Sierra Leone, 9 years on. Reconciliation?
Post categories: Trips
| 17:30 UK time, Tuesday, 30 November 2010
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This topic was discussed on World Have Your Say on 26 November 2010. Listen to the programme.
This entry was written by Ros in Freetown and posted by me.
Hi from the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú World Service Trust offices in Freetown. We're busy sorting any number of things ahead of today's programme.
Ben is down at the Information Ministry explaining why we're here; Mary in Nairobi is rigging up local media interviews with us (I'm very excited about going onto Good Morning Sierra Leone on telly tomorrow).
Fiona is taking any number of calls as various guests head into town from the countryside. (The civil war played out for many years before reaching the capital, so as we don't have time to travel out of town, some guests have kindly agreed to come to us.)
Alex our engineer is playing with the generator. If the mains go down, as is quite common, we'll fall off air and re-appear 3 minutes later with the purr of the generator in the background.
And I'm sat in a side room with the light brown walls that you always seem to find in West African offices. Outside the barred window, is a two-storey buiding, clad in corrugated iron on top and on the sides, with a palm tree behind.
It's muggy, still and the shouting of children suggests that it must be lunchbreak at a nearby school.
I had a good 8 hours on the plane to read an awful lot about Sierra Leone, and in particular about its civil war.
There were several times I had to put down the book. The accounts of the extreme violence used by both sides in the civil war are so gruesome, so brutal and so random that even picturing such things was too uncomfortable.
On today's programme we've people who fought on both sides, some when they were children. We'll also be joined by others who were attacked and in some cases maimed during the war.
We're going to listen to their stories, and try and understand how humans can become so cruel and violent, and then learn to live alongside each other in peace, all in a relatively short period of time.
Background on Sierra Leone's civil war - by Ben James
The fighting began in 1991 between Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels and the government. Control of Sierra Leone's fuelled the conflict.
The rebel forces were notorious for mutilation and thousands of people who survived the war live today with missing limbs ().
The RUF was allegedly backed by Charles Taylor who went on to be President of neighbouring Liberia.
at a UN backed on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone; the verdict is due mid-2011.
The war officially ended in January 2002, after a peace process which saw a UN force and British troops enter the country.
Since then, a Ìýhas attempted to repair some of the damage done by the conflict.
Organisations like are continuing to work in communities where former enemies live side-by-side.
It's not the only country to have to work out how their society moves on from war, atrocities and division - , and Ìýhave all emerged from dark periods of their history in different ways.
