By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Before now, I knew of matricide; patricide; fratricide; regicide; tyrannicide; deicide; genocide, and suicide. But quite recently, while watching a documentary on the BBC television channel, I came across a new “cide”. It’s called “Femicide”, which is the killing of a girl or a woman because of their gender.
And if you have noticed already, there is one thread that runs through all those “cides”. And that is: “they [are] all concern [with] death, destruction, extermination and deliberate killing. The–cide ending originates from the Latin word caedere meaning to kill.” So with that in mind, let me now explore my newfound One Dropian coinage: “SLPP-cide”.
In today’s One Dropian dropping, I’m going back to the killings that took place in Makeni; in Lunsar; at Mile-91; at Tonko Limba; at Tombo, and at the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown. All these killings took place in places which are officially, or unofficially, known to be the strongholds of the main opposition: the All People’s Congress (APC). These killings will, forever, remain in the collective conscience of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) because they are still unresolved as those who shot those helpless civilians, in cold blood, are yet to be brought to justice.
And the reason why I’m bringing up this issue today, which seems to have been swept under the red carpets at State House in Freetown, is the fact that from the time when those killings occurred to date, President Julius Maada Bio has not offered a public apology in the spirit of collective responsibility. It is as if the lives of Sierra Leoneans in the north-western parts of the country do not matter!
And President Bio cannot be boasting of his human rights record and still feigning forgetfulness that extra-judicial killings took place in Makeni; in Lunsar; at Mile-91; at Tonko Limba; at Tombo, and at the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown. And one thing that is very striking, or which might have caught the eyes of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the fact that President Bio’s speech of 8 May 2020 appeared to have justified those killings.
In that 8 May 2020 national address, our Commander-in-Chief accused the APC leadership of being silent “on the active participation of their members and executive members in these acts of terrorist violence.” He twisted the dagger savagely (figuratively, of course) when he said that, “For each of the attacks at Lunsar, Foredugu, Tombo, and the prison breakout at Pademba Road Correctional Centre, known agents and associates of the All People’s Congress party have publicly predicted the precise date, target, and nature of the attacks. There is an obvious pattern. These attacks are therefore premeditated, orchestrated, and executed with a clear objective– to make the state ungovernable”. So, to put it in disrobed language: President Bio and his SLPP believe that APC supporters are “terrorists” whose cardinal aim is “to make the state ungovernable”.
From the above, it seems to me that when the security forces were sent to Makeni, Lunsar, Mile-91, Tonko Limba, Tombo, and the Pademba Road Correctional Centre they had one thing in mind: they were sent to flush out “terrorists”! So, they appeared to have just shot on, and out of, sight every moving thing; flushing out the “terrorists” who had been recording “their acts with telephone cameras, run self-valorising commentaries on their acts of extreme violence and killings, and share those synchronously in WhatsApp forums”(in President Bio’s own words). This surmises that for the Bio-led administration, those killed in those killings were not peaceful citizens but “terrorists”.
We can now appreciate why the security forces entered those places like the far-right death squads in El Salvador of old. But President Bio cannot convince me that at the Pademba Road Correctional Centre, the alleged “jail breakers” were recording “their acts with telephone cameras, run[ing] self-valorising commentaries on their acts of extreme violence and killings, and share [their acts of terrorism on] WhatsApp forums”. No, they were not! Reports claim that the prisoners were right inside the correctional centre when the “peacekeepers” entered and started their peaceful “peacekeeping” which resulted in countless deaths and gunshot wounds!
As I see it, these are simply crimes against humanity that should be of interest to the International Criminal Court. According to Geoffrey Robertson QC in the Preface of his influential book, “Crimes Against Humanity, The Struggle For Global Justice,” the logic of the “crime against humanity, first defined in Article 6(c) of the Nuremberg Charter, was that future state agents who authorized torture or genocide against their own populations were criminally responsible, in international law, and might be punished by any court capable of catching them.” My point here is: those trigger-happy security personnel who committed flagrant violations in Makeni; in Lunsar; at Mile-91; at Tonko Limba; at Tombo, and at the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown, causing the seemingly exterminations and deliberate killings of peaceful citizens, should be brought to justice. And those who authorized those trigger-happy security personnel to go on those “peacekeeping missions” should also bear the greatest responsibility for the killings.
As Wole Soyinka notes, in his prison memoir The Man Died, “Even in totalitarian states, the time comes when past ‘errors’ are admitted, high-placed criminals unmasked and victims rehabilitated, mostly alas, posthumously!” This fact is not lost on the Bombali Human Rights Committee whose April 2021 Report, titled “Study On Youth Disenfranchisement And Protest In Sierra Leone: Response And Recommendation”, recommends that, “independent investigations must be conducted on allegations of deaths by gunshot wounds [in Makeni, Lunsar, Mile-91, Tonko Limba, Tombo, and the Pademba Road Correctional Centre], report published and officers penalized if found wanting.”
But this is what the Bio-led administration is yet to do. And what is mockingly shocking is the fact that some of the victims of those “peacekeeping missions” were “either being held on criminal charges or being investigated for criminal violence and terrorism-related offences” (to quote President Bio for the last time) for what seems to be their unspeakable crime of not being killed during those “peacekeeping missions”! It is for that reason that I will, for now, refer to those killings as an “SLPP-cide”.
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a quote from the Epilogue of Geoffrey Robertson’s book, quoted above, that: “Punishment cannot be left to history (which depends, after all, on who writes it) or to hellfire (even the Pope now doubts the availability of this sanction). There is a legal duty on all states to investigate and (if the evidence is available) to prosecute persons suspected of…systematic murder or persecution…of innocent civilians pursuant to a political policy. Individuals who commit such crimes must have no hiding-place….” But those who carried out the killings in Makeni; in Lunsar; at Mile-91; at Tonko Limba; at Tombo, and at the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown appear to have sanctuaries!
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