organised a counter-demonstration involving rarray man dem led by Kemoh Fadika. Supported by the armed Special Security Unit (SSD), these youths were brought in to flog, rape and brutalise students. The deployment of such a force foreshadowed events to come during the conflict, when youths were pitched against youths in an orgy of violence. The government’s backlash led to a nationwide demonstration by students in February 1977 following the arrest of their student leader Hindolo Trye. According to one participant:

“They sent thugs and members of the paramilitary to beat us up. They destroyed the campus, which led to a national uprising led by the students and sparked up by school children. It is what we called the “no college, no school” demonstration. It spread countrywide and became a national uprising, which lasted for several weeks.’”

29. The student protests, planned and led by radical students, received popular support and forced President Stevens to make certain concessions. A general election was called three months later. Violence by APC-sponsored rarray man dem resulted in a massive electoral victory for the APC. The hopes of the educated youths for an opening up of the political system were dashed.

30. The 1980s saw the emergence of well-organised radical groups and study clubs on university and college campuses, including the Green Book study club (promoting Ghaddafi’s ideas of revolutionary mass participation from Libya), the Pan African Union (PANAFU), which called for a popular movement, and the Socialist Club. Unlike other campus clubs, PANAFU brought both categories of youth together and was concerned with educating its members about apartheid in South Africa and neo-colonialism in Africa. PANAFU operated outside the campuses and had revolutionary “cells” in central and eastern Freetown.

31. Following a student demonstration in 1984, the Fourah Bay College campus was closed down for three months and upon resumption of classes, students had to sign an agreement for re-admission into the university. This repressive act helped “contain” students and brought relative calm to campus. Then, in 1985, Alie Kabba, a keen member of several radical clubs, was returned unopposed as president of FBC student union on a platform of collective self-advancement that he referred to as “we-ism”. Kabba’s student union executive made no secret of its intentions to put its radical leftist ideologies into practice once in power. The student leadership was constantly at loggerheads with the university authorities, who perceived Kabba as a subversive firebrand.

32. Events reached a climax at the end of the second term in 1985 when students refused to hand in their dormitory keys. The authorities accused them of planning to bring in Libyan mercenaries to oust the APC government. The paramilitary SSD, again called in to put the students in their place, used undue force in restraining the students and beating them into submission.

33. The SSD’s actions gave rise to a Freetown-wide demonstration. When the college reopened for the third semester in April 1985, forty-one students were declared ineligible to register, among them Alie Kabba. The student union protested against this decision. The campus demonstration spread to the city centre, where shops were looted and vehicles burnt down, apparently by unemployed youths who used the political demonstration of the students as a chance to wreak havoc and enrich themselves. Such opportunism, to many differing degrees, would become a constant feature of the conflict in the 1990s.

34. Alie Kabba and five other students were arrested and detained for two months, while three lecturers - Cleo Hancilles, Olu Gordon and Jimmy Kandeh, the original founders of PANAFU - were summarily dismissed from the university without a proper explanation or compensation up to the present day.

35. Some of the expelled students eventually found their way to Ghana and gained admission into the University of Legon. From Ghana, Alie Kabba made frequent visits to Guinea and Libya and was also a regular visitor to the People’s Bureau (as the Libyan embassy was called) in Accra. According to Olu Gordon:

“The idea of the RUF actually came from the expelled students from Fourah Bay College, especially Alie Kabba. And the specific reason why it was called a “united front” was because they had attempted to draw several organisations into their plan, including the organisations belonging to the Pan African Union (PANAFU).’”

36. Other witnesses, who were part of PANAFU, as well as some members of the RUF, have challenged the veracity of this testimony. Indeed, Gordon’s account is not entirely accurate, since Alie Kabba’s umbrella idea went by a different name altogether - the Popular Democratic Front, with the acronym PDF - and had a non-violent agenda for change at its heart. RUF members further pointed out that at the time the students were in Libya, no name had been chosen for the movement they joined. The name RUF was coined by others in Libya and had no direct connection to PANAFU, which had by that time become detached from the revolutionary project.

Divergence of Youths and the Spiral into Violent Rebellion

37. The exiled students raised the idea with PANAFU in Freetown of sending members of their revolutionary “cells” in the city to undertake training programmes in Libya. Four trainees nominated by PANAFU left for Libya during the rainy season of 1987. By the time they returned in 1988, leading members of PANAFU were no longer committed to the revolutionary project, which led to a split in the movement. One group went underground and carried on planning for new batches of trainees, recruiting mainly marginalised youths from the city.

38. PANAFU’s withdrawal from the revolutionary project starved it of ideologically educated youths and turned it into what one writer has described as:

“an individual enterprise… any man (no attempt was made to recruit women) who felt the urge to acquire insurgency training in the service of the “revolution” [could join up]… This inevitably opened the way for the recruitment of lumpens.”

39. Alie Kabba had assumed the position of co-ordinator of the “revolution” because of his pre-existing links with Libya. Many trainees were opposed to Kabba’s leadership, though. They objected to his personal refusal to undergo military training. They also accused him and his friends in Ghana of “sitting on millions of dollars” and benefiting from their recruitment for training in Libya. By the time Kabba left Ghana for Libya, most of the trainees had revolted. The bulk of them had returned to Sierra Leone by 1989 or 1990 and never assumed roles in the RUF movement, or indeed in any of the factions that fought in the conflict.

