Chris McGreal in Freetown
The young black man with a Sierra Leone accent insisted that he was indeed William Edward Floode. It said so on his Welsh birth certificate; born October 1975 in South Glamorgan.
Floode pleaded that he has a brother in London and an aunt working for the United Kingdom probation service. There were their phone numbers. But the British official behind the gate of the hotel- turned-military camp and evacuation centre would have none of it. Where was his British passport? Floode said he had been on his mother’s passport as a child, when his family returned to Sierra Leone, and had no need of one since.
Until now. It wasn’t good enough, and he was left to stand disconsolate in the sun wondering what to do. “I cannot understand it. I really have to get out of this place. It’s dreadful, always worrying about whether someone is going to chop your head. The British don’t want to take me because I’m black, but I’m British like them. Let them go to Cardiff and see. I’m sure there are lots of black people there,” he said.
He was not alone. Many others tried to get through the hotel gates, but without the right kind of passport they were all turned back. The British military did evacuate more than 300 other people from Freetown on Wednesday, mostly with European Union passports. But many other foreigners were reassured by the growing British army contingent in Sierra Leone’s capital and decided just to register their names and return to their homes.
They may yet regret it. Freetown was quieter, but overnight shootings left at least 19 dead and more than 50 wounded as scores were settled after Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels gunned down unarmed protesters on Monday.
The commander of the British military force in Sierra Leone, Brigadier David Richards, said with several thousand militiamen and demobilised soldiers in Freetown – some rebels, some from the government side – he is as concerned about the risk of faction fighting on the streets as he is by a rebel attack from outside the city.
“There are a lot of ex-combatants here who are taking the law into their own hands. We have to keep a watch on them. There’s always the risk of a coup. It’s a recipe for anarchy.”
It may not yet be anarchy, but the lack of central control is only too evident as government soldiers crammed into the backs of lorries wormed their way through Freetown’s narrow streets. The occasional gunshot sent people scurrying. They don’t yet have faith in their own army to protect them.
Members of the Kamajor pro-government militia are also on the streets, waving down cars and searching pedestrians. It was, they said, a security operation but Sierra Leonians quietly whispered that the hunt was on for supporters of the rebel leader, Foday Sankoh.
The search was also under way for Sankoh himself. He disappeared from his house about the time his men opened fire on the protesters at his gates. In Freetown, the interest in the rebel leader’s whereabouts is more than mere curiosity. It may determine whether Sierra Leone faces another extended bout of bloodletting and atrocities.
The most popular rumour has it that the RUF leader is in the clutches of the United Nations as a kind of bargaining tool for the nearly 500 peacekeepers being held hostage by the rebels. The UN heatedly denies it.
“We are anxious to contact him for reasons that are clear,” said representative David Wimhurst.
Then word spread that the Sierra Leone Army had snatched Sankoh and was holding him at one of its bases. But the government denied that. Richards believes the rebel leader has fled the capital and it does not bode well.
“He’s out and about somewhere planning to have another go because he is testing the will of the UN,” he said.
Wherever Sankoh may be, if he returns to Freetown it won’t be to his old home. The dead were still scattered outside a day after they fell victim to his rebels’s impatience with dissent. The body of a young woman, her arm pulled across her face and her chest soaked in blood, lay close to a cardboard placard with “UN toothless bulldog” written in a careful hand.
A couple of large lorries pulled up. Some thought they had come to collect the corpses, but it transpired they were from the United States embassy. US technicians came to rip out a generator loaned by the Americans to the Nigerian intervention force which in turn gave it to the rebel leader. The embassy was grasping the opportunity to get it back.
The generator was just about the only thing still intact at the house. Looters moved in last night, taking revenge on Sankoh and his cohorts by tearing their portraits from the wall and carting off their clothes and furniture. Thousands of syringes were scattered on the floor, a testament to the widespread use of drugs among the rebels.
A couple of posters – “Stop the use of Child Soldiers” – seemed little better than a taunt, given the RUF’s abduction of innocent children who were swiftly transformed into killers.
The British military contingent – with 800 soldiers already on the ground and many more on their way by ship – is rapidly taking on the role of the defenders of Freetown. The capital’s residents are counting on it.
The British have taken over the international airport and the western part of Freetown from which the helicopters fly. Richards says that frees up UN troops to defend the rest of the city, but then he concedes that the UN mission – Unamsil – is not in the best position to do so, so the British are helping with that too.
The army says it will remain for as long as evacuation might be necessary.
That includes the possibility of airlifting out the British high commissioner, Alan Jones. But Jones says that he is not going anywhere and so the soldiers will have to stay for as long as there is a threat. “From a military perspective, it could go on for some time,” Richards said.