THROUGH FOREIGN EYES
Refugee Children Escape Sierra Leone Hell
HOW CAN I ANSWER THE QUESTION "WHY?"--asked by sobbing teenagers from Sierra Leone? What can I tell these adolescents arriving at the health care center prostrate, distraught, re-viewing again and again the horrible film of what they have been through? What can I say to deeply traumatized kids who have seen their own parents killed under horrible conditions, who witnessed a sister or mother raped, a beheaded father's head rolling on the floor because he refused to rape his own daughter, or who were forced to make "short or long sleeves" (chop the arm or the forearm) to a brother to save their own life? Could you live after making such an impossible choice, remembering the house burning with the whole family trapped inside?
Surviving kids find themselves drugged, military trained, dragged into murdering violence--violence resonating to others' violence--trained to participate in a dirty war where even those who are supposed to reinstall peace act in the same brutal way. What logic can be assigned to such savagery? "It's because they know they will never get any power that they dare to do everything" was the clear-minded judgment of a 16-year-old boy when I asked what he understood of this hell.
I am the Director of the French AVRE health care center, an association for "victims of repression in exile"--a soft name for torture victims. We started with a mission in Guinea in 1984 to take care of prisoners released from the concentration camps after the death of the mad Guinean dictator, President Sekou Touré.
The children who come to us are the "lucky ones" who have succeeded in escaping and whom people have put in planes and sent to different countries like France. Most of them come straight from Sierra Leone. They arrive at our health care center--sent mostly by the social assistants and people that get to know them--because these youngsters are so psychologically and physically damaged that they were frightening others in the place where they were surviving. They are "British" educated and most touching.
It had been a long time since I had cried in my office, but I had to cry alone once or twice in past weeks. One youngster came to us with his shirt shredded by flogging. He came to my office in January, frozen because he had nothing to wear except a sweat shirt, his shredded shirt, and oversize jeans. He had been in France for more than two weeks, always living in fear of the nights spent outside, a logical continuation of the fear felt when he was running away in his country: "This will never end!"
It will end; it must end! We have to do whatever is necessary so it stops. When these kids arrive in an asylum country, we have to do everything we can to stop the horror, so that they--deprived of their childhood and their teenage years--don't assimilate to the continuing trauma. They may be tall or show an illusive maturity, but we must not expect from them adult attitudes, especially in their psychological weakness.
We have to prevent the absurd from becoming logic. Absurdity has to remain inexplicable, without answers. Isn't it absurd to build a peace process on amnesty for torturers? Is there any sense in expecting refugees to imagine going back to their homeland when the torturers are in charge of the ministry within the context of a settled peace agreement?
What will be left of a country that was once one of the biggest wholesale exporters of slaves for US cotton fields? The US is, or has been, involved in Sierra Leone. Madeleine Albright, your new gender symbol, was there on October 18, 1998. US authorities have proof that Liberians and Burkinabe are among the rebels. The Washington Post has the registration numbers of the planes that have been used for ammunition, transportation, etc.
Sierra Leone is a martyred country. Thousands of its 5 million inhabitants have been killed by rebels and soldiers from their homeland, where 50,000 have been auto-mutilated to death in the last 8 years, and there are now 2 million refugees. This land is collapsing on itself-the humanitarian catastrophe of the 20th century into the 21st. The explanation is economic. Sierra Leone is exporting lots of diamonds. If diamonds are forever, let's hope the absurdity and horror will soon end.
--Dr. Pierre Duterte, <p.duterte@wanadoo.fr>