40. Divergence of paths and purposes occurred during the time of the training in Libya. Sierra Leone’s original student revolutionaries realised they had little in common with some of their countrymen who trained on the camps near Tripoli. Alie Kabba and Cleo Hancilles, the two ideological driving forces, grew wary of the direction their project had assumed and decided to opt out. Into the resultant leadership vacuum stepped Foday Sankoh, an aggrieved former soldier of the Sierra Leone Army who was an anomalous, older presence among the mostly youthful trainees. In Libya, Sankoh met Charles Taylor, the leader of the Liberian trainees on the camp. The two men forged a joint plan for insurgencies in their respective countries, starting in Liberia and moving into Sierra Leone. From that moment on, the course of the “revolution” - and with it the destiny of the sub-region’s youth - changed irreversibly. Sankoh and a handful of cohorts made their way to Liberia and joined an insurgency alongside Taylor’s NPFL. Among the youths involved, only Abu Kanu, a graduate of Njala University College, had reached a level of higher education comparable to the original PANAFU-led group of the mid-1980s.

41. Foday Sankoh began to assemble more fighters for his RUF rebellion in 1990. He used Charles Taylor’s NPFL bases and logistics to train Sierra Leoneans from diverse backgrounds who had been caught up in the turmoil in Liberia. Some were migrant workers whom Sankoh plucked from prisons in NPFL control areas; others were marginalised urban youths and common criminals. They became known as the RUF “vanguards”. In March and April 1991, the vanguards entered Sierra Leone with a troop of NPFL commandos who outnumbered them by about four to one. The Sierra Leone conflict had begun, with youths from unlikely and unsettled circumstances very much to the fore.

42. After the launch of the armed rebellion, most of the youths who joined the RUF, or who were compelled to join the organisation, were marginalised rural youths. Thus different categories of youths were involved at distinct stages of the conflict history of Sierra Leone. Educated youths were involved in the formulation of ideas for revolution and regime change, instigating the training in Libya. Marginalised urban youths were involved in the bulk of the military training and the launch of the insurgency. Thereafter the bulk of the growing manpower of the RUF consisted of marginalised rural youths.

43. Youths who joined the RUF could be further distinguished according to those who joined voluntarily and those who were forced to join. Some of the youths who joined willingly were won over by the simplistic rhetoric of the movement and believed that their involvement would help to reform “the system” that had oppressed them for so long. They were fed up with the APC and wanted a change of government. According to a resident of Pujehun District:

“We assembled at the barray and they addressed us… “We have come to make Sierra Leone a better Sierra Leone… Sierra Leoneans are suffering… education is expensive… we have come to get rid of the APC rule”… After their address, we were happy and prepared food for them… They appointed a town commander… Some of them left after they had finished eating.”

44. However, whether by choice or against their will, practically all the recruits soon adopted forms of behaviour that characterised marginalised youths - drug addiction and violence. Involvement in the rebellion itself became an alienating and marginalising process. RUF and NPFL atrocities in Sierra Leone soon drew contempt and opposition from the communities they were attempting to win over. Youths who had joined the insurgency became completely alienated from their own people, either due to acts in which they participated personally or due to their association with the outrages perpetrated by the movement as a whole.

45. The involvement of youth in the conflict became infinitely more complicated in April 1992, when a band of youths in the Sierra Leone Army overthrew the APC in a coup and formed a military junta known as the NPRC. In an attempt to counter the insurgents at the warfront, the NPRC engaged in mass recruitment of marginalised urban youths into the Army. By 1992, therefore, almost the entire combatant population consisted of youths, on both sides of the battle.

46. It should be recalled that by the eve of the conflict most urban youth had lost all hope. They had sunk into an abyss of unemployment and disillusionment. In this state, fighting in the war seemed a viable alternative. It presented a means through which youths could possibly break out of their despair and transform their lives. Many youth aligned themselves with one or more of the factions and swiftly achieved what they considered progress: they were able to accrue “wealth” and “status” that otherwise would have been unattainable.

47. More youths joined the war when they saw how “profitable” the experience had proved for others. Instead of enduring long periods of unemployment, they looted money and goods. Rather than possessing no stake in society, no property and no hope for the future, they became “commandos” who could acquire guns, sex, food and drugs at their will. The opportunity cost of going to war was very low. War empowered them. Inevitably, such youths began to perceive personal benefits in the continuation of conflict. Across all factions they became the most vocal constituency resisting efforts to end the war.

48. Some youths joined the armed factions in order to carry out personal vendettas. Statements from Pujehun District indicate that some of the earliest recruits into the RUF on its Southern Front were militiamen who had participated in the so-called Ndorgboryosoi rebellion against the APC government in the early 1980s, but ultimately failed. The Commission also heard testimonies from various parts of the country about youths who had been ostracised from their communities in the past, only to return during war to lead fighters into attacking their people, destroying their communities and humiliating their chiefs, elders and members of their traditional authorities.

The Re-convergence of Youths

49. In the late 1970s and 1980s, there had been a convergence of the educated and the uneducated marginalised youths. This convergence initiated discourse on modes and means of resistance, or violence, that could be targeted at the perpetrator of their marginalisation - the APC government. Their discourse took place in the potes, against the background of a non-conflict environment.<