Freetown is burning. The sky is barely visible through the gray clouds of smoke curling up from the eastern side of the city. The occasional finger of white African sunlight that pokes through the haze falls on piles of dead bodies. The soft sands of Lumley beach, which sits on the north edge of town, are blanketed with dead soldiers, and the tranquil bay that lies between downtown and the airport is an oily, grisly mess, teeming with floating bodies and body parts.
For the better part of two weeks, since the rebel forces of the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.) swept into Freetown from Sierra Leone's thick jungles, the capital city has been a killing zone. Last week the troops of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), a peacekeeping force led by Nigeria, struggled to throw the rebels out. It was bloody, street-by-street fighting. Aid agencies evacuated most of their personnel during the week. The only way in and out of the city was by Nigerian military helicopter. One Lebanese businessman who had stayed behind to protect his rice crop bought his way out on the same helicopter that carried a TIME reporter in, one of the few journalists to venture into Sierra Leone in the week following the killing of an Associated Press staff member and the wounding of two others.
Into Saturday night, ECOMOG fought to maintain control. Since most of the R.U.F. leaders had been killed in the previous few weeks of fighting, most rebel positions in the city were held by 15- and 16-year-old boys, who looted and burned huge swaths of downtown. ECOMOG forces patrolling Freetown's main streets were continually harassed by Kalashnikov-wielding teenagers who slipped from dark alleys, machine-gunned them for 15 or 30 seconds and then slipped away again. After sunset the teenagers, many of them high on local hallucinogens, set houses on fire--night candles, they called them--to ward off the fearful dark.
Sierra Leone's descent into chaos began on May 25, 1997, when a group of rebel soldiers from the Sierra Leone Army staged a coup d'etat, replaced democratically elected President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah with Major Johnny Paul Koroma, and soon allied themselves with R.U.F., the rebel movement that had waged a civil war earlier in the 1990s. Koroma was quickly isolated by some of Sierra Leone's West African neighbors, such as Nigeria and Guinea, which wanted to see Kabbah restored. Last February an ECOMOG military force pushed the junta from power, driving the rebels out of the capital, and Kabbah reassumed his office. ECOMOG hoped that once the rebels had been removed, they would scatter and disappear into neighboring countries such as Liberia, becoming less of a threat.