Let us build a brighter future for Sierra Leone –Betty Jessica Milton

Sierra Leonean journalist wants her country to work again.

By OLOLADE ADEWUYI

Betty Jessica Milton was a teenager when civil war swept her country in 1991. Her once beautiful Sierra Leone was brought to its knees and looted by rebel soldiers who were fighting over the sharing of political positions and power in the centre.

When the first gun shot was fired in a small village in the east of the country in March of that year, little did Milton and many other residents of Freetown know that it was going to affect their way of life for many years.

“I was told by my father that there was war [in the East],” Milton, now a journalist at Awoko News says.

The civilian government of Tejan Kabbah was overthrown in 1997 by a military coup whose sponsors then tried to find peace by creating a government of national unity. Little knowing that this would be the country’s albatross, the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) invited the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group to the capital to participate in the government.

The capital soon began to brim with rebel soldiers who committed atrocities without fear. Many women and girls were raped. Young boys were conscripted into the rebel forces and dissenters were shot dead or amputated.

The UN estimates that more than 20,000 civilians suffered amputation, the stock in trade of the rebel forces. Many lost arms, legs, ears, and lips to the marauding machetes of the rebels before they were eventually chased out by ECOMOG forces led by the Nigerian Army.

Milton’s classmate Fudia was killed in front of her home during a shoot out by rebel soldiers. It is an incident she remembers with bile in her throat.

“It was a terrible time”, she says. “They were involved in all sorts of evil things. They raped women and girls. Our men were powerless in the face of the rebel onslaught. They destroyed our country.”

A story cannot be full of gloom without a silver lining at the end. Milton, like many Sierra Leoneans, says the past is in the past. The future is what she wants to build.

“[It] is our country and we cannot run away forever. We need to have a government of national inclusion that will do away with the tribal fears of the past.

“Otherwise we will not have learnt our lessons” Milton says.