by Tim Butcher
I was excited to be covering the endgame of Taylor’s regime, so I headed to the rain-lashed Mamba Point Hotel, a rare safe haven for visitors to Monrovia during wartime, where I was charged £80-a-night for a room with unwashed, damp sheets and mosquitoes that droned like Stuka dive-bombers. Down in the gloomy hotel restaurant, after curfew began, I would pass the worst of the storms watching the plate-glass doors leading to the balcony quiver in the wind as coconut palms thrashed around outside like dervishes against a grey Atlantic backdrop.
War meant that food was scarce but when it was not safe to venture outside the hotel I would still pass the time in the un-stocked restaurant, sometimes talking to the forlorn Sierra Leonean ambassador to Liberia, the only hotel guest who was not a foreign reporter. His Excellency Patrick James Foyah had been forced to decamp to the Mamba Point Hotel when his private residence was destroyed by looters just a few days earlier.
‘The strange thing,’ he said, ‘ was my house is nowhere near the place where the rebels attacked, so it must have been Taylor’s own people who did it.’
I spent a few days in what had become one of the world’s most dangerous and broken cities gathering material for my main report, hoping to come up with something that would make it stand out from my rivals’. I applied for an interview with Taylor himself but was turned down. I went to see a group of women who were staging a non-violent protest against the war. Wearing white T-shirts pasted to their bodies by the rain, they stood ankle-deep in mud on open ground near the city’s abandoned fish market determinedly singing anthems and chanting slogans. With the curfew strictly enforced it was only safe for them to gather at dawn but they would pass all the daylight hours, no matter the weather, solemnly protesting, desperate for an end to Liberia’s cycle of war, lawlessness and decay. Even though they stood no chance against thugs like Chuckie Taylor, the triumph of hope over experience was uplifting and I thought initially about focusing my piece on them.
Then I became inspired by a sinister-looking grave I had seen in the city’s main cemetery bearing the name of someone who had recently died, Elizabeth T. Nimley. The letters were scrawled in a smudgy jumble of upper and lower case by someone using black paint that had dripped. It was ghoulish, almost voodoo-like, and it made me wonder how easily the dead can rest in a place with graves like this. Perhaps this was the way to encapsulate the zombie city.
But when I eventually got my satellite phone to work in one of the breaks between electrical storms, I spoke to my editor and he told me exactly what he wanted.
‘When people think of Liberia they think of drug-crazed gunmen wearing magic wigs, so that’s what I want,’ he said.
I made my way towards the site of a recent firefight where the corpses of dead gunmen had been left to rot on the road. Next to a skull lay a wig, bloody and knotted – just what the editor had ordered.
Wigs, often brightly coloured with crazy coiffure, were regularly worn by gunmen in Liberia, along with wedding dresses, headscarves and other bizarre accoutrements. Some said they did this because the costumes were imbued with a force field of magical powers to protect the wearer; others refined the explanation, saying it changed the identity of the wearer thereby saving him from harm; others hinted at magic too secret to share with outsiders.
These responses fitted into an underlying theme of sinister ritualism, the hallmark of the fighting in Liberia, but one that was deeply frustrating as it was so difficult to fathom. When I started to enquire further, various sources said the practice reached to the top of the regime and I even heard accusations that Taylor, like other Liberian warlords, used cannibalism – not through hunger, but to somehow harness their power by consuming their enemies’ body parts. As his regime faltered, Taylor, they said, had become more and more willing to explore anything that might help defeat the rebels, including the use of ritual murder and cannibalism. It was my report on this that drew the death threat from his people.
I never saw anything in writing but the message passed via my diplomat friend was that it was too risky for me to return to Liberia while Taylor was still in power. I had no choice but to report from outside the country as rebels brought down his regime a few weeks later. Two of his predecessors as Liberian president had been murdered in office but Taylor avoided these grisly precedents by accepting a flight into exile in Nigeria in August 2003 – although, eventually, he would be tried for his role in fomenting war in nearby Sierra Leone, the first African leader ever to stand trial for war crimes.
I felt both shame and frustration at missing the denouement of his regime. As a reporter I had failed. I had made it impossible for myself to get into Liberia, missing the opportunity to cover an important historical turning point, but it was not the first time I had felt a strong sense of frustration in West Africa.
My first trip to Sierra Leone, the north-westerly neighbour of Liberia, had touched on the best and worst of life – love and death. In May 2000, I had flown to Sierra Leone to report on the sudden deployment of British troops to shore up a United Nations peace-keeping mission in danger of collapse under rebel attack. Terrible leadership, muddled communications and military incompetence meant the 9,000-strong UN force had been reduced to a state of complete chaos by disjointed gangs of ill-disciplined militiamen, mainly belonging to the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
The civil war in Sierra Leone had been started by the RUF, a non-ideological, non-tribal armed group that had effectively been created by Taylor to plunder whatever it could. Taylor wanted to destabilise his neighbouring state and at the same time make a financial profit. The rebels started with the alluvial diamond fields out in the east of the country not far from the Liberian border but then went further, including looting rampages through Freetown, the capital city on the Atlantic Ocean over on the western edge of the country. Attacking from Liberia for the first time in 1991, the hallmarks of the RUF were to be its cruelty and durability. In spite of concerted efforts by regional peacekeepers, diplomats and even mercenaries, the RUF kept the civil war festering in Sierra Leone throughout the 1990s, with occasional spikes of bloodletting and chaos.
