Human Rights Reporting
Spring 2001 Student Work
© 2001 Laura Angela Bagnetto
Becoming Whole Again: Sierra Leoneans Recapture Their Dignity
By Laura Angela Bagnetto
Three men are diligently working on dexterity exercises in the
physical therapy room at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn,
putting cards into a box with slits, trying to use zippers and
laces on practice boards. All three have a few things in common:
the similar stocking caps they are wearing, a soft African lilt
to their voices. They also have shiny claw-like prostheses that
extend from their jacket sleeves, the legacy of rebel forces who
hacked off their arms in the war in Sierra Leone.
Debbie Steinberg, a physical therapist working with everyone in
the room, approached the men. “Can you take your arms off?”
she asked. “Madam! One minute!” said Lamin Jussu Jarka,
46. He unsnapped his jacket and took it off with amazing ease
for someone who has no arms below the elbow. In another minute,
he hunched his shoulders and arms and took off his two prostheses,
connected to a leather strap that crosses his back. He smiled.
“Do you have trouble getting dressed?” Steinberg asked.
Jarka, with a wry smile, said no, then laughed and added, pointing
to his pants, “Do you want me to take it off?”
Steinberg laughed, “No,” as she walked over to the
sample kitchen in the physical therapy room. “Do you have
a microwave at home?” she asked Jarka. Again, the coy smile.
“No,” he replied, “Well, let’s see what
you can do with the microwave,” indicating to him to push
the number keypad on the appliance.
Neither Jarka nor his other compatriots have a microwave, but
that’s because they live in the amputee refugee camp in
Freetown, Sierra Leone, a war-torn country in Western Africa that
touches the Atlantic Ocean, where their roof and walls are plastic
sheeting and their floor is packed dirt. There is no food to microwave
because rice is $17 a bag, and none of them can get a job due
to their lack of limbs. After receiving the meager World Food
Program portions of bulgur, corn oil and flour that are supposed
to last a month but only last a week, they went out the streets
of Freetown, begging. “What little we get we give to our
wives,” said Aubaka “Abu” Kargbu, another member
of the group.
Each man is the victim of the brutal war in Sierra Leone and is
on an odyssey towards becoming whole again, a journey that will
take them to Brooklyn, New York, and back to Freetown again. Each
is on a health visa and can only stay as long as their health
is being attended to. The goal of this trip, agreed to by the
maimed men who live in the war and the people who brought them
to the East coast of the United States, is to restore their freedom
and mobility.
Some critics, including Rotary Club members who have dealt with
past Sierra Leone amputees in the United States, feel that the
trip back home is an unnecessarily cruel denouement, especially
for those who have already lived through 10 years of war, a war
that does not seem to end.
The rebel forces, known as the Revolutionary United Front, invaded
Freetown, wreaking havoc on the once-peaceful country, and took
control of the lucrative diamond and logging industries. Revenues
from the diamond trade have fueled their quest for more arms to
place a stranglehold on the country.
According to the United Nations Observers Mission in Sierra Leone,
the war dates back to 1991. But in May 1997, another rebel group
calling themselves the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council overthrew
President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, accusing him of corruption. In a
swift move, the AFRC united with the Revolutionary United Front.
In February 1998, a West African peacekeeping force, comprised
mainly of Nigerians, forced the rebel army headed by Foday Sankoh
out of Freetown, the capital, and into the countryside. Kabbah
was brought back until the brutal tango started again, this time,
the rebels launched a vigorous attack on the capital in December
1998. the atrocities were conducted by adults and children, many
of them on drugs, randomly hacking off arms and legs of men, women
and children in the Sankoh directive ‘Operation No Living
Thing’ to enforce their message: no one is to side with
the government. The rebels are the government. Even the maimed
survivors are mute testimony to the relentless ferocity of the
RUF.
The brutality and psychological terror that they have inflicted
on the population has been devastating. According to Doctors Without
Borders, over 6,000 people died in the first month of 1999 alone.
Kargbu witnessed rebels split open a pregnant woman’s stomach
to see who would win the bet whether the unborn child was a boy
or a girl. Stories like this were common, and gang rape and abduction
were the norm.
After the democratically elected Sierra Leone government negotiated
the peace accord with the RUF, part of the peace accord said that
the rebels would be given blanket amnesty for the rape, mutilation
and murder of citizens, not to mention the rebels razing Freetown
and neighboring towns by looting and arson were also forgiven.
