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Instead, ousted from the capital, the rebels rearmed and, village by village, began terrorizing the countryside. For the better part of a year, ECOMOG has struggled to stamp out the fiercely violent brushfires. Nigerian Alpha jets have streaked through the skies of Sierra Leone bombing rebel hideouts. Tens of thousands of village-based militia--traditional hunters called kamajors--have stalked the jungles battling R.U.F. forces. But the Nigerians have discovered that the rebel fire seems to be nearly inextinguishable. Hopes for negotiations have been blocked by rebel demands for the release of Corporal Foday Sankoh, an R.U.F. leader who had been captured and sentenced to death. Two weeks ago, R.U.F. stormed the capital, using an army that included some 5,000 teenage soldiers who sneaked into Freetown unarmed and dug up weapons that had been buried in local graveyards.
The sheer dimensions of the brutalization in Freetown in the past few weeks have been hard even for resolute aid workers to withstand. The images that flash by them are otherworldly, they say. Marie de la Soudiere, who heads the International Rescue Committee's Children in Armed Conflict Unit, is still haunted by the shy six-year-old girl outside Freetown who raised the stump of her arm and asked, "Will my fingers grow back?"
Ever since the rebels were driven into the countryside, they have used brutalization as a kind of strategic device, hoping the horror of war would lead Kabbah to sue for peace. In Freetown's Connaught hospital, doctors began reporting last April that they were seeing an enormous number of mutilations, as well as women who had had foreign objects inserted in their vagina. Aid workers say pregnant women, normally highly respected and well treated in Africa, had had fetuses cut from the womb while they were still alive. Rebel soldiers slashed one woman's ankles so she could not run away. She was raped and beaten over a one-month period.
One witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch said he saw rebel soldiers tell a boy that he was too tall. A soldier then took a machete and cut off the boy's left foot. When the boy fell to the ground, the soldier calmly shot him in the chest three times. A woman who sold fish in a market was ordered to lie down on the ground. When she hesitated, a boy in the rebel army slashed her neck with a machete. When she fell, a soldier put her wrist on a rock and cut off her hand. "They left me there," she told interviewers. "I walked 11 days to Forekonia [on the Guinea border], and I had to bury my own hand." The amputations are a common form of terror. Young rebels blithely ask victims if they want "long sleeves or short sleeves"--amputation at the wrists or elbows.
Such extreme violence is not characteristic of Sierra Leone. Jim Stearns, an emergency-relief-operations specialist for care, says that when he first started going to Sierra Leone in 1989, nearly all the violence was across the border in Liberia, which was then in the midst of a civil war. Freetown, which sits amid lush rice paddies and rolling green hills, was established in 1787 as a home for freed slaves. The British cut off the slaves' shackles on a block in front of a cottonwood tree that still stands today. But the country is no paradise: the U.N. ranked it the least-developed nation on earth in 1997. The average life expectancy is 34 years.