Sierra Leone building on 20 years of peace

this week on the 77 street debate since i left my parents in the bush i never set eyes on them anymore and it was really tough for me because i was crawling with my hands and my knees where is the rehabilitation that happened that's the psychology psychological therapy that happened nobody talked about it not in school not in college we pretend like it didn't happen [Music] hello and welcome to the 77 the show for africa's youth this week we are in the west african country of sierra leone and 20 years ago this year an 11-year brutal civil war came to an end unfortunately some of the people who participated in that war lost their loved ones and even lost some of their limbs were children 20 years on those children now make a part of the 77 and we want to find out from them what does the world look like for them what are their hopes and aspirations now before we continue i'd like to warn you that some of the themes we might touch on might be difficult for some of you to hear so please approach cautiously so we'll begin with uh ibrahim who is a teacher here in sierra leone uh but obviously 20 years ago this was not the case so can you explain to me what your experience was uh during that very difficult time during that time i was staying with my uncle so by then unfortunate i was supposed to join part of the commercial but right now unfortunately my father too was lost in that particular time so i decided to be part of the camaraderie group due to that factor so i also joined and partake in the civil war during that time all right so let me just get you straight again so your father died during the first days of the war the first few years of the war and then your uncle recruits you to join the kamado who are like the community sort of militia all right let's come to muhammad here and your situation is not so different from what ibrahim is describing tell our viewers what you went through i was 15 years of age when the rebel attack and our township and we went to the bush for three months then there was nothing to eat with my two father father and mother so we down the bush so nothing to eat so my parents asked me to go out and get some fruits like papaya some mangoes during that time so on my way going i stepped my feet on the landmines so automatically stopped my leg so i was in the bush for three good days i found myself in the touch house where i met two people so those people took me to a place called ile and where i met with the action farm so they took me to go government hospital wow so i mean that's really really tough how do you survive in the bush for three days with an amputated leg well that was it's a really terrible moment for me and whenever i explained that one i always felt difficult in my emotion yeah and because since i left my parents in the bush i never set eyes on them anymore because they died on hunger in the bush so since that time i never said eyes on them and it was really tough for me because i was scrolling with my hands and my knees for three good days yeah i'm really really sorry to hear about that unfortunately it's more terrible news and we're just going to come to you for a second uh fantasy wiz because what they're describing is not alien to you either having been alive and also a teenager at that time no it was it wasn't it wasn't actually and for the fact that i think it was in 1998 i was a child and then the rebels attacked in kabbalah and then everyone you know every everyone was scattered mothers were not looking for their children and children were unable to look for their mothers and whatever everyone is like all over the place we went into divorce with our life for like five days i think i get to see my mother and then my mother was like you have to go back and get medication and then i went there and i saw a family friend um which was you know like close family friends he used to live you know in our house and i went there and there was no way to go back to my mother and then he was like you're safe with me you could you know spend the night people were not like in town it's just a little bit little people and then that was the night that i got raped by him not once or twice three times i think and i was there helpless i could do nothing about it like who am i going to tell he was the only person and then the next morning he pretended like nothing happened and then he asked me are you okay and i remember like i didn't see anything and i didn't say anything about it for like 10 years because i couldn't i'm like who would believe me and then my trust went from 100 to zero i trust no one to this day yes unfortunately yes i'd have to say that i don't wow thank you for sharing that um yeah so let's come to ishmael you know i'm listening to some of these stories and of course i have a little bit of background having spoken to some of you to all of you actually before this debate but as i'm really hearing it again it's difficult for me i can't imagine what it's like for you to to carry that with you for the rest of your life please explain to us what happened with you and how you found yourself to be here today alive and well and a survivor so when i was about 12 years old the war came into my life i started running from it by the time i was 13 i'd been recruited to fight in the government army and i fought for nearly three years lost everything my my home my aspirations i wanted to be an economist that didn't happen long and short of it i was able to survive the war and i was put in a rehabilitation center actually here in freetown in the eastern part in a place called approved school went through rehabilitation and then i was adopted in a family in the united states so i left but i carried the burden of the war with me because i felt guilt for having survived and additionally for having not only survived but having the opportunity to leave