Freetown is relatively safe, but the peace is an uneasy one, exemplified
by the ongoing presence of British troops, who will remain in
Sierra Leone until September. Dr. Sylvester Rowe, the deputy UN
ambassador to Sierra Leone is frustrated. “Things are not
moving as we would have liked it,” he said. “People
expect the UN to fight. The problem is ours. It’s us. Sierra
Leoneans. This is a national problem and a national solution.”
A teeth-smacking sound comes from tall, mustachioed Abdul Sankoh,
24. He is frustrated because he cannot attach a zipper or cut
with the special scissors for amputees. “These two things
I am unable,” says the former schoolteacher. Steinberg gives
Sankoh two bowls, one full of rice with buttons. As he picks the
buttons out of the rice and puts them into the second bowl, a
rare smile inches across his face, a face with an ugly pink scar
between his nose and mouth where the rebels tried to cut off his
lips. “ah, Phil Collins,” he says, as the song “One
More Time” comes from the stereo in the room. Sankoh, lost
in thought, is miles away from rice and buttons.
Miles away on the outskirts of Freetown, it was washing day on
January 20, 1999. at five in the morning Aubaka Kargbu, 26, headed
down to the stream with his family’s clothes, proud to help
his wife and two children with the daily chores. A building contractor
by trade, he moved his family to the outskirts of Freetown from
northern Sierra Leone to make more money building fences for the
large houses that dot the area. He heard about the rebel attacks
nearby, but thought that they were still far enough away. After
some time in the stream, he went home “to collect the children
and family so we will find a safe place to hide ourselves,”
said Aubaka. “I went to pack the children’s clothes.
So they came into my room. Five of them.” He pleaded with
the rebels not to shoot. Instead, he recounted, they brought him
outside and chopped off his arms with an axe. “A man named
‘Junior’ did it. He said, ‘You’ll never
vote again,’” said Aubaka. Then the rebel said, “’Go
tell the presidents. Appeal to them (about your lost limbs).’”
He believes Junior was on brown-brown, or crack, but he wasn’t
sure. In the midst of all this brutality, he noted that the rebels
occasionally had a soft side. When there were children around
“The rebels told them to go out of that area. They did it
not to have them see them chop off the heads.”
These are stories that prompted Dr. Henry Ostberg, businessman
and former marketing professor, to create a family charity, the
Ostberg Foundation to help victims. He had seen a photo from The
New York Times, showing amputees staring straight into the camera
“looking so depressed and forlorn.”
His first inclination was to send the men under his care to a
Kibbutz in Israel, where accommodation would be taken care of
by the Kibbutz association. Ostberg is very active in bridging
the divide between Muslims and Jews, and thought that this would
be the best for the five men and their two chaperones, who are
all Muslim.
All five are double amputees, with both arms butchered in the
“long sleeve”- in the parlance of the rebels—with
stumps below the elbow, and were hand picked by the Sierra Leone
Department of Health. After spending six months trying to get
them to Israel, the shaky peace between the Palestinians and the
Israelis broke down again. Osteberg was caught in negotiations
with the two governments when he contacted Matthew Mirones, owner
of Arimed, a prosthesis center in Brooklyn, New York. Both men
met and bonded over their similar reactions to horror stories
about the atrocities and their frustration in working with government
officials on both sides. Ostberg is most upset with the British
government. The men were originally to fly through London, connecting
on a flight to the United States. British authorities were worried
that the men would escape at the airport on their way to transfer
to an American-bound flight, and required Ostberg to post a $50,000
bond.
“They didn’t tell me this until the day they were
to fly,” said Ostberg. “I had already bought the tickets.”
That flight was scrapped, and they were routed instead through
Belgium to the United States. He had similar with the United Nations
and the Sierra Leonean Mission to the United Nations, discussing
their obstinacy to help because his project was for five individuals
and not on a national level.
“We sat here and cried together,” said Mirones, pointing
to his office, and both came out of the meeting determined to
help the men.
Osteberg arranged for housing at the local YMCA, near Long Island
University Hospital, where they received physical therapy and
medical care donated by the hospital. NYU School of Dentistry
donated their dental services. AS their financial sponsor, Ostberg
took care of food, board, and provided them with a driver until
their return to Sierra Leone in February. Mirones coordinated
the hospital arrangements and donated his services, creating and
fitting custom-made prostheses.
