Fire in Freetown?

Editor's note: The events addressed in this post occurred nearly a month ago, and Freetown has been completely stable for weeks. Still, I promised my boy Jimmy D. more info on the riots in Freetown and I just couldn't look myself in the mirror if I did wrong by that king among men, so here goes.

Oh, and the title of this post is a reference to the song off K'naan's stellar sophomore album. Seriously, go buy Troubadour right now. The blog will still be here when you get back.


On March 16, I sat in the passenger seat of a taxi making its way from Conakry to Freetown. I'd been on the road for just over two amazing weeks, and I was exhausted. My ankle was sprained and swollen. The burn on my leg provided the occasional unwelcome shot of pain. My clothes were uniformly filthy. Freetown couldn't really come soon enough.

So, it would be an understatement to say I was not thrilled when one of my friends' cell phones delivered the news that Freetown was the scene of rioting, as we were told that cutlass-wielding youths terrorized the downtown. Craig wondered aloud if we should divert our course to Makeni.

I didn't want to go to Makeni. I wanted to go to Freetown. I wanted to go to Smartfarm. I wanted to go home. To shower. To do laundry. To eat a good meal. And to sleep.

And a couple hours later as we rolled into Freetown, the fact we'd even considered avoiding the city seemed laughable. All around me, Freetown was as I remembered it and, had I not spent a good portion of the next week reading and talking about what had happened, I'm not sure I would've believed there had been any disturbances at all.

In many ways, my return home was a study in juxtaposition. Everything I was hearing painted an image of a city of untold danger. Even outside the violence, which had begun the preceding Friday, my return home was met by the ghastly news that expats were being med-evaced at an alarming rate due to various mishaps, mostly vehicular. There had been something like six evacuees in the last week.

The worst accident saw four VSOs taken to England after a heinously ironic car accident in which their taxi was broadsided by a Red Cross vehicle. One woman had broken both legs, while another had suffered a number of facial lacerations that would require reconstructive surgery.

Chloe and Rob, a couple who stayed next to my crew at Lakka beach on Christmas Eve, were the other two. Rob was the only one who had escaped without serious injuries, but Chloe was comatose and, last I heard, there was still no guarantee she would live.

And yet, as I took a stroll down to Montana's for a delicious pizza dinner, Freetown seemed anything but threatening.

I was stopped every couple minutes by someone in the neighbourhood who wanted to know why they hadn't seen me for a couple weeks. Rather than the weariness this would've engendered in the days leading up to my vacation, I revelled in the friendly faces as a sort of confirmation that Sierra Leoneans were not interested in violence, whether a few rabble-rousers had begun rioting or not.

Noting the gauze on my leg, even complete strangers inquired about my wound with worried visages. A young boy yelled at me across busy Wilkinson Rd., concern echoing with immediacy in his voice. For every lighthearted explanation of my ocada accident I gave out, sincere declarations of "My sympathies" were returned to me. It was nice to be home.

In the days that followed, though average Sierra Leoneans generally dismissed the notion that the rioting would develop into anything more than an isolated annoyance, the frequent banter in the expat community made it impossible to move beyond it. Rumours were flying.

At a meeting to go over our evacuation plan and take further security measures, JHR's country director, Gbanabom "Elvis" Hallowell, confided that he'd heard the opposition Sierra Leone People's Party was planning to kidnap government ministers and torch the newspaper office of the governing All People's Congress. Thankfully, no such malevolent deeds have come to pass.

Having missed the fracas in its entirety, it's a little difficult for me to recount what exactly happened. Fortunately, our lead trainer, Marie-Jo, has already posted a pretty comprehensive blog on the topic, which I suggest you check out here. It gives background into the escalation of violence and a look at some of the aftermath.

In addition, you can check out all the stories Marie-Jo referenced:

1) BBC story from March 17: "Clashes in Sierra Leone capital"
2) Reuters filed two reports: "Seventeen hurt in Sierra Leone political violence" and "Police open fire during S. Leone political violence"
3) Al Jazeera also had two, the first of which includes the video Marie-Jo mentioned: "Women raped in Sierra Leone clashes" and "S Leone president vows crackdown"

I'd have to agree that Reuters sensationalized the story a little, and I found the phrase "police open fire" in the headline a tad misleading, since they only fired warning shots into the air.

I don't, however, see much from the BBC story to suggest their stringer, Umaru Fofana, hyped the violence, though it clearly concerns him. Even before the Monday incidents took place, the President of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists - a man known to many as "Obama" because he represents a younger set of journalists and ran on a campaign of change that coincided temporally with Barack's - wrote this in a March 16 editorial in Awoko newspaper:

Methinks that Sierra Leone's stability keeps hanging on a thinner thread by the day. Even as a natural optimist, recent happenings have consumed my sanguinity. From whence we have come, forgotten fools we have become.... My heart is in my mouth, competing for space with my tears. My country is on the edge. Threats and counter-threats have been flying back and forth.

...

This is the warning shot and we must listen to it and change our ways.... If our leaders do not show leadership, we are tinkering on the brink of mayhem in a country whose people know full well what every letter of that word means.

I think this last point is especially significant. Ever since I've been here, the attitude I've generally heard from Sierra Leoneans is that they like President Ernest Bai Koroma, but the knock on him has always been that he's not a strong enough leader. While he is believed to be free of corruption, the perception is that he can't control his ministers, who don't share his integrity.

As alluded to in the Al Jazeera piece, Koroma didn't provide the type of strong leadership a situation such as this demands. It took him entirely too long to come out with a denouncement of the violence, and when he did so it was laden with divisive political overtones.

Rather than offer a strong, non-partisan message designed to unite the country and quickly put down any overzealous sentiment, he opted to take pot shots at the SLPP for being unwilling to accept the opposition role. A nation-building opportunity was clearly missed.

Politically, incidents such as these aren't doing the APC any favours. I've noticed a stark decline in support for the government, as Sierra Leoneans revert to deeply-rooted perceptions that the party ranks are populated by bullies.

But whether the riots give the SLPP the edge at the polls or not, such violence ultimately serves only to further smear the country's international reputation and set back the progress made. It will make things more difficult on whomever wins the elections in 2012, as they will have to battle even harder to convince the international community of the country's stability.

Hopefully, the country's politicians can soon recognize these simple truths, as it's clear that the general population understands them. Many people I've spoken to firmly believe the country has no stomach for a return to violence, and this attitude has fueled my cautious optimism about the nation's stability throughout my stay here.

Still, when unemployment rages and many youths were raised on violence, how quickly does 'rebel soldier' begin to look like a good career option? For the sake of Sierra Leone, I hope the answer is not at all.