and study so i decided to write about it so my first book which is a long way gone chronicled something that most people did not hear about prior to that and so i wanted to change that so i changed language by actually making one thing very clear that all of these stories that i've heard to survive war requires intelligence it was not looked upon that way can you explain that to me well imagine a child who's 12 13 8 every day having to wake up and decide which way to run because it's violence in their country everything has collapsed that child becomes an economist an anthropologist you know a painter a singer they imagine what's possible what's not uh basically it's the epitome of uh resilience yeah true nature of it so and in addition to that if you're a child who was drawn into war to fight as a soldier what child do you know at an age of 13 can command 500 other kids at a playground let alone once carrying weapons so but when people look at black children particularly on african continent war they don't see the intelligence that it takes to survive these things yeah and by the way ishmael's case and everybody else we've heard from today their case is their cases are one of tens of it's estimated that around 10 000 children participated in that war and the children we're talking about are probably not older than the ones who are playing football here so that gives us a visual but also very difficult to imagine um let me invite john to this conversation because you're obviously working with young people in the community most of whom have these experiences as their childhood what do you think is the biggest challenge or the biggest thing that people are still carrying with them from the war one of the biggest thing is to have a conversation at a community level most of the present young generation did not experience the war and for those who experience the world they don't have the space to have that dialogue so i think part of our challenge as a nation is having an ongoing conversation about what went wrong we used to be one big family your child is my child your mother is my mother what went wrong for us to our children that we were supposed to protect but having that conversion seems to be a big challenge and that is why we as farmwe talk we continue to create that space at a community level within the school clubs for them to continue with this conversation this dialogue about what went wrong so that they will be able to serve as role models to avoid that scenario in future okay it's interesting to me that you say there's no space for dialogue yet externally when people think about sierra leone i think the civil war is one of the things that comes to mind why do you think the discussion is not happening internally well we need the conducive atmosphere to have that conversation we started as an organization you know we are able to organize 215 bond fires that is at the community level where we work with section chiefs the traditional leaders to come together to understand what went wrong why did you kill someone's else mother why did you kill the daughter that you were supposed to protect so having that conversation the space to have that conversation was only created at the bonfire where you can tell your paramount chief that what you did during the war was wrong and then the paramount chief will apologize some traditional chiefs also apologize but outside of that space it's a taboo but you did mention people who didn't experience the war directly and one of those people is mariam so you were one when the war uh ended but your parents obviously who've raised you and who gave birth to you were very much part of this crisis is this something that you discuss at home openly has it affected how you were raised just like ishmael and everyone here my parents were able to strive through the war and they were able to go to school and get education but what i can say is it has affected a lot of family members that i know directly and what what we experience is the trauma the trauma of war what happens is if you are around people who have actually experienced trauma of war then that trauma can affect you because you have relations with them so you would you would experience that a lot of family members were not able to get jobs they were not able to learn skills because they are formative years we are destroyed by the war so um all the burden all the the for them to have support and all the responsibilities lies with your parents lies with your father who is the only surviving member or who is the only educated one wow okay so let me come back to fantasy here because we're hearing that on the one hand not only do the opportunities and the spaces to speak openly they don't exist but not speaking about it creates more trauma even for the generations after the fact we're one thing we're good at in sierra leone is we move too fast when something happens today everyone is all over it it's a frenzy and then tomorrow we moved on to something else and we pretend like what happened yesterday didn't happen and that's how you have people like me and a lot of other people that are bottling up so i went through phases there was a time i became like so paranoid like any sound would i just like i went into like i would just black out and then it got to a point i get cold you mean like internally you feel internet like nothing like i could see the doing this to people they're doing that to people it doesn't affect me in one bit i get colds like eyes and then after that and then i went in to be would call it ptsd or whatever and i'm that's where i am now yeah the sight of blood it just it like if i see blood like justin whatever i just go into this thing that i don't know how to take like my body is shaking i feel like i want to throw up i feel like i want to put i feel like so me if i hear like i'm inside and i hear people shouting for example