The men arrived in November, shy and uneasy about being so far
from home. They were depressed, said Ostberg. “They were
looking at the floor—unhappy.” Their daily lives,
working without limbs, are a struggle in the refugee camp, but
the struggle with new settings in a new country was brutal in
other ways.
Back in November, new arrival “Pa” Lamin Jussu Jarka,
42, walked into Mirones’ office, with a big smile on his
face. His knit cap and bulky coat made him look like a longshoreman,
not a former security officer for Barclay’s bank in Freetown.
After exchanging salutations in Krio, Pa’s native language,
Jarka shyly asked Mirones if he could make a phone call to his
sister in Sierra Leone.
“I need the number, Pa,” said Mirones.
“Yes, I’ll get it,” said Jarka, as he used one
handless arm, with great difficulty, to get to the inside breast
pocket of his jacket. The other handless arm tried to push the
jacket out of the way. As Pa tried to pull out the address book
with his teeth, Mirones rushed up to help.
After helping Pa, Mirones looked up, with tears in his eyes. “How
can someone do this to another human being? How?”
It is important to Mirones to help the men, he says, because they
have been crippled since January 1999, unable to anything by themselves,
including simple actions that people take for granted, including
unzipping their pants in order to go to the bathroom. “I
want to help them create a life with dignity. The people who come
are helpless, but not hopeless. I want to give them a sense of
hope.”
According to Mirones, it is important that all patients, even
those who traveled thousands of miles to come to his office in
Brooklyn, realize their expectations. Half the battle is getting
an amputee to deal with his body image and accept his situation,
says Mirones. “There is no magic. It’s hard work,
and you have to do it,” he says. To ease the men into their
new situation with prostheses, he invited amputees, such as Edgar
Rivera, to come and speak to the men about dealing with their
new artificial limbs day to day.
Rivera, 42, was pushed onto the subway tracks by a schizophrenic
man in Manhattan last year. He smiled as he spoke to the men from
his wheelchair. He is currently waiting for a new set of prosthetic
legs.
Handsome and strapping, Rivera has been through a lot in the past
year, after coming so close to death, yet his cheerful disposition
doesn’t hint at this. While he speaks with the five men,
their two chaperones, and their Haitian driver, his words sound
incredible and ‘politically correct’, their meaning
lost on this captive audience. “I’m not disabled.
I’m differently abled.” Jarka, the oldest and unofficial
spokesman for the group, responds calmly, finding words for the
other four silent men clad in stocking caps and sweaters., sitting
next to him. “We can be employed. We can live up to expectations,”
he says. The men shuffle in their seats, obviously uncomfortable.
Jarka continues, mentioning how thankful he is for their sponsor.
“I believe in God,” he says.
Rivera agrees. “There are only two ways to feel. Either
sink like the Titanic, or you stand up and thank God and say,
‘Life goes on.’ I’ve only lost my legs,”
he says.
Jarka agreed, “No space to hate to fell sorry for myself.”
The other men nodded in agreement. “I’m not in denial,”
said Jarka, referring to his damaged body.
How can you bolster the morale of someone who has had his hands,
his lips and his ear cut off, all in one day? Abdul Sankoh, 24,
a school teacher, recounted his story. He was maimed in an attack
by the rebels and had to walk to the hospital for treatment. On
the walk, bleeding from the mouth, side of his head and where
the stumps where his arms used to be, all he could think was,
“I wanted the doctor to kill me.”
Sankoh doesn’t talk about what he feels about life now,
but he does help Sheiku Mansaray tell his story. Mansaray, the
shy 19-year old in the group, had his arms cut off by the rebels,
according to Sankoh. They put a bayonet into his right eye. Then
they took his parents, doused them with gasoline, and set them
on fire. They burned to death in front of him and his five brothers
and sisters. Mansaray, who was mute while the story was told,
gazed downward, unable to meet anyone’s eyes. Rivera broke
down. Sobbing, he wheeled over to Mansaray and gave him a hug.
Mansaray remained mute.
“Do not cry,” said Jarka. “Do not cry. Then
we will cry. And we can’t cry.” Rivera responded out
loud, “This is territory I have never experienced. My mind
cannot figure out how people can do this.”
According to a report released by Doctors Without Borders last
year, 90 percent of the Sierra Leonean population surveyed witnessed
people being wounded or killed, as well as torture, brutal amputations,
attempted or successful, and public rape, most stemming from the
January 1999 pullback of RUF troops from Freetown.
Ostberg is not spending any money on the men’s mental rehabilitation.
