RELIGION-SIERRA LEONE: Church Closes Hospital After Rebel Attacks

By Lansana Fofana Reprint | | Print |

Lansana Fofana

FREETOWN, Dec 10 1998 (IPS) - The Catholic Church in Sierra Leone has stopped operations in the northern town of Lunsar, about 115 kilometres from the capital Freetown, following weekend’s rebel attack and threats on the lives of missionaries and expatriate medical staff.

Lunsar is a strategic town with a large missionary presence and a thriving agricultural base. It hosts the famous Mabesseneh hospital which offers surgical and other health care services to tens of thousands of rural people impoverished by the conflict in Sierra Leone.

Sheka Turay, a school teacher, fled the town with ‘hundreds of civilians’ on Dec 6. “We consider the situation very volatile, and we just can’t wait for the rebels, who have already attacked and burnt a number of outlying villages,” he told IPS this week.

He said about 40 houses were set ablaze and an unknown number of civilians killed in the town, which is populated by more than 250,000 people. He said the church has evacuated all priests and medical staff, to Makeni, the capital of the northern region, 32 kilometres from Lunsar.

Church leaders say the evacuation is to avoid a repetition of an incident three weeks ago, when a Catholic priest was abducted by rebel forces.

One clergyman says they are praying for the early release of Father MARIO GUERRA who was kidnapped from Kamalo also in the North, and do not want to risk a replay of the incident. “We now know the rebels are targeting priests and foreign aid workers and we are not giving them any opportunity,” the priest told IPS on Monday.

The Mabesseneh hospital, which was treating some 100 patients at the time of the incident, has been closed and patients reluctantly discharged from the clinic and told to go home.

“The closure of the hospital is a tremendous blow to the poor who cannot afford to go to hospitals in distant cities,” Says Pa Alimamy Kamara, an elder from Lunsar.

The hospital serves patients from various parts of the country affected by the civil war and expatriate medical services are cost effective. Drugs are freely distributed to the poor and needy and other health outlets have optical facilities for the people in and around Lunsar.

All this has now grounded to a halt. A town not too far away from Lunsar, and also a farming settlement Mange, was earlier attacked by rebels and completely burnt down. An undisclosed number of civilians were either killed or abducted.

The rebels have reportedly sent a message to Lunsar threatening to attack and take the town, in coming days. The West African peacekeeping force ‘ECOMOG’ and its militia allies have dismissed the threats as ‘bogus’, insisting that the dissidents are incapable of overrunning the town.

But the Catholic Mission is taking no chances. Earlier this year, rebels briefly hold a number of priests hostages, before the Bishop of Makeni, George Biguzzi, negotiated their release. And, also in Lunsar, at the height of the conflict, rebels abducted about seven nuns holding them hostages for a month.

Biguzzi told IPS over the weekend that he got a message from a rebel leader saying he (Biguzzi) too would be abducted, if he fails to meet specific demands, which he did not disclose.

“Although they (rebels) said Father Guerra was alive and safe, they threatened to capture me and maintained that they were just as capable,” the Bishop said, adding that “priests should be totally left out of the conflict”.

“We are not politicians or military officers and we cannot be used as bargaining chips,” he added:

Father Guerra’s abductors three weeks ago, demanded a satellite phone and medicines, a demand which was outrightly turned down by the Catholic church.

The government also has refused to talk with the rebels. “Who are you going to negotiate with? Who are the leaders of the rebellion and what is there to negotiate ?,” says Septimus Kaikai, spokesman for President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah.

Kaikai says the government’s offer of amnesty to rebels, who are willing to surrender unconditionally, still holds. “We would treat them humanely as long as they lay down their arms and surrender to ECOMOG.”

The civil war in the tiny West African nation erupted in March 1991, when rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), attacked Sierra Leone’s border towns, from neighbouring Liberia.

More than 15,000 are believed to have died in the conflict and at a point, up to a quarter of the country’s five million population forced to flee into neighbouring countries as refugees.

A number of towns and villages have been burnt down by rebel troops and the country’s mineral and agriculturally rich districts blockaded by the fighting.

In May 1997, renegade elements from the government army ousted the elected administration of Kabbah, in a coup, and invited the rebels to help form a government.

The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) which emerged afterwards, ruled for nine months before it was ousted by ECOMOG in February. Remnants of the rebel movement have been committing atrocities against civilians in rural areas.

Although the government has vowed to crush the rebellion, the war seems to be protracting and its conclusion still illusive.