EDITOR’S NOTE: Dear Readers, the below is the second post of a three-part series on the moral economy of resource extraction, with its attendant violent commodification of people’s lives. In order to probe some of the issues raised in part-one, our interview with Danny Hoffman, CIHA Blog editorial assistant Ben Cox interviews Mohamed Tarawalley about his experiences during the recent conflict in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the state of humanitarian aid, and his collaboration with Hoffman. Mohamed Tarawalley is former General of the Civil Defense Forces in Sierra Leone and founder of Action for Poverty Mitigation in the Third World (APM3) and West African Youth Agenda Against Corrupt Practices (WAYAACP). We are grateful that he could join us from Monrovia, Liberia.
Ben Cox (BC): Could you speak a little about yourself and your experience in the conflict in Sierra Leone and Liberia?
Mohamed Tarawalley (MT): I am Sierra Leonean and hail from Kailahun District in the eastern part of the country from a town called Jojoima in the Malema Chiefdom. I am the first male born child of my parents. I am 40 years now, born in 1972 on 19 January. I was schooled in Sierra Leone up through the Sixth Form, but my university education was disrupted by the rebellion.
With respect to the conflict in Liberia and Sierra Leone, in which I participated from the beginning to the end, I look at most of the humanitarian ventures, especially the DDR Program [Demobilization and Reintegration Program], as a partial failure. The DDR Program was designed from outside, was exported from outside, and got into this area and was just forced down the throats of people. The people were forced to pick it up because there were no other alternatives. And the real people – the real actors – were not given the chance to contribute ideas on how the program should work or what we might need. The conditions that led to the war during that time are still very much visible and alive here now — we are on a time bomb in these areas. If you come here one day, you will understand what I mean.
BC: Can you speak about your time with the Civil Defense Forces (CDF)?
MT: I started military operations with the CDF in 1997 after the government of President Tejan Kabbah was overthrown by the AFRC (Armed Forces Revolutionary Council). At the time I was in Monrovia. The AFRC and the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) combined forces and started fighting the CDF in an attempt to disband it. When the CDF was finally flushed out of the country into neighboring Liberia, I had good friends among those who crossed into Liberia. They were seeking ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) support. These guys eventually linked up with me. The government which was exiled in Guinea sent the Deputy Defence Minister to come and coordinate the affairs of the CDF resistance, or the CDF movement, in order to oppose the AFRC coup in the country. We set up some operational bases and started military/guerilla attacks on the junta and RUF troops.
Due to my past experience in former conflicts, and my wide connections amongst ex-combatants in Liberia, I was picked out to recruit and organize an elite group of battle-tested and hardened fighters. That unit became known as the Special Forces in the CDF, and then I was appointed to head and command that unit in addition to my initial role as Adjutant General of the CDF. I served as commander of that unit until the end of the war. So I was playing two roles in the CDF at different times. I was the Adjutant General and the Commander of the Special Forces. And I rose to the rank of General and to the position of Deputy Director for Planning and Special Operations in addition to my other role as commander of the CDF Special Forces. This was how it stood until the war come to a close.
During the conduct of the war, I was arrested by the then-President of Liberia, His Excellency Charles Ghankay Taylor. I was jailed for six months. My deputy, General Ibrahim Jalloh, took over command responsibilities of the Unit as they continued the fighting and advancing towards Freetown.
The AFRC/RUF junta was overthrown and driven from the capital. As a goodwill gesture, and wanting to mend fences with her Sierra Leonean counterpart, the president of Liberia granted me clemency. On the very day the President of Sierra Leone was returning from Conakry, the 10th of March, I was also released from prison by His Excellency Charles Taylor, and flown into Freetown and I was officially turned over to the government of Sierra Leone.
When I returned to Freetown, my unit was headquartered on the border areas of Kenema and Zimmi. Zimmi was the main headquarters, so I came back to meet my men in the jungle and I was welcomed back. I took back my responsibility as the Forces Commandant. But shortly after my return there was an attempt to take my life. This is a story I am not prepared to talk much about here, but, in short, I was shot by friendly forces. That made me return to Freetown for the second time, because I was flown in for medical attention.
