Opinion
By Lans Gberie, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Reading through the report of the Political Parties Registration Commission (PPRC) on the recent Kono violence, I was immediately struck by this finding:
“The Commission having examined the entire situation in Kono based on eye witness accounts and interviews has made the following conclusion: That the uninvited entry of Adamu Eze widely believed to be a supporter of the APC [All Peoples Congress] into the precincts of the Fachima Hall with Youths where the SLPP [Sierra Leone Peoples Party] was having their meeting is in the least an act of provocation and a show of political intolerance.”
‘Uninvited entry’: the report understandably uses sedate language like that. It says, moreover, that “the SLPP delegates were attacked and pelted with stones through no fault of theirs. They did not provoke any situation that could warrant an attack on them by any group or group of individuals.”
These facts, of course, were all well known, but it is refreshing that the PPRC – an important national institution – should say so without equivocation. Where the PPRC – again understandably equivocates- is assigning ultimate responsibility:
“The PPRC could not get any prima facie evidence as to whether the violent attack on [the SLPP] delegates was prompted or motivated by the leadership or supporters of any party or movement.”
I think that it is important, if nasty occurrences such as that in Kono are to be prevented in future, that ultimately culpability be assigned, perhaps after a more thorough investigation.
Sometime last year after successive violent confrontations between supporters of the ruling APC and the opposition SLPP, I was commissioned by a major multilateral organisation to investigate the roots of the clashes and make recommendations with respect to mitigating measures. I traveled in most of the districts in the country: beginning in Freetown, I did Bo, Pujehun, Kenema, Kailahun, Bombali, Koinadugu and then Kono.
Some of my findings surprised me, not least the key one: All of the violent political clashes that occurred in the provincial towns/cities since the elections of 2007 were preceded by visits from Freetown by high-profile leaders or activists of either the APC or the SLPP. I found that both these parties have very limited and tenuous infrastructure outside of the capital, and so the initiative for any organised political activity or violence must come from the top leadership, mainly in Freetown. In even a volatile place like Kono, the evidence I unearthed suggested that it is simply not feasible – certainly not the tradition – for local groups, even unruly youth groups, to initiate any serious violent political confrontation without the blessings or signals of top political leaders; and that the young people who actually carry out the violence, in Freetown and elsewhere in the country, merely respond to such signals, however vaguely expressed by the party leadership or prominent activists.
I had got to know Adamu Eze during my three days stay in Kono. His name had come up in more than a dozen interviews I had had with people in Kono, as the principal perpetrator of most of the political violence, including gang-rape of supposed SLPP female supporters. A contact brought him to see me.
A slight, soft-spoken man, Mr. Eze appeared surprisingly vacant. He was very casually dressed; and his drowsy eyes suggested a hangover from the previous night (we met at about 10:00 am). His manner was diffident, even ingratiating; but he curiously spoke with a charming un-self-consciousness. There was about him more vapidity than irritation, even when confronted with heinous allegations. I spent two hours with him.
He was born, he said, in 1969. His father was a Nigerian trader (an Igbo) and his mother a Temne from Makeni. The hallmarks of Mr. Eze’s life are some of the turbulent milestones of Sierra Leone’s recent past. He joined the army in 1991, hastily recruited just after the war started. He joined the Second Battalion at Teko Barracks in Makeni. He rose to become a Sergeant just before the Johnny Paul Koroma coup in 1997, of which he was an enthusiastic supporter. When Koroma’s Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) was unseated by Nigerian troops in 1998, Mr. Eze fled, first to Kono, where he participated in massacres of civilians and “Tejan Kabbah’s SLPP supporters.” When Kono was threatened by Nigerian troops, loyal soldiers and the Civil Defence Forces (CDF), Mr. Eze fled and joined SAJ Musa’s forces in Kabala. Under Musa, Mr. Eze was such a brutal enforcer that he was very quickly promoted to Colonel.
When the war wound down, and disarmament started in 2000, he offered himself for reintegration, and was placed under Colonel Yira Koroma. Mr. Eze insisted on being called a ‘Colonel’; and so Colonel Koroma, convinced that “two Colonels cannot serve in a brigade”, sent the churlish Mr. Eze to the 8th Battalion under Major PS Foday Koroma. “I was placed at a checkpoint between Masiaka and Freetown” by Major Koroma, he told me. “I was instructed to identify RUF [Revolutionary United Front] fighters, since I had fought with them and know how they look. They were not to go pass through the checkpoint without being fully disarmed.”
