Video: the child soldiers speak

Hawa Dumbuya was eight years old when a rebel commander, his machete still wet with the blood of her neighbours, marched her into the Sierra Leone jungle and forced her to become his “wife.” His name, Hawa says, was Issa Sesay, the notorious rebel leader currently on trial at the war crimes tribunal in Freetown.

For four years, until the Revolutionary United Front was disarmed in 2002, Hawa says she lived as Sesay’s slave, accompanying him on brutal missions by day and suffering his repeated rapes and assaults by night. Now 18 and rejected by her community as a “rebel wife”, she lives alone, scraping a living from selling jungle fruits and awaiting the verdict of a trial which offers the only hope of justice for victims of the group’s decade-long terror campaign.

With the judges to retire in a matter of weeks, Sierra Leoneans will know soon whether the leaders of the RUF will be held to account for the depravities that became the group’s hallmark. In their quest for power and control of the country’s diamond wealth, the Liberian-backed rebel group terrorised a reluctant civilian population with mass amputations, mutilations, rape and sexual abuse, looting, murder and the use of child soldiers.

Hawa is all too familiar with such atrocities. “He forced me to have sexual intercourse with him. When I tried to refuse he said he was going to kill me. My parents had already been killed, that was why I could not do anything. He made me carry heavy loads and if I could not he beat me. Or he sent other combatants to deal with me.”

A diminutive if muscular teenager, at eight Hawa could barely hold the gun Issa Sesay thrust in her hands. “I didn’t want to fight. I tried to refuse, but he beat me, and told me he would kill me.”

“I carried the gun. But I never killed anyone. One time they captured a pregnant woman, during an attack on a village. They were betting on whether her baby was a boy or a girl. They told me to shoot her, but I refused, so they shot me in the leg.” She is matter-of-fact as she pulls up her long skirt and points to a smooth, dark scar shaped like a two pence piece on her lower shin. Then her face contorts.

“They held the woman, screaming, and slit her belly from bottom to top. The baby came out, it was a boy. Then they killed them both.”

Sesay is currently defending himself on 17 counts of crimes against humanity – including murder, looting, use of child soldiers, abduction, forced labour and sexual violence. The RUF’s leader in Sierra Leone from the 2000 arrest of overlord Foday Sankoh until the end of the war, Sesay was indicted in 2003 after his arrest in a sting operation which drew him to the capital Freetown. With Sankoh having since died in custody, Sesay is the most senior RUF commander left alive.

Having pleaded not guilty on all charges, Sesay has never expressed any remorse for his role in the civil war which left up to 75,000 people dead, many thousands more mutilated and a nation traumatised. He has frequently been pictured smiling and laughing in court while listening to allegations of his part in such depravities, which he has dismissed as "rumour and folklore". He argues not only that he was fighting a just uprising against a corrupt regime, but that he was betrayed by the government of President Kabbah, which granted an amnesty on crimes committed by the rebels as part of the eventual peace agreement. Though the amnesty was later revoked, the wheels of justice grind awkwardly – and at times even farcically – in Sierra Leone. So far just four men have been convicted of civil war crimes – all of them members of government-backed militia or military splinter groups. Sesay may yet be acquitted.

Hawa prays every day that that won’t happen.

“I saw him cut off hands, feet, sometimes male organs. One time I was standing in front of Issa Sesay when he caught a man the age of my grandfather. He told him to carry a very heavy load for him to another village. But the man couldn’t, so Issa Sesay chopped off his hands.”

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