When I went back to Freetown, most of the men in my unit, the Special Forces, who were mostly Sierra Leoneans, had been in Liberia for long periods, like myself. Believing that the Liberian government was supporting the rebellion in Sierra Leone, we began nurturing the idea of attacking Liberia. We believed then that they were giving support to the RUF forces. We thought the best way to stop the RUF was to engage them or attack their supply line between Liberia and Sierra Leone. That was the beginning of the Liberian insurgent movement that later transformed into a revolutionary movement to be known as LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy) for Liberia. That was the group that finally overthrew President Taylor. The movement took foothold when the Sierra Leonean war was coming to an end. Some Liberian political dissidents from Liberia and the Diaspora came into Sierra Leone, and they contacted me and my unit because they knew we were armed and capable. They teamed up with us to formulate a joint political and military strategy to lunch an attack on Liberia in an attempt to remove His Excellency Charles Ghankay Taylor from power.
After I was discharged from the hospital, it was not too long before the major attack by the Junta/RUF to recapture Freetown started – the popular January 6 invasion. I had to send for more of my forces to come into Freetown, as I suspected security threats and so they came to Freetown before the general invasion started. We were staying at the Brookfields Hotel, and we were part of the CDF forces that were initially routed or defeated from that base. We retreated to the Wilberforce Barracks in the western part of the city for three days, before we brought in reinforcements and we started fighting to push them out of the city together with the ECOMOG troops and other Allied Forces.
BC: Did you spend a lot of time at the Brookfields Hotel? What was your role there?
MT: In fact, for much of my time in Freetown I was at this Hotel. I was the most senior field Commandant on the base, except for the times when the national coordinator or the director of war popped in. Other commanders that were there would look up to me for guidance, planning, and instructions. So I stayed there for a long time, from the beginning of May until we were attacked and very close to when it was shut down as a base.
It was the general headquarters – like a barracks for the Civil Defense Forces’ men who where in Freetown. My men were based there too, so I had my residence there too. Though my official residence was away from the base, my presence there was highly required, because the troops there relied on me for planning, command, instructions, and also for negotiating with the government and the armed forces of Sierra Leone for logistical support, both fighting and non-fighting.
BC: Can you paint the picture of a day at the Brookfields Hotel?
MT: Well, there are two ways I might describe life at the Brookfields Hotel. One is when there are no forward operations – I mean when there is no war. At this time Brookfields Hotel is completely peaceful. At times like that, you have the combatants’ wives there busy cleaning up in the morning, looking for food for their children and men. You will find people who are on the side taking wine and drinking the local brewed palm wine popularly known as poyo. Others will engage in playing checkers. The whole place gets lively. Some people are going out into town. Some other people are playing football games in the yard. Some of the people are quietly reading, because we also had intellectuals among us. We had people who were in school, but because of the war they had stopped going. Some combatants are busy cleaning their weapons. Other pictures you may see is women fussing and fighting some for very trivial matters. Some commanders are engaging in meetings, planning their next operations. Some want to make sure their men are always ready and fit. That is about what you will find at Brookfields on a normal day, a day without any operations. Everybody is busy doing what he is supposed to do. No one is harassing anybody. Soldiers’ wives and dependents are free to move about as long as you cause no trouble. They go out into the market and come back and do their cooking. Some would cook in the day; some would cook at the night.
But the other picture of the Brookfields is on days when there are operations at hand — when there is war to fight. Men have to be moved to the frontlines. You would see more of a military barracks than a peaceful settlement. You would see soldiers/fighters being called to assemble by their commanders. You would see military vehicles coming in, and you would see logistics officers going to the arms depots, and arms are brought in, and arms are issued out, and people are falling into line while instructions are given.