“The funds I have are very limited—I have to see where
it is spent most effectively—see every dollar that I spend,”
he said. The Doctors Without Borders also found “that the
psychosocial and mental health consequences of war on civilians
are all too often neglected.” It is unfortunate that the
men will never receive counseling. Mansaray, who was just 17 when
he saw his family immolated, rarely speaks. Since arriving in
the United States he has had three surgeries to try and repair
his bayoneted eye.
Holiday in the Hamptons
The snowy, icy grounds of Siena Spirituality Center in Southhampton
became the home for men for the weekend, as Ostberg wanted to
give them a break from the YMCA. All of the men were treated to
a full body massage. Mansaray’s toes curled in delight as
the masseuse worked his shoulders. Ever-silent, he giggled. It
sounded like hope.
Some of the men, feeling restless, went out for a walk. They walked
gingerly, still new to snow. Kargbu remarked, laughing, “The
first day I saw the snow I thought it was from a factory that
was flying in the sky.” “We like seeing it on the
ground,” said Sankoh. “But…” his voice
trailed off. Even the snow was a reminder that he has no arms,
because without arms he can’t balance very well. He didn’t
want to fall down. A suggestion to play soccer was met with five
pairs of sad eyes.
“We can’t balance well enough to run and play,”
said Sankoh.
Ostberg’s driver, Arturo, offered to take the men to Montauk,
a town on the northernmost tip of Long Island. The seven men in
puffy coats nestled into the white van. On the highway, each became
lost in his own thoughts. This trip mirrors many that they have
taken, a trip to the edge of a piece of land that touches the
same ocean that they have swam in many times before, when they
had arms, and where they must return even if they do not want
to.
These trips, like life without arms, are beyond their control.
The fragile life they have made in New York will come to an end
in February, and they know it. Looking out over the choppy ocean,
Jarka chirped, “We want to go swimming, like in Freetown!”
ignoring his own teeth chattering. A thought clouded his face.
He paused. “We swam too much in Freetown.”
The next day, the men went to Southhampton Library to talk about
Sierra Leone. After a drum circle paid tribute to the Sierra Leonean
men Jarka was introduced. Clad in a dark blue jogging suit, he
faced the crowd of 40 people and told them what happened at 3
p.m. on January 20, 1999.
“They got into my house—the rebels. They were firing
guns and going from house to house. They were assembling men at
an open place under gunpoint,” said Jarka. The rebels took
one look at Jarka’s seven children and tried to abduct his
14-year-old daughter. She ran into the house to hide. He begged
the rebels not to shoot him, telling them he would go find her.
“I jumped through a window,” he said. They captured
him. “The rebels took me under a mango tree in a queue to
be amputated. I was the third person,” said Jarka. One by
one, they made the men place their arms on the stump of the mango
tree. Jarka won’t forget the desperate screams of the men
in front of him. The two men had their arms brutally chopped off.
They were murdered immediately after. Jarka put his arms on the
stump. They hacked off both with two strokes of a machete. His
arms dropped to the ground. Jarka thought they were going to kill
him, “but one rebel said, ‘That man is already finished.
Let him go.’ Blood was spraying, and I did not know if I
was on earth any more. Blood was all over my body.” His
wife, who was hiding, came out to find him. She didn’t recognize
her own husband as she walked by him. “Mariamma! Mariamma!
I had to call her name,” said Jarka. Husband and wife walked
to a doctor’s house, but rebels had stolen all the medicine
from the doctor. It took him three days to get to a hospital.
Rebels were still in the area. Bone projected from his bloody
stumps and a doctor had to cut through bone and flesh in order
to make a cleaner cut.
Jarka told his story without stopping, not once mentioning the
pain he felt from the second amputation. Both times there was
no anesthesia. “They did it roughly,” he said, “but
I am happy that I was spared.”
Many in the audience could not fight back tears; others were looking
at the floor. Jarka spoke matter-of-factly. His eyes were dry.
He continued, and spoke with true affection for Henry Ostberg.
Jarka said his new artificial limbs have given him back his dignity
to deal with daily personal chores. “I have been able to
do domestic work with myself. So I am very much glad.”
Tall, broadly-build Henry Ostberg took the floor, but he could
not speak as freely as Jarka had. His grey-green eyes became moist
as he tried to prevent tears from rolling down his face. Ostberg’s
wife, Ostelle, a mature suburban version of Brenda Star, looked
at her husband with pain as she held onto her fluffy white Maltese
dog. “Shock. Grief. Gratitude that we live in a country
like we do… it’s hard to understand,” said Ostberg.
