SLPP (Sierra Leone People’s Party) Women’s Leader, Fatmata Sawaneh, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Lahai Lawrence Leema and others may face International Criminal Court at the Hague for alleged killings of inmates at the country’s main correctional facility on Pa Demba Road in Freetown. Former Chief of Defence Staff too would be roped in.
A US-based media agency, Africanist Press put the number of inmates killed at 60 while official accounts indicate 31.
“In the prison incident alone, more than 60 deaths-mostly unarmed prisoners-have been reported by eye-witness accounts,” the report reads in part. The inmates were allegedly gunned down by guards from State House during an attempted jail break in April, 2020.
Suspicions of the mass killings fell on the three afore-mentioned personalities when SLPP Women, through a leaked audio, confirmed her presence and others at the scene of the killings. Sierra Leoneans living in the diaspora were alarmed by the brutal crackdown, and the ICC was requested to investigate.
In response, the ICC has previously notified the diasporans that it was in receipt of the notice. International law strictly prohibits torture and inhumane treatment of a prisoner. Sierra Leone is a signatory to a number of conventions that uphold the rights and dignity of its citizens especially prisoners.
The country also signed up with the 1998 Rome Statute which established the ICC headquartered in the Hague, Netherland. Despite its signature on the statute, government ordered no coroner’s inquest into the killings.
The Africanist Press thus report apportions blame on state authorities and the security apparatus. Apart from the prison killings, the report also captured violent incidents in the western-rural and northern towns of Tombo Lunsar respectively.
Although the report indicated that public buildings were set ablaze in the two towns, it questions the nature of police response to the riots. “What is most important in this context is the response of the Bio regime to these events,” a portion of the report reads.
The report also noted that many in government have casually described the on-going youth protests as “riots by lawless youths.”
Authorities, the report said, went as far as ascribing them to “hate messages” allegedly spread on social media by defeated opposition elements.
Some ruling party supporters and government spokespersons even claim that the on-going violence is sponsored by former President Ernest Bai Koroma and APC opposition politicians. It was alleged that Koroma and the defeated APC leadership were resisting Bio’s pending ‘White Paper.’
The White Paper consisted of government’s approved recommendations of the defunct commissions of Inquiry. One of the key recommendations is freezing of assets of former government officials of the Koroma-led government.
These officials were drawn largely from membership of the main opposition, APC (All People’s Congress), the main political rival of the ruling SLPP. The US-based media agency report however defended such claims.
It says that the Bio-led administration failed to acknowledge what actually precipitated the youth responses in Lunsar and Tombo.
“Youths do not begin to protest simply because some former opposition politicians…tell them to do so. No, the recent youth protests are symptoms of a country deeply entrenched in political economic crises; a crises that has reached its apex during a raging disease pandemic, and a crisis that has been punctuated by state violence throughout,” the Africanist press report also reads.
Protests of such nature, the report further stated, have been witnessed across many countries on the African continent where citizens from South Africa, Uganda, Burundi, Nigeria and Congo have protested against the hardship of violent lockdown measures.
Africanist Press also noted that many concerned citizens have failed to consider a key factor that nursed and nurtured the violence in the state of Sierra Leone.
The report made it clear that the youths and several constituents were aggrieved at SLPP’s governance style. “They have ignored how at the first sitting of the newly elected parliament in April, 2018, riot police stormed parliament and forcibly removed opposition members of parliament who were, by the results of the 2018 elections, the majority in parliament,” the report claimed.
The removal of parliamentarians was a move seen as legal by several sectors of the Sierra Leonean society. The Bio Government, the report went on, did not only stop at such illegality but went on to impose a speaker of parliament whose integrity has been held in great doubt by a number of Sierra Leoneans.
“Having removed the majority opposition party in parliament, ruling party politicians hurriedly, and in a questionable and illegal process, imposed a speaker of parliament who was not even from among elected MPs, but whose political record has been the subject of two judicial processes from the days of Tejan Kabba and Ernest Bai Koroma,” the report continues.
Apart from the imposition of the speaker on parliamentarians, other such important personalities as Deputy Speaker and Clerk of Parliament too were controversially installed.
The move was too ensure that the Bio-led Government becomes a dominant force in the legislature. The Government, by being dominant, can command control of parliamentary processes despite its minority status.
As a dominant force, bills could be easily passed into law and government’s policies and programmes approved even if not in the country’s interest. The report further stated that ruling party supporters and leaders celebrated this parliamentary coup against the popular will of the people.
SLPP stalwarts and ardent supporters justified the violent beginning of the Bio regime as a representation of political tact. Government, according to Africanist Press, has failed to understand a fundamental factor that is responsible for the violence.
“What they have failed to understand was that by that singular action alone, Bio and his new squadron in power had set in motion a violent train whose gushing flames would eventually be fuelled by the resistance of the constituents whose representatives were brutalised and humiliated by coercive agents of the executive,” the report further asserted.
The removal of the parliamentarians was the same as planting a seed of violence which germinated in subsequent months. The peace and democracy which Sierra Leoneans suffered for too long was on the verge of total destruction.
In the short period, Sierra Leone was tagged as a fragile state ready to relapse into another all-out conflict on regional and tribal lines. Africanist Press sees the Bio administration as one that began with the wrong footing.
“It was a fratricidal and shocking beginning,” the report claimed. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron, then head of the Commission for Fragile States visited Sierra Leone to assess the situation. Cameron’s effort was later bolstered by ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States).
The sub-regional bloc dispatched a fact finding mission to Sierra Leone to see first-hand the prevailing political realities. SLPP leaders ignored ECOWAS recommendations as parliament continued its attacks on the opposition majority in parliament by further use of the judiciary to force ten opposition MPs out of parliament.
The report thus alleged that the forceful imposition of the officials was one of the main causes of violence in Sierra Leone.