Just such a spike had brought about the British military deployment, when attempts to negotiate the disarmament of the RUF had collapsed and the gunmen turned violent. Hundreds of UN peace-keepers were suddenly surrounded in their bush camps upcountry by hostile gunmen. Cut off from rescue and re-supply, the peacekeepers had effectively been taken hostage while a wretched few actually fell into the hands of the rebels. They were tortured and executed.
The chaos worsened when the militiamen put on UN uniforms and stole the peacekeepers’ white-painted vehicles, meaning that for a time nobody in Sierra Leone knew who to trust. Panic reached Freetown as the remaining peacekeepers melted away from the rebel advance and civilians fled in fear of a repeat of the terrible bloodshed of January 1999 when the RUF had fought their way into the city, laying waste to entire suburbs, looting property and slaughtering civilians. The UN mission headquarters was located in a hotel overlooking the most westerly beach in Freetown, the country’s most westerly city, and for a short period it felt like the foreign force was going to be driven into the sea.
For me as a foreign correspondent that trip to Sierra Leone was in many ways the perfect story. It was totally unexpected, strategically significant and downright exciting. I was based in London at the time and the first I heard about Britain sending a fighting force to West Africa was early one Monday morning before I commuted by motorbike across London to the Canary Wharf headquarters of the Telegraph. Two hours later and I was back on the bike charging up the M40 motorway desperate to reach the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton near Oxford. I had persuaded the British Ministry of Defence to give me the last seat on a military transport plane deployed on what commanders were calling Operation Palliser, but it was a close-run thing. The straps of my hastily packed rucksack flicked annoyingly around the edges of my visor as I huddled over the handlebars trying to ride as fast as I could. I made
the flight by minutes but had backache for days.
The story dominated international news for weeks and I found myself at the centre of it all. It was my first experience of sub-Saharan Africa and I can remember the thrill when the cargo aircraft doors whirred open in the small hours of the following morning and I smelled the sweet sedgy scent of Sierra Leone for the first time, still not knowing if the capital city would fall.
When I made it to the grounds of the UN hotel headquarters in Freetown the tropical night air was made even warmer by exhaust blasts from military helicopters flying soldiers in and civilians, mostly British passport-holders, out. I joshed with a television reporter friend about who would find the first white nun fleeing to safety and was then amazed that almost the first people I saw on touchdown were four sisters of The Holy Rosary.
‘We missed a helicopter flight a few minutes ago and we are not going to do that again,’ Sister Celia Doyle, from County Wexford in Ireland, shouted, struggling to make herself heard above the engine roar, her wimple flapping in the downdraught from the rotor blades.
By daybreak a crowd of terrified Sierra Leoneans had gathered at the gates of the UN headquarters, crushed against the fence pleading for space on the helicopters, but within a matter of days the tipping point had passed and the city had effectively been saved. Patrols of British soldiers, led by members of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, were spreading out from the helipad and order was being restored, first across Freetown and then beyond. The deployment was bold, decisive and effective. The UN mission had been rescued.
I had been sent with the British force as a ‘pool reporter’, which meant that because I had been flown in first to Freetown, my reports had to be shared with rival newspapers in Fleet Street. For a few days I was able to set the agenda, an exciting time for any journalist. I slept on a basement floor, washing in a shower using water from a stagnant swimming pool, and survived on biscuits and lukewarm Coke. But for those few heady days I ignored the hardship, thrilled instead to have privileged access to the officers and soldiers of ‘1 Para’ as they rewrote Britain’s rules for overseas deployment. For several years I had served as the Telegraph’s Defence Correspondent and in the 1990s I had reported how the government slowly threw off caution born of the Cold War, sending troops first to Bosnia and then Kosovo. The Sierra Leone deployment was another important step in this evolution, the first time significant numbers of British combat troops were risked on a unilateral humanitarian mission outside Europe. And the success of the mission would eventually reach far beyond West Africa as it would contribute to the decision by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, to commit British troops to the much more controversial and costly US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In short, Sierra Leone gave Blair his faith in foreign military intervention.
The long-term historical value of the mission was hard for me to focus on as I charged around having the time of my journalist’s life. The Paras whisked me upcountry by Chinook helicopter to report on their reconnaissance specialists, the Pathfinders. They had set up a blocking position to defend the approach to the country’s main airport and their bush location was the most exposed and vulnerable of all the British force. That night – after I had flown back to Freetown – the Pathfinder position was attacked under cover of darkness by the RUF. The British soldiers had seen their attackers coming but held their fire until the last moment. Several of the men approaching the position appeared to be wearing items of UN uniform and the British soldiers did not know if they were genuine peacekeepers or rebels attempting a ruse de guerre. When the approaching men dived to the ground and started shooting, the Pathfinders fired back. None of the British troops was injured but at daybreak the bodies of four RUF rebels were found along with a number of UN berets.
