Author
By Umaru Fofana
I sat in a meeting of some armless and limbless men and women on Tuesday. Yes it is a familiar sight to see them. Yes it is not unfamiliar to anyone reading this piece to hear their harrowing experience. But, Yes, there is something that may be unfamiliar. They live in appalling conditions and are neglected by the authorities in a way that makes them feel as if they are still being amputated. Agonising. Painful. Frustrating. Hopeless.
They live under very reduced circumstances. The new even if long-running experience they have been forced to live with is dehumanising. I sat in the meeting of dozens of leaders of the over 1,000 amputees from every district of Sierra Leone. They were meeting to discuss their welfare, or the lack of it.
Today their meeting and their plight cannot seem to interest anyone. None of the country's leaders were present. No other journalists. Coming weeks after elections, no politician was in attendance. A meeting of such a nature in early November would have attracted politicians of all shades and colours jockeying for seats in the small but impressive National Office for the Amputee and War Wounded Association. Its location could not have been more appropriate. Aberdeen Road.
At the height of the war the Aberdeen Road Amputee Camp housed these men and women, and in some instances children who became the Poster Guys for the carnage that was visited upon Sierra Leone in the 1990s and brought out the worst in man. When the rest of the world thought it was all a festival gone awry after some boozing spree, photos of the stumps of what was left of their arms and limbs proved it was near-Armageddon. A war of boundless cruelty.
Those photos in broadsheets and on TV screens pricked the scar of the conscience of those who could act to do so. Act they did. They came from far and wide to help end some of the most despicable atrocities of our time. Drugged men and boys who not only killed but raped and maimed. They used machetes to hack off the arms and limbs of these people with whom I sat this week. Brothers killed. Sisters raped. Mothers maimed.
A visit by anyone to this country was not complete if they did not go to the Amputee Camp at Aberdeen Road. The victims of the war became a tourist attraction. Probably for good measure it was decided that they be relocated to cleanse the image of the country. But they were to move with memories of their plight. Plus the new reality and experience of being abandoned to fend for themselves.
That relocation would not have happened without some good Samaritans in Norway. They donated money under the Norwegian Friendship Association, to build nearly 1,000 shelters for our war victims across the country. Mummy Elisa has dedicated her retirement life towards tending to these abandoned and neglected compatriots of ours.
I know January 6 is a few weeks off. The date on which in 1999 brutality defied the human mind. Brand new cutlasses kept for purposes of agriculture to feed the nation became the source to starve and dehumanise hundreds of people whose body parts were hacked off, and the thousands of their dependants. The word “amputee” became a part of the lexicon of even the uneducated Sierra Leonean.
Their agony may have helped bring about peace but how much attention have we paid to our amputees. Some people even see them as a menace and an albatross around our necks and even an eyesore on the streets. But they have to be on the streets to find something to feed. Or die of hunger in the discomfort of their homes. Or someone should step up and take up their responsibility by attending to their needs. A scar on the conscience of our leaders.
The peace agreement signed in the Togolese capital, Lome, set out a wide range of mechanisms to not just end the war but look after those most directly hit by it and left alive. Like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing, those who are alive think those who died were the lucky ones, better off. In a country endowed with huge mineral resources, the peace agreement suggested the setting-up of a commission to manage a fund for victims of the war. That has not happened.
Speaker after speaker at the Tuesday meeting asked for things as basic as providing them with water and food at their new settlements, free medical care and enabling their children get a good education. And perhaps most contentious they want their social benefits which should come in the form of a monthly pay to take care of their basic needs. These are people who can no longer be employed. Some of them have been forced to farm with only one hand or with prosthetics.
One can only imagine how many people have built mansions and bought big cars in the name of caring for the amputees while the victims themselves struggle to eke out a living. Their unsightly sights begging for alms on the streets are as revealing as they are heart-wrenching. Yet hardly does anyone seem to care about them.
The National Commission for Social Action (NaCSA), which is heading the reparations programme say the funds needed to tend to these our very unfortunate compatriots are not available. I agree that donors have chickened out of their commitment and gone away with the return of normalcy even without a more permanent solution to the Amputee Question. But can we not step in? Whatever happened to corporate social responsibility!
It would not be too much to suggest that a certain percentage of taxes/royalty paid from our iron ore, for example, be dedicated towards starting something dealing with the Amputee Question. Or may be for a start, let there be a conference of amputee leaders such as the Tuesday one, to discuss what they want, what they need and what can be met by government. We cannot afford to continue abandoning these our compatriots who were only less fortunate to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The last time I visited by amputee friends at Mattru On The Rail, I was shocked to see two women, the one without an arm, struggling to fish in a stream if only to make ends meet. The other fella, Dabor, was farming with his left hand after his right hand had been chopped off.
Last week, Dabor called me from Makeni that a friend had offered to send for him to travel to a hospital in Makeni to undergo a surgery. He could not go through it in Bo because he did not have money. Thankfully the surgery is done and he is back at his Norwegian-built settlement at Mattru.
Some of those settlements, good as they may be for the amputees, have had an adverse effect on them. Many of them raised it in the Tuesday meeting that their neighbours do not empathise with them because they think money comes for them every now and again from all around the world. Some even said that traders sky-rocket prices when they go to the market on the same assumption that they receive huge amounts of money from government and the world. Their neighbours think money comes in bags for them. A real catch twenty-two situation indeed! Like the coloured in apartheid South Africa who the black felt were with the white and the white accused them of being with the black. The Amputee Question must be raised again and addressed. I will return to it in the New Year.