The women will go back to the rooms, with their children, and they will be spying through the windows. There will be passersby in the street curiously watching out. The vehicles will get into lines and start moving out. In the same manner, they are some returning from the front. There would be some fighters that come back to rest and fresh fighters are loaded to go back as reinforcements. Soldiers and vehicles come and go in convoys. It is a tense situation because everybody is concerned with what is happening, especially the women. They want to know what has happened to their husbands and loved ones since they went to the front line. There are a lot of questions. People are curious. You will see the place is quiet. You will see just little life. If word comes about the death of a fighter, that family will cry. They are sad, but they will suppress their emotions. They will only sob in their rooms.
Others will go to sympathize with them. When news of wounded fighters comes through, their families and friends will run out to go to the hospitals. Tense situations, but very somber too. This is your second picture.
BC: What happened after the conflicts ended?
MT: Well after the conflict ended in Sierra Leone, it did not end well for us, the fighters of the Special Forces Unit of the CDF. We were denied the opportunity to disarm in Sierra Leone on the orders of my boss. There are many other things that I don’t need to tell you right now. But that gave my men and me the reason to complete the agreement between our unit and the Liberian political dissidents to move into Guinea and team up with other Liberian dissident forces to start attacking Liberia fromthe Guinea front.
So I left for Guinea, and we organized and made plans to attack and advance into Liberia. At this point, we still had more fighters in Sierra Leone, and because I was the Commander, I was sent back to Sierra Leone to send reinforcements to Guinea and to organize alternative plans to attack Liberia from the Sierra Leonean side so that we open two front lines into Liberia. We wanted to keep attacking and pushing until we got into Monrovia.
When we succeeded in overrunning Monrovia, It was here that I disarmed. After all this, I saw better opportunities in Liberia than in Sierra Leone, my home country, so I stayed there. I have been working on a non-profit institution to empower young people in this region with the aim of stopping wars in this region.
BC: How is that work going? You said earlier things were still very stressful, like a time bomb, and conflict could reemerge at any moment?
MT: That is what I am telling you. The level of poverty among young people, the rampant unemployment, their political exclusion — which lead to the war in the first place — is still here. Those conditions have not changed. In fact, I believe it is worse than before the war. That is why I said we are on a time bomb which could explode anytime.
That is the reason in fact why I started this institution. Because otherwise I believe that the politicians and the business elites will continue to plant confusion in this region. And whenever they plan these things it is the young people, the youth, the children that they use to implement these plans. So I believe that the best way to stop war is to engage the young people, empower them, bring them into employment. If they are gainfully employed, they will not buy into any ideas to go and fight another man’s war, when they know they are going to risk their lives. So if there are alternative livelihoods, I don’t think they are going to take another man’s gun and go to fight for them, because when the end of any way comes no one is going to put in place any strategy or plan for them. The politicians are only concerned about themselves going into politics, going into government, getting political powers. These young men are left to languish on the streets. That is what is still happening around here. And that is the gap I want to bridge. This is the problem I intend to solve.
BC: What is the name of your organization?
MT: I have two institutions. One is not-for-profit, and one is a for-profit institution. The for-profit is called Action for Poverty Mitigation in the Third World (APM3). The not-for-profit is the West African Youth Agenda Against Corrupt Practice (WAYAACP).
BC: And are you doing the same kind of work in both places?
MT: Yes, well, APM3, I just started that last year, and that is in Sierra Leone. The West African Youth Agenda Against Corrupt Practices was started here in Liberia three years ago. That is now working on the ground. We are now working in four communities. This year we want to expand into other communities and we are bringing on board young people and trying to make young people look at farming as a business.
BC: Do your groups work in conjunction with other international or regional organizations?
MT: That is presently the biggest challenge we are facing – how to collaborate and partner with other international groups – be it not-for-profit or for-profit institutions, donor foundations, loan giving institutions, bilateral institutions, or governments. We are having a serious problem with this. If you are a young institution, and you want to buy into partnerships or collaborations with bigger institutions out there in the diaspora, the first thing they want to know are your credentials: what are the experiences you have gone through? And we are beginners. And so if someone does not buy into us, if someone is not ready to fund us, we will not get the experience they are asking for. So it is like we are scraping from nowhere to make our ideas work, to make our ideas stand. This is a serious challenge, but we are still working toward that, and I believe we will jump those barriers.