or it's christmas time and i hear they have all this you know this whatever it is if i hear that sound i can't stand i could just like find some way to see and i'm just panicking uh ishmael let me come to you because you said that earlier you felt this sense of guilt for not just having escaped the war but also having left the country to rebuild your life did you get a chance to get sort of mental health care after the fact yes i did have a little bit of mental psychosocial therapy as they used to call it right after the war that was not the case for a lot of people and even after i left i went to the united states where i went to school i did not get support you know what what people call now ptsd is a new language that didn't exist at the time that some of us came out of the war you just was some some person who had seen things uh who was losing it at some times as fantasy said some sound scared you you didn't want to look at certain places you didn't sleep well there was no discussion really there was shame around having that now what i what i also want to really address is the fact that if you look at our society sierra leone now you will see how people behave in this culture in this society reflects what we haven't dealt with a lot of us are broken can you give me some of those examples what think about social personal spaces the way people view women the way people view relationships all of those things had dysfunctionalities had existed during the war and some of the people who inherited that went on to be parents and raise children they don't know how to pass on those things to them so when you walk around the city you will see people who are angry for reasons they can't even explain you will see people who are walking daydreaming because we have not had the space to discuss what really happened so that we can repair each other okay let me come back to john because somebody from government might be watching this and say hey we did our job we formed this commission there was a special court there are people who were prosecuted what more can we do uh they yes they did their beat by ticking the box this outside in thing they said at the end of the war peace agreement there should be a truth commission tick there should be prosecution tick but did the truth commission really address the root causes of the war i will tell you the truth commission the report is one of the best we have if not the best report we have as a nation but the process was flooded all what you've heard occurred at the community level my suggestion to the experts the consultant was let us look at the possibility of organizing many commissions we are people at the community level who speak within the safety of their community about what went wrong and how can they as a community as a family move forward but it has never happened before then they choose to have the official truth commission like in south africa so basically the truth commission yes it existed but the process was flooded alongside the challenge of having a special court running alongside the truth commission by the way i should interrupt briefly to just say that only nine people were actually convicted for crimes committed during this time correct yes you know so basically with and the cost the price tag to prosecuting that nine it's about 300 million dollars okay so earlier fantasy said that this is a society filled with broken people and now you're saying it's also people who did not really get justice is that what i'm hearing from you and my experience in this country is justice is best defined by the individuals themselves when we work in communities to them justice is when the person who did wrong to them comes forward in the public for a public apology in the place of everyone that is justice but when you look at the special court i mean the nine or ten that were prosecuted they were in almost like hotel but make no mistake in terms of the importance of it yes it sends a message to africa heads of state yeah in terms of charles taylor but for us as a nation justice can better be served if we're allowed to define it yeah i want to to hear from muhammad a little bit because i know that the stigma you know we're talking about the stigma from the war survivors women tell me about that there was one question the trc went and asked people it should forgive then the end of the day forget it is mess yeah i can never forget my amputation never and ever even my child when she or he comes i would tell him or her that i became a visitor during the 10 years the lebanese senseless brutal rebellion so he can't ask me to forget and some of the main reason that we formed the amputee football team throughout the country in buu kenneman mckinney just to ease our strength whenever we met together we don't think about our problem yeah ibrahim i read somewhere something that was very shocking to me that this country only has three psychiatrists so if this is a situation how have you been assisted to sort of get away from this thinking and live your life in a more productive and healthy way well like for reasons because the president's also created venues forever for some of us that have been part of the war for us to be able to elevate ourselves through by education because i'm standing here as i'm one of the beneficiaries because i went through the holdups for me to be able to upgrade myself you also had something to tell me about this whole mental health issue tell me about it it's uh the word mental health and then in korea it means say chris and when they say christmas and i mean this person is crazy that not like you know when you say oh my god you're so crazy no you're crazy that's a mad person that's a mental person so if i say oh my god like i come up today i've gone social media saying i'm struggling with mental health because personally i deal with anxiety i've been dealing with that