That same day senior officers briefed me on the arrest of Foday Sankoh, the talismanic brute who had led the RUF when it established its hallmark of hacking hands and arms from innocent civilians. He had been captured in Freetown along with a witchdoctor, his personal guide to the dark arts of West African spiritualism. After nine years as one of the region’s most violent bogeymen, he was spirited away by British military helicopter to a safe location pending trial for war crimes. But those seeking retribution would be denied closure as he was never actually brought to trial. His health deteriorated in prison following a stroke and he died in custody, a shambling, incontinent, confused figure barely able to say his own name.
I have good reason to remember the moment when, after a few days, my British-based newspaper colleagues eventually caught up with me in Freetown. The airport was the main headquarters of the British force and I was hanging around the concrete apron waiting to speak to one of the officers when the first civilian aircraft to arrive there in days touched down. Among the journalists disembarking from the plane was a photographer from London carrying something much more important for me than any story I wrote during that trip. It was a letter from Jane, the girl I had been seeing for just two months before I rushed to Sierra Leone.
I still have it. It is one of the pole stars of my love for her. She used two envelopes and the larger one is formally addressed to ‘Tim Butcher’, written in Jane’s confident, fluent hand, although the black ink is smudged from my sweaty first touch that day at the airport. May is the hottest month in Sierra Leone, the sweltering finale to the dry season before it is broken by rains that last months, and I can remember the exposed concrete of the runway pulsing with heat as I tore open the smaller envelope inside, one that was marked ‘T x’. I can also remember the goose bumps spreading up my arms as I read the card inside. We have been together now for ten years and have two children, all of which flows directly from what she wrote.
From that euphoric private peak, my Sierra Leone adventure sank to a grieving low when, a few days later, two colleagues, friends from my days reporting the Balkan wars of the 1990s, were killed in an RUF ambush about 40 miles east of Freetown. Kurt Schork and Miguel Gil Moreno, working for Reuters and The Associated Press respectively, were covering the advance of the Sierra Leone army as it tried to retake positions lost to the RUF rebels in the confusion before the British force arrived. We had all been probing further and further out from Freetown to report on what would later develop into the full-blown rout of the RUF. But covering the advance of an army is among a war correspondent’s most dangerous tasks as static frontlines shift and small pockets of resistance can be left behind. Kurt and Miguel were driving between two towns freshly taken by the army when they fell into an ambush by RUF gunmen, who shot up the two-vehicle convoy and then vanished into the bush never to be caught.
I had known Kurt since January 1992 when, early in his career as a reporter, he lasted a full winter in Iraqi Kurdistan, something few foreign correspondents had the bottle for. And I had watched Miguel’s career as a cameraman take off in Bosnia in the mid 1990s and then soar in Kosovo in 1999 when he produced some of the strongest images of ethnic cleansing by Serbian security forces to come out of that conflict. During that time in Sierra Leone many of us had driven down unsafe roads in similarly volatile situations; Kurt and Miguel were scarcely taking greater risks than the rest of us.
Their deaths hollowed out my first experience of Africa, sapping my zeal to be there. The shock came in part from the unsettling knowledge that it could have happened to me. But it also came from the sense of hopelessness that the deaths of my two friends were, in the wider scheme of the conflict, utterly irrelevant. Journalists love to convince themselves they matter but an incident like this reinforced what cynics might call the pointlessness of what reporters do.
After their deaths I came to realise that the reason those first weeks in Sierra Leone had seemed so rewarding was that, for a short time at least, it had seemed possible to simplify a nuanced and complex African situation. A multi-dimensional conflict with long historical roots and significant regional links – the RUF rebels existed only because the Taylor regime armed, trained and paid them, and Taylor, in turn, e
xisted only because of backing from outside sponsors, including the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi – could be boiled down to simplistic stories about good guys (British soldiers) and bad guys (rebels).
Numb from grief I wanted out, to be back safely with Jane, so I made arrangements to fly out with the British paratroopers who had been ordered home, their mission done. The last thing I saw in Sierra Leone was the ground crew at Freetown airport struggling to stow my friends’ coffins into a light aircraft for their last journey home.
My work as a reporter would take me back to the West African war zone four more times. Working conditions were always tough and, at times, risky, but no matter how interesting I found the stories, I never felt I had a genuine understanding of the region, its turbulent past and current fault lines. I struggled to get beyond the powerful but troubling mental images triggered by the two countries, of drug-addled child soldiers cutting off the hands of civilians or ruthless warlords clinging to power on the profits made from smuggling. And as a journalist I felt guilty about oversimplifying a complex situation. I would write about combat between government soldiers and rebel gunmen, even though in a place like Liberia such plain language did no justice to the twisted reality. How can terrified children paid in cocaine by Taylor’s henchmen really be described as government soldiers? And what is rebellious about a person with a gun who is defending his village from attack? Like all reporters, I rarely strayed beyond the capital cities, Freetown and Monrovia, largely because for much of the time it was simply too dangerous. I did my best but the truth was I never had a real sense of having understood the region, and long after I left Sierra Leone and Liberia my feeling of having missed something was like a stone in my shoe, a nagging irritation that never fully went away.