BC: Who do you work with directly?
MT: We are targeting those between 15 years and 35 years – that is our target area. We focus on young people. They are the target of armed movements, rogue politicians, and unscrupulous business people.
BC: How did you decide to move into this kind of work?
MT: Well, as I told you, I have been part of the fighting forces. I was in it when I was a youth and crossed through the youth group and then I became a young adult, and now I am a real adult. I saw it happen. I was on the ground. I was in the bush. I saw men falling before me. I saw my compatriots dying before me. I saw people being killed in gruesome ways. So it is a lot of things!
And most of my friends who were involved with me did not even go to school. They literally did not know why they were in it. And a lot of those guys that were in it with us were younger than us. Children I mean – and they didn’t even know why they were there. Their childhood was taken away from them. No opportunity to go to school! Yes, men were indoctrinated into the madness. People were indoctrinated in most of these things. Today, people who are 30 years or 35 years cannot even write their own names. But if we can engage them today and conduct a survey to ask them: if today was sixteen years ago, would you take up arms? Most of them will tell you no, a big no. They did it then because they were children. They were exploited and indoctrinated.
So there is the potential that younger people coming after us could also be used by rogue politicians and unscrupulous business people for their own selfish gains. So in order to stop that, I believe in empowerment for these young people. It is not as if these young people have a livelihood. They have what they are making. Now, imagine if they have money in their hands. They are able to arrange their own rooms. They are able to keep their own wives. They are able to take care of their families. Nobody will tell them to take guns into a rebellion where they know their lives are at risk! Except if someone signs up for the national army where he knows he is well taken care of. I believe that this is the only way to have the young people engaged. Our major focus right now is agriculture. Agriculture is the main sector that people are becoming employed in: hundreds and hundreds of people at the same time can work at little cost and we can help empower them. That is why I choose that path.
BC: Can you talk more about this agricultural work?
MT: Yes, what we are doing is IVS (Inner Valley Swamps) – rice cultivations. working on small, small swamps. This is what we are starting in about three communities, and we are now starting a small cassava plantation. As I told you, we do not have any funding yet from any institutions. We have talked to friends and well-wishers, people that I know – that is what we are starting with. In Sierra Leone, we are in a lot of negotiations with land-holding families and I am trying to get leases on those lands in those riverine and boli areas. We want to go into mechanization. We want to bring in tractors so that we will be able to plough thousands and thousands of acres of farmland where we will be able to employ thousands of young men in large groups. So that is what we are looking at. Even in Liberia, I have just started some negotiations yesterday with another land-holding family who has up to 5000 acres of land that will also allow mechanization, tractorization. So that is the cause I am working on.
BC: What will you grow in the fields?
MT: We are going to look at rice, which is a staple food in this area. We want to see why we cannot feed ourselves in this area. We want to know why Sierra Leone or Liberia should import rice from China or Burma or Pakistan while we have better land here, better fertile land here – we want to see why? We believe we can do that. So we want to start with rice, and then go into peanuts, and we can go into cassava. And as we grow, we will begin to diversify into other crops that are necessary for the local markets, as well as exportation.
BC: How can the international community be more helpful to Sierra Leone and Liberia right now?
MT: When the crisis started in Ivory Coast, thousands of men began to leave Liberia and entered the Ivory Coast as mercenaries to fight the Ivorian War on both sides of the divide. People were going on the side of then-President Laurent Gbagbo, and other people were going on the side of Alassane Ouattara, the opposition leader and President-elect. A lot of men died there. So I started a proposal that would stop men from moving from this country to those areas as mercenaries. I sent the proposal to a friend and mentor in the USA, and he sold the idea to his friends in the World Bank group in New York. They showed interest and they started working with me to see if they could support it. It was a proposal to help to stop these young guys going to another man’s war by empowering them and providing alternative livelihoods for these guys. Between somebody going into war for a hundred dollars, and participating in a supportive job that can earn him three hundred dollars in three months, most will choose the latter. But that proposal did not materialize because by the time they were reviewing the documents Laurent Gbagbo was captured in Ivory Coast and the war came to an end, and that just ended the entire thing. So I believe that support from the international community, like the venture the World Bank wanted to support, could be one key way of assisting countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia from avoiding future conflicts. And I believe if international donor organizations come to support good proposals here, that could help to relieve conflict in this region. So if key international partners want to come in, they have to look at the employability of young people in these areas. Employability has to be number one. If they are looking at education, I would put education at number two or number three. Agriculture programs should be the first, then skills trades such auto mechanic, bike mechanic, cell phone repair, carpentry, masonry etc. – skills for people who have not been to school. Because the majority of the young people on the streets right now are illiterate. So you see, if you concentrate on education, you will have many that will not subscribe to school. They will not make it. Some are beyond school-going age. Some are 30 or more. The last assistance goes to formal education. So that is what I would recommend.
