When Hell Descended on Freetown
January 6, 2021
A-Z Multi-media Corporation Editor Albert Baron Ansu retraces a dark chapter in our war history and zero in on implication of today for the future of Sierra Leone as nation…
Today is January 6. It comes as a rude awakening to older Sierra Leoneans who retain memories of that dark overcast on our skyline in Freetown.
The intro of this commentary is both a literarily and literally valid. It conjures an image of hellishness. The billowing of smoke and littering human cadaver, the cordite stench filled air….
The BBC was apt at that time to have reported it as a scene of apocalypse. And it is no exaggeration to explain the magnitude of the carnage that was let loose when soldiers that had defected to rebels of Revolutionary United Front, returned from the northern jungles of Krubola and outgunned pro government forces and UN peacekeepers daringly and brazenly. Theirs was both a mission to avenge and revenge in Freetown.
Remember: renegade soldiers came to avenge the burning alive of the colleagues that were entrapped in the wake ECOMOG and Kamajoh militia intervention spearheaded by Maxwell Khobe.
They also bent on revenging their somewhat disbandment from the national army following the ouster to returned power to late former President Tejan Kabbah in 1998.
One year following the ECOMOG restoration of democracy based on the insistence of General Sani Abacha of Nigeria, the country slid into false sense of security. Hardly did most Sierra Leoneans consider the missing army on the run as a factor worth considering or reintegrating. The renegade soldiers had become non-existent in our consciousness as wishful and wistful way of allowing peace to reign.
You can say the country was dozing and SAJ Musa, (who would die at Benguema barracks ammo dump explosion) was strategizing in the forest to brutally force the country to accept the missing soldiers. He who had led the attack from the northern jungle could not reach in Freetown. It could have been out of divine providence from hindsight. Those renegade soldiers, who were with SAJ in the planning of the come-back, recalled his open boasts to raze the city in inordinate massacre.
But even as he died and was buried at the Benguema army barracks those who took over from him including 55, Gullit etal…unleashed the biggest carnage of amputation and mass killing
“Na una bin dae burn we brother dem wit taya den…lay you han…”The krio lines attributed to the drugged and irate renegade soldiers that wielded cutlasses and axes for revenge translates as: you were the ones burning our brothers alive with tyres lay you hand.
This was the renegade soldier’s way of justifying the chopping off hands and limbs of our compatriots. The amputees most of them have died in traumatic conditions and most of them live with us with the stumps and prefab fittings.
January 6 distorted the world impression about the Sierra Leonean. It suggested that we are animalistic and sadists. It left us living memories of the darkest chapter of the war. Two decades thereafter we are still trying to find ourselves like shepherdless flock of sheep.
How sadly it is that the country has not built national consensus on how best to remember this day? We should be figuring out what to do with this day that tends to pass unnoticed.
One lesson that this episode of J 6 wrought is that hate begets hate and there can be no winner in the slug out of venom.
For when the UN Peacekeepers and pro-government forces including Kamajoh militias regained their wit in operation death before dishonor to expel the soldiers from the city after their siege of Freetown relying on human shield, the outcome was to come back to terms and smoke the peace-pipe. The soldiers were encouraged to join the Disarmament and demobilization and Reintegration process and were retrained and reenlisted in the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces. Some were retrenched in the downsizing and right sizing of the army to make it more professional and efficient as we have it today.
Victims of January 6 are the amputees and seeing them parade the streets of Freetown trying to get attention is supposed to prickle our conscience as a nation supposed to hold knit to certain things that are challenging our cohesiveness. Holding fast to progressiveness is one of those certain things required to make up for war ravages linger…