“It is like the Holocaust. It requires some sort of response
from all of us.”
Manhattan Movie
After a weary half-hour physical therapy session, Mansaray and
Jarka, accompanied by one of their chaperones, Moustafa Abimi,
took the subway into Manhattan to see the movie “Charlie’s
Angels” at Worldwide Cinemas in Hell’s Kitchen. The
other men, explained Jarka, decided not to come because they were
too tired.
The men sat in the dark with a bag of popcorn on their laps. Jarka
could not grab the hot, popped kernels and stuck his head into
the bag to try it for the first time. “This is too salty,”
said Jarka. Mansaray agreed. They were happier watching the movie,
sucking their pineapple juice through a straw. Halfway through
the movie, 19-year-old Mansaray wiggled in his seat, breaking
into rapid-fire Krio directed at the other two Sierra Leoneans.
They ignored him until he repeated his previous statement. “Sheiku
wants to go home,” said Jarka. “He doesn’t want
to see this movie no more.” The other two men decided to
stay and watch the movie, so Mansaray pouted in his seat. Ten
minutes before the end, however, Abimi was also fed up with the
antics of the three American women in the film. Convinced that
the movie will end soon, they stayed in their seats but bounded
out of the cinema at the end. Out on the street, all three repeatedly
stated that they wanted to get home as soon as possible. And the
movie? “Well, it was too violent,” said Abimi. “I
don’t like that.” The other two refused to answer.
Tired and cranky, the men want to get onto the train at rush hour
in Manhattan. Two cling to the third, who is hugging the pole
as the train jerks along, and the worry in their eyes does not
seem to penetrate any of the commuters who have finished their
jobs for the day. The people in the train will be going home;
the men will be going to the YMCA, postponing their own reality.
Each wants to stay in the United States, even if that means leaving
wives and children, brothers and sisters.
“If we had asylum, we would like to stay if given the option,”
said Jarka.
For Ostberg, who had to vouch for their return, the answer is
direct and simple. “I made an agreement with the INS,”
said Ostberg. “They will be going back.”
The men have tried to find an ally in Arturo, Ostberg’s
driver and an immigrant himself from the Philippines. “They
have asked me how they can stay,” said Arturo. “They
said they would sacrifice their families because they could send
money home and be of better use. But I don’t condone that.
Other people need to be helped. The INS has a limit, you know?”
The men have asked for a small sum of money when they go back,
to start their own businesses, selling small items on the side
of the road. The only way they can contribute to society is to
be self-sufficient. Jarka claims that the sentiment back in Freetown
is “that man hasn’t got any hands. He can’t
do anything. How can he work? That man is finished.” Aubaka
would like to sell fabric. The others just want to sell. Mansaray,
the youngest, has the most experience: he was a ‘petit retailier’
before his arms were hacked off.
Human Rights Watch’s Buckert would applaud the men’s
wish for independence. After observing the 20,000-person amputee
camp in Freetown, where amputees live with their families, he
said, “This is a creation of a dependency culture; some
are rethinking the wisdom of setting up a camp for amputees.”
The Journey Home
Neil Ostberg, Dr. Osterberg’s son, went with the men that
morning to the airport. They arrived for their Air Ghana flight
at 10AM, even though the flight was not to leave until 3PM. Commotion
reigned at the Air Ghana ticket counter, where passengers stood
in line with huge suitcases. The men also fit the profile—each
had at least two cases, weighing more than 100 pounds. “An
unbelievable quantity of luggage,” said the younger Ostberg.
Friends made during their stay generously donated money to each
man. The diner where they ate their food took up a collection.
A church group also gave money towards their future. The Ostberg
Foundation gave each man $500. “They asked for a lump sum
so they could move out of the camp and set up an apartment,”
said Neil Ostberg. “An apartment rents for $1,000 a year,
so this would help them for the first half.”
By 2:50PM the men were at the gate, but Ostberg was still trying
to negotiate the excess baggage fees. Vondi, one of the nurse
chaperones, received two boxes of medical books as a gift from
Long Island University Hospital. They were charitably overlooked
by airline staff. But the almost 700 pounds of excess luggage
was finally placed on the plane, wheedled down to the sum of $800.
After a long flight, the men returned to Freetown safely, relying on relatives to help them with their baggage, to hide it so no one would steal the presents they had received.