Day two of Hannah Strange's diary from Sierra Leone

When Fatmata’s parents asked her to name the father of her unborn child, she couldn’t answer them. Captured by Revolutionary United Front rebels at 11, she had spent the previous four months being passed around from fighter to fighter at their bush camp near Kenema, in eastern Sierra Leone, force-fed alcohol and jamba (marijuana).

“I was raped by all the rebels, so I told my parents I couldn’t name any one among them,” she says. A source of shame for her family, and ostracised by her community, she gave birth to her son alone in 2002, shortly after the RUF was officially disarmed. She was just 12.

Like many young girls, Fatmata, now 18, had been seized from her family when rebels attacked their home in Kenema, just a few months before the end of the civil war. By then they had already fled the northern town of Makeni, forced out by fighters from the Civil Defence Force, a government unit whose cruelty sometimes rivalled that of the RUF.

As the RUF was forced back to its eastern stronghold near the Liberian border, it embarked on a final push in its ten-year campaign of orgiastic brutality. Attacking Kenema by night, it laid waste to the town, looting homes and killing and mutilating its residents.

Fatmata was asleep when the bang on the door came. Fighters burst into her home, pushing their guns in the faces of her pleading parents, and demanded they hand over their daughter. Threatening to slaughter the entire family if they tried to resist, they pulled Fatmata from her bed, and dragged her with them into the bush. She finds it difficult to talk about what happened next. “They used me how they wanted. Then they forced me to become a wife, and I tried to escape.” Along with some other “wives”, Fatmata fled into the bush.

The group survived for two weeks living on jungle plants and sleeping on the ground, but then they fell into the hands of another rebel group, who held her captive for three months, beating her and gang-raping her repeatedly. “They had guns, and all the men were using me how they wanted,” she says.

Eventually, during an attack on the rebel camp by government forces, she managed to escape, and returned to Makeni where she found her parents.

“When I came down from the bush, I noticed I was pregnant. It was a time of tremendous suffering. By then my father was sick and was always in bed, my mother was old and we had no money. I had to sell leaves just for us to survive. It was a lot of suffering for all of us, we lived only on bolgo [bulgar wheat] and foofoo [pounded cassava root].”

“My parents were happy at first when I escaped but when they noticed I was pregnant they were not happy. They asked me to name the man, but I couldn’t because it was all the rebels, so I told them I couldn’t name any one among them.”

Her father died before she had the baby, her mother soon after.

“It was complete suffering, I could not care for the child, we both had to live on bolgo. Nobody owned the child but me.”

Like many girls forced by the rebels into sexual slavery, Fatmata was shunned by her community. But attitudes are changing. HANCI - Help a Needy Child International - and other local NGOs work to inform communities of the suffering of the estimated 6,000 girls forced into sexual slavery during the civil war. Slowly, the blame and the shame is beginning to dissipate.

Zeinab, 19, who, like Fatmata, receives support and education from the Makeni branch of HANCI said of her community: “They were frightened of us. They thought that we were rebels. Sometimes people ran away from us. Others gossiped about us, stigmatised us for the shame of having sex and children with rebels.”

For Fatmata, however, the horrors of her ordeal will never go away. The beatings and the rapes she endured, the killings and mutilations she witnessed, are reflected in her empty, faraway gaze.

“I will never forget, because every time I see my son I remember, I will never forget what happened. And also because I lost my parents, I have to fend for myself, it’s very difficult.” At this point, she becomes unable to talk, tears spilling silently down her cheeks. The interview is terminated.

To read more about the work done by the charity Plan International with women in Sierra Leone, click here

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