At the road-block, Mr. Eze says he arrested a RUF fighter, one Tanda, “who was one of Issa Sesay’s boys. He had diamonds in his wallet, which I took and delivered to my commanding officer. Colonel Koroma heard about the diamonds and asked me about them. I told him that I’d passed them on to his brother [Major Koroma]. Later, he gave me Le. 15,000. I grumbled and grumbled, and I was accused of indiscipline, and imprisoned with hard labour for 32 days.”
After his release, Mr. Eze said that he asked for leave to rebuild his mother’s house, which had been destroyed during the war. He mentioned this rather matter-of-factly, as though he had played no role in the war; as though indeed this had been a natural mishap. He was given his leave.
Mr. Eze spent more than his 32 days, and returned, he said, “several months later.” The army wouldn’t have him back, he was told. The reintegration process had advanced way too far, and some of the notorious officers had been weeded out. Unknown to him, Mr. Eze was one of those considered too dangerous to allow into the ‘new’ army. He didn’t see it this way: he had someone to blame for his predicament. “Colonel Koroma frustrated me when I wanted to return to the army; he forced me out unceremoniously. He was a strong SLPP supporter, you see, and they don’t like me for my role in the AFRC.”
Mr. Eze’s weapons were taken from him but not his uniform, he said. In 2002, he moved back to Kono, and became, he said, “a licensed diamond miner.” He also joined Johnny Paul Koroma’s Peoples Progressive Party (PPP), which contested the 2002 elections and won some seats. Paul Koroma soon after fled the country after being accused of plotting another coup – and just after his indictment by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. In 2004, Mr. Eze joined the APC, and became Central Youth Chairman and APC Taskforce Leader in the district. In 2008, he was made full APC Youth Leader in Kono.
In that position, he said, “I have helped some of my youths join the police [the armed paramilitary wing], and have gotten some to be made Mines Monitors. Many are working under me as miners at the No. 11” [a mountain of tailing left behind by the defunct National Mining Company, NDMC]. As well as being a miner, Mr. Eze was also made ‘Chief Security Officer” at the mining site by John Yambasu, the (APC) Chairman of the Kono District Council, he said. At the time he said that there were ten police officers guarding the site, and they were all answerable to him. I did not know whether he was bluffing, but the next day when I visited the site, I realized that the officers were in awe of Mr. Eze. He also had 20 youths working for him at the site.
The conversation then moved on to the attacks on SLPP supporters at the Aries nightclub in Kono a few months before our meeting. A group of SLPP heavyweights, including John Benjamin (the party’s chair) and Mrs. Iye Kabbah, had visited the city, and were attacked by young men said to be APC supporters. Three women were allegedly raped. I met two of the women, and both were convinced that Mr. Eze was among those who assaulted them. But the attacks took place at about 1:30 am, in different locations near the nightclub, so Mr. Eze couldn’t possibly have participated in all three of them, a point he picked on immediately. “These women have now disappeared. Tests were conducted on them at the Rainbow Centre, and nothing was found. These are baseless allegations, you see,” he said, almost pleading.
He appeared convincing on the point that he didn’t personally participate in the assaults, but such is his notoriety and putative control over the feral youths in the city that it is almost certain Mr. Eze had overseen the attacks. Knowing of the other bogus tests of alleged rape victims in better-equipped clinics in Freetown, it was easy to ignore the supposed test at the Rainbow Centre: a near-derelict facility…
Mr. Eze had strong views about politics – he is after-all an active politician of sorts – and he readily lectured me on the nature of “African politics.” “Violence is a part of it. The opposition SLPP has been provoking us. They tell us that we won the elections of 2007 but they control governance,” he said. “They treat us as fools, so we have to fight back to show them that we are in control. You see, after the elections, we all must avoid politics. They should sit down and wait for the next elections and allow our government to rule. But all they are doing is politics, politics, politics. We have to put them in their place.”
It was the voice less of a believer than a true mercenary. Still, there was a touch of self-parody about this role: from participating in large-scale massacres, a sanguinary ‘rebel’ war, Mr. Eze is now merely a brutal political enforcer, with his phallic weapon to terrorise defenceless women and shits to throw at opposition buildings. But it occurred to me, listening to his deranged locution, in an impoverished city blighted and war-scarred, a place with so many layers of dereliction and decrepitude, it occurred to me that this may well be a dress-rehearsal for something more sinister, something that ought now to be halted in its track. “The APC is giving more to the youths now. The SLPP was all for chiefs; they were in complete control. But here in Kono, we the youths are in control, we are power.”
Mr. Eze was, in spite of himself, a very lucid politician indeed….
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