for like a very long time and they start looking at you like like don't go close to her she's this she's that she's that yeah um i want to hear from mariam if the education system is also catering to this you know as somebody who says you're facing second generational trauma is it something that you're taught in school are you addressing this in your own sort of youth circle as mental health issues right now a lot of people even youth as my age do frown around mental health discussions trauma depression anxiety they don't want to talk about it and even i have spoken to some of my colleagues who are studying medicine in in syrian college of medicine they will tell you that i don't want to study psychology or be a psychiatrist because everybody in my community will feel i'm a mad person i'm working with mad people and what they fail to realize is mental health issues does not only claim to people that are mad it's we can be i can be talking to you i can be sane physically but mentally i'm sick so let me ask a question that you know it might even sound colors to ask it but i need to have sierra leoneans really learnt from the war no no no no when i say you say no everybody says no everybody's saying no well everyone listen i know what i'm saying i work with young people mostly young people and adolescent girls boys whatever have we learned anything from the world no you know why because we pretend like it didn't happen nobody talked about it not in school not in college not in houses not in there it didn't happen do you sometimes what i do to people that are the little boys and girls that i work with i play in as much as it's crazy i shouldn't but i play documentaries off the wall and sometimes they go like is that a rambo i said no you see that part is state house you see that i start showing them and then the look on their faces it's like it's to die for like they go like and then sometimes they look at me like auntie fantasy you were there during that time and i was like yes so if we don't stop or we don't do it right we don't try to fix things we might go back to this and then they go like no we shouldn't i was like now yeah that's the point that's what we have to do as a country that's what we have to do as a nation go back forgive and forget for who don't forget pull it like remove it forgive yeah okay talk about it first forget no let's talk about it all right and let me know why i'm forgiving mariam this is very scary for you who you know didn't go through it and you can still see what makes you say we haven't learned as a nation all the situations around the world all the effects all the things that led to the war are still present are still here corruption is here youth unemployment is here poverty is here and even the fact that we don't talk about it makes it more scary because if we don't talk about it how do we want to move past it for example the ddr process that happened the disarmament process that happened after the war i've learned in school that actually the people who didn't go to the camps the the the um the soldiers the the the children who are part of the war who became um soldiers didn't actually go to the camp all they wanted was the money that was coming from the ddr process give me your arms i give you incentives and you sit back home so where is the rehabilitation that happened where's the psychological psychological therapy that happened it didn't happen and those people are adults today the al-qaeda riders today they're in the communities and when um situations happen around elections don't forget the whole thing that happened in australia was around the political situation and so when issues like that arise again you see these people taking up arms that's what they're used to yeah by the way it's important to note that this country is relatively stable but when there's elections there tends to be violent flare-ups uh so john how do we move forward from a situation like this what we need is a constructive engagement of young people let's try to include in the curriculum of schools the history of the war let's try it it's not part of the curriculum no it's not oh my goodness it's not in schools let's have that conversation in the schools at the university so that people get to understand what went wrong all right if i could add something to that there is an adage in australia it's very very popular like that there's no data goes by without you hearing someone say saying it if you no no usa you come out you know usa you they go what does that mean if you don't know where you're coming from you will not know where you're going let's know where we've been what's there what's behind us let's study let's read that and then we'll know how to go forward if not we'll go back to that yeah going forward what do you think this country needs to do in order to be sustainable to be a healthy place for people like you and maybe your children in the future okay so first of all i think what we need to do is that people that are coming to us like the ngos they come to us this is your problem this is how you fix it without asking us they already they assume they know our problems and they know how to fix it that should stop we should tell them our problems and we know our problems and we know how to fix them yeah that's what we should do as a country i think that's a fantastic place to end it's very rare that on these street debates we dwell on the past but if there's something that has come out very very clearly today is that in some instances in order to move forward as fantasy said very clearly you sometimes have to look back thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: DW The 77 Percent

Views: 35,067

Keywords: DW, DW Africa, Africa, War, Sierra Leone, Conflict, Debate, Fighting, Civil war, Peace, Freetown, The77percent

Id: IKnF3ECwgAI

Length: 24min 54sec (1494 seconds)

Published: Sat May 28 2022