BC: Can you speak briefly about your collaboration with Professor Hoffman? What do you think about the idea of Western academics writing a book about the experiences you shared in the area?
I have been working with Professor Hoffman for the last ten years or more. That is why you saw in his book, War Machines, that I am one of his closest friends to whom he owes a lot. I think it is a great idea. I am also working on a book. I am also writing a memoir that will bring together striking issues, issues that have not been touched on, issues that the world might not know about. I am writing about that. Professor Hoffman’s book is a very great book. I believe in history. I believe that the nation that will not write its history, is the nation that is bound to fail and make fatal mistakes in the future. So everything that happened here should be written. Some have done extremely well, especially Western scholars who are coming down here, living here, doing this research and putting it on paper. Journalists around here, historians around here , they are not making the extra effort to research for this information and put it on paper for posterity. So that is why I commend the work of Westerners, like Professor Hoffman, who come down here, with all of the stress they go through. In the end, they come up with something that people will look at and, say, “Yeah, this is a great work.”
BC: What do you think about the current situation in the region?
MT: In this region, you have a lot of influx of men who have fought in the wars, who moved for their own employment to the gold mines and the diamond mines, and into motorcycle transportation. A lot of these young guys are using motorcycles for commercial purposes around here. A lot of them also are engaged in criminal activity, taking bags from people, especially in the night all around the city. And they are also in the jungles all around this area. These men still remain potential mercenaries who can take up arms at any time. They still remain very disgruntled. They still believe the governments in this area have not done much to solve their situations. There is a notion still that if you have arms you have some livelihood. So I will give you the example of what happened in the Ivory Coast. Tens of thousands of men were switching from Liberia and Sierra Leone to Ivory Coast, because they believed if they take the arms they were going to empower themselves. They are going to get some money. So that is the situation. It is a very difficult situation. And the governments are making very little effort in that direction.
The international community is making a very huge effort, but it is misdirected. It is misguided. It is not reaching the right people or the right things are not coming in. You will see that the international community is pouring in too much money, and very little is achieved. That is the situation around here. If you really want to engage with the ex-combatant, if you really want to salvage the situation in this area so that we do not return to future conflict, first and foremost, get the people – the insiders, like you are talking to me – I will give you what is happening from the ground, from the fighting men, from the generals. So if you sit me on a panel to design a proposal or a project that will change the lives of these guys, I will do that. I know better what they need than an expert from, let’s say, Europe. The notion from the west and the United Nations is the idea that they can best design project proposals for us without our input. They think they have the experts. They then bring it down on the ground and try to make it work here. You will just end up spending too much money, and it will hardly work. That is the situation. They need to recognize the fact that local people too have valuable ideas to contribute.
The only way we will move forward in this area is when we close the gap between the poor and the rich. There is still a very big gap. As long as this gap continues to widen, people will continue to be disgruntled. And when people are disgruntled, and when people are hungry, anything can happen. That is why I say we are on a time bomb in this area.
Mohamed Tarawalley is a former General of the Civil Defense Forces in Sierra Leone and founder of Action for Poverty Mitigation in the Third World (APM3) and West African Youth Agenda Against Corrupt Practices (WAYAACP).
Ben Cox is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine, and an editorial assistant for The CIHA Blog.