SIERRA LEONE : A Civil War Outside the World’s View

Largely hidden from the rest of the world, a terrifying humanitarian crisis is ravaging the West African country of Sierra Leone after four years of civil war, U.N. officials report.

Officials of the World Food Program say that marauding soldiers are preventing them and other aid workers from carrying food to the worst-hit areas of the country. A third of the country’s 4 million people are now refugees, and there are incessant reports of rapes, beheadings and dismemberment.

“There are tales that you imagine come only from the pages of a horror book,” said Francis Mwanza, a World Food Program information officer from Zambia, after a recent trip to Sierra Leone. “You find skulls on stakes on the road. How could anyone in this day and age put a skull on a stake at a roadblock?” Mwanza also found soldiers wearing dried human body parts as charms against bullets.

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The horrors have taken place outside the world’s view largely because Western media have focused their attention on other African disasters, such as those in Somalia and Rwanda. “There has been no CNN camera or BBC camera which publicizes such things,” Mohammed Diab of Sudan, the food program’s director in Sierra Leone, said in a recent phone call from Freetown, the capital.

The World Food Program, which is coordinating the international relief operation, faces excruciating obstacles in transporting food and medicine to areas in the war zones. In August, for example, soldier rebels--known as “sobels” in the countryside--attacked a food convoy trying to reach the town of Bo in south-central Sierra Leone and destroyed 70 of its 77 trucks. The loss occurred even though the convoy was guarded by government soldiers.

The United Nations estimates that it is feeding only 12% of the nearly 1 million people who are in need of relief.

To make matters worse, officials say, the U.N. request of $14.5 million in relief for Sierra Leone by the end of this year so far has not been met. World governments have donated $3.8 million.

The war, which has killed at least 10,000 people, is one of the strangest in Africa, for it appears to have little or no ideological or ethnic motivation. The rebels--who call themselves the Revolutionary United Front--number around 3,000 and are led by a little-known former army sergeant named Foday Sankoh. The first wave of rebels, evidently trained in Libya and supported by Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, crossed into Sierra Leone from Liberia in 1991.

Like Liberia, Sierra Leone, a former British colony, was settled in the 19th Century by freed slaves. But the civil war does not seem to have its origins in any enmity between the descendants of the slaves and the native tribes upcountry. Sierra Leone is run by a corrupt and unpopular military government led by 29-year-old Capt. Valentine Strasser.

So little is known about Sankoh that he has been described both as a muddle-headed visionary who wants a democratic and non-military society and as a cruel Pol Pot-like tyrant without even a Communist ideology to justify his rebellion.

Plagued by battles, the southeast sector of Sierra Leone has suffered the most. U.N. officials say that 30,000 civilians are trapped behind enemy lines in areas along the eastern border near Liberia and Guinea. A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross found 30% of people at the northern end were severely malnourished. No one has been able to get to the south to estimate the number of ill there.

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Although the town of Bo is in government hands, U.N. officials say, it is unsafe to move far beyond its borders. Some women who tried recently were captured by the rebels and beheaded, according to the United Nations.

The government has hired South African-led mercenaries to strengthen its ineffectual army. Their presence has eased the security situation somewhat, and the World Food Program has been able to distribute 6,000 tons of food since September.

Mwanza said that many people in Freetown refuse to believe that the situation in the countryside is horrific.

A local television crew recently made footage of malnourished people in Bonthe on Sherbro Island in the south. When the documentary was shown in Freetown, Mwanza said, many people said, “How could they show us pictures of Somalis and say it is Sierra Leone?”