Should Idi Amin, too, go in peace?
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Foday Sankoh, Sierra Leone Rebel Leader, Dies
July 30, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:11 p.m. ET
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) -- Foday Sankoh, an indicted
war criminal whose Sierra Leone rebels routinely hacked off
the limbs of men, women and infants during a 10-year
campaign, died in U.N. custody at a Freetown hospital, the
war-crimes court said Wednesday. He was 65.
Sankoh died late Tuesday, said David Hecht, spokesman for
the U.N.-Sierra Leone war crimes court trying the rebel
chief.
The imprisoned guerrilla leader, who reportedly suffered a
mild stroke after his capture in early 2000, died of
natural causes and was ``granted a peaceful end that he
denied to so many others,'' said a statement from the
office of the court's chief prosecutor, American David
Crane. Prosecutors promised a post-mortem to determine his
cause of death.
``God has taken his course,'' said El Hadji Lamin Jusu
Jarka, an official at a Freetown camp helping to provide
housing and training to Sankoh's mutilated victims. ``And
God will judge him.''
Jarka was one of Sankoh's victims -- his wrists are capped
by metal claws.
Sankoh trained in the Cold War guerrilla camps of Libyan
leader Moammar Gadhafi and launched his insurgency in 1991,
bent on winning control of Sierra Leone's government and
diamond fields.
His drugged, drunken fighters increasingly targeted
civilians by the late 1990s, killing, raping, and
kidnapping civilians and burning homes. Prosecutors
estimate the death toll at 75,000.
Sankoh's machete-wielding rebels made a grisly specialty of
cutting off the hands, feet, lips and ears of men, women
and children, including babies.
``This is a man who terrorized his people and almost
destroyed Sierra Leone,'' U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
said in New York. ``In the end, he died an indicted war
criminal, a lonely and a broken man.''
Sankoh, who repeatedly broke peace accords, was arrested in
May 2000 after his fighters gunned down more than a dozen
peace demonstrators outside his Freetown home. After his
capture, his health and sanity deteriorated rapidly.
Decisive military intervention by former colonial ruler
Britain, neighboring Guinea and the United Nations crushed
the rebels, and Sierra Leone formally declared the war over
in early 2002 and held peaceful elections. Sankoh's rebel
group stood candidates for parliament but received no
seats.
Amputees used metal hooks on the stumps of their arms to
shove their votes into ballot boxes.
A roughly 13,000-strong U.N. force -- the body's largest
deployment worldwide -- is guarding Sierra Leone's fragile
peace.
The Sierra Leone government hoped to see Sankoh face the
war crimes court to explain his ``barbaric acts,''
presidential spokesman Kanji Daramy said Wednesday.
Sankoh's testimony might have helped the West African
country's people understand ``what was happening in his
mind, for him to have committed so many atrocities,''
Daramy said.
Sankoh, who also faced charges in the national court,
appeared ill and disoriented almost from the start of his
imprisonment.
``I'm a god,'' the handcuffed ex-warlord, disheveled and in
matted white dreadlocks, told the court in June 2002. ``I'm
the inner god. I'm the leader of Sierra Leone.''
Authorities said in October 2002 that Sankoh had suffered
what they at first called a mild stroke.
The war-crimes court said last month it was pursuing a
waiver on a U.N. travel ban against Sankoh so it could send
him outside Sierra Leone for treatment.
The court's acting chief of defense, John Jones, said then
that Sankoh was in a ``catatonic, stuporous state.''
Born Oct. 17, 1937 in diamond-rich northern Sierra Leone,
Sankoh worked as a wedding photographer and served in
Sierra Leone's army before moving to Libya.
His companions in Libya's guerrilla training camps included
Charles Taylor, who launched his own insurgency in Sierra
Leone's neighbor, Liberia, in 1989.
Taylor, now Liberia's president, has been indicted for war
crimes for backing Sankoh's rebels and faces international
pressure to step down.
Sankoh founded the Revolutionary United Front in 1988-89 in
Libya. His followers, many of them boys, knew him only as
``Pa.''
Survivors include his wife, Fatou Sankoh, and at least one
daughter.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Obit-Sankoh.html?ex=1060606135&ei=1&en=29c5abca3d30ed88
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