Smash hit

Sao Augusta, an 18-year-old former fighter abducted by the rebels at the age of seven, says she worked as a slave on Sesay's farm from 1998 to 1999. “He was an evil man, a very wicked man,” she whispers.

Working from six in the morning till seven at night, Sao received only beatings and a meagre evening ration of bulgar wheat from her captors. Like Hawa, she soon fell victim to the RUF’s appetite for young virgins, raped at the age of 10 by Augustine Gbao, a senior commander on trial alongside Sesay.

“He came to the house where I was staying with Issay Sesay’s wife and he forcefully took me and raped me, because I was a virgin. He said he had a ceremony to perform. He had a ritual to perform, he wanted to go to the front, the war front, and one of the conditions they gave him was that he had to have sex with a virgin. I was about 10 years old.”

Hawa and Sao are among many former child fighters or slaves still living in Kailahun, the RUF’s headquarters during the 11-year civil war. According to Dauda Kanu, who runs the district offices of Plan, an international NGO working to support children in the country, some 95 per cent of young people living in the area fought – willingly or not – for the RUF or another militia force.

In Kailahun town, a huddle of make-shift huts and bombed-out concrete ruins buried in the eastern rainforest just a few miles from the Liberian border, bike riders shelter from the scorching sun under the corrugated corners of lean-to stalls, waiting for their next hire. These are the rebels, the meagre living they can scratch out ferrying passengers their only opportunity for survival in a community which might have been ordered to forgive, but will never forget.

Hawa lives in a state of fear, knowing that the next stall-holder she buys from, the next customer to whom she sells her jungle fruits, could be one of her abusers. “I am afraid when I see them. I am afraid that something like that might happen again.”

Gloria Bonda, seven years old when she was captured by the rebels, knows her tormentor will never be brought to justice. At 11, she became a “bodyguard” to Sam Bockarie, the notoriously sadistic RUF commander nicknamed “Mosquito” for a killing style supposedly more deadly than malaria. Killed in 2003 in Liberia while on the run from Special Court prosecutors, Bockarie was second-in-command to RUF leader Foday Sankoh, and during his two-year imprisonment from 1997 was the overall commander of the group, directing its nihilistic attack on Freetown in 1999 as part of “Operation No Living Thing.”

It was Bockarie who lined five villagers up against a blood-stained wall and ordered 11-year-old Gloria to shoot them dead. “I refused, but they said if I refused, they would kill me. I did that, just so they wouldn’t kill me.”

Gloria shows me where she carried out the killings. Blood still stains the walls of the dank, dungeon-like room, in a bombed-out building known as the Slaughterhouse. As she tells me of the atrocities she witnessed there, the murders she was forced to commit, her jaw hardens, her stare becomes stony and faraway.

“At the Slaughterhouse, so many people were killed by him,” she says. The rebels would take groups of captured villagers there, line them up in front of a pit and shoot them so their bodies would fall in. At other times, they would be more inventive.

"There’s many ways to hurt people so that they die. Taking the knife and cutting them to death. Sometimes they beat them, flog them so that all their body was broken and all their parts would be flexible and they would die. Sometimes they would take a big drum, and fill it with palm oil, and boil it for some time. Then they would take them, and put them in it. Or they cook them, and eat them. I saw it.”

Now Gloria lives alone. Her father dead, her mother killed in front of her eyes long ago, she has no one to help her survive. Shunned by many in her community for the rapes she endured and the killings she committed, she struggles to earn the money for her school fees from selling jungle fruits. With some help from Plan, who provide counselling sessions and educational support, she has just taken her West Africa school-leaving certificate. She hopes to become a nurse to help those injured in the war, but she does not know how she will pay for the course.

“They say we are rebels, that we are thieves, killers, sometimes they run away from us. There is so much stigma, forcing us to live alone without anyone. There are so many girls like us. We need help.”

Plan International's report on women in war zones - Because I Am a girl: In the Shadow of War - was launched on May 15 by Cherie Blair. Visit www.becauseiamagirl.org

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