Sierra Leone's 'family talk' heals scars of war

Inspired by childhood memories of community rituals, human rights activist John Caulker treks across Sierra Leone to reconcile war crime perpetrators and their victims.

from the July 7, 2008 edition

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In 1997, Caulker became something of a human rights spy. He'd throw on his dirtiest pair of jeans and a long T-shirt and slip between guerrilla groups, pumping proud, often drunk, fighters for details of their war atrocities. Then he'd duck into an abandoned house, test the phone line, and make collect calls to Amnesty International, funneling out details that helped the world sort rumor from truth. The work was dangerous: He lived in RUF-controlled territory and slept in abandoned cars. But he had little trouble getting war criminals to talk.

"The rebels were very boastful," he remembers. "They said things happily.... 'I killed three people,' and another will say, 'Yeah, I killed five.' To them it was like a prize."

Eventually, that violence reached his mother's village, and Caulker brought her back to Freetown. Her death not long after, Caulker attributes to the war – not to the fighting, per se, but to the situation into which it forced his family. When his aunts bought an expensive casket and held an elegant viewing in the very home his mother had been turned out of, Caulker was furious. "But I was a little boy; I don't have any voice by then," he says; he was in his 20s – still too young, in a country with reverence for age, to do more than complain.

His mother's funeral was held the day Nigerian peacekeepers arrived in Freetown to defend the capital from the RUF. But no one in the church where Caulker's mother lay in her coffin knew what was happening when gunshots began.

"Everyone ran away from the church. Everyone," he remembers. "I just sat under the coffin [to] be with her until it died down, and people came in again." He crouched beneath the coffin for close to an hour; when the fighting broke briefly, they buried her. "Others were not buried.... There were corpses at the mortuary, and it was burnt down. It gave me some solace, that she was buried."

When the war ended, Caulker tried to cultivate that sense of solace in his country. He became, with others, a tireless advocate for a truth and reconciliation commission, today a common institution for dealing with the legacies of atrocities like those in Sierra Leone. For 10 years, combatants on all sides of the conflict had moved from village to village, raping women, burning houses, even chopping off the limbs of civilians. Caulker traveled the provinces encouraging people to share their experiences with the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). His views weren't always popular, but he persisted.

"John is not afraid to make himself unpopular with the powerful," says Jon Lunn, a senior research analyst in the British House of Commons who has worked with Caulker since 1998. "One of the characteristics of him really has been to speak truth to power ... to speak independently without fear or favor."

He's famous, in fact, for his advocacy on behalf of the war's amputees. "The war victims, they all know him all over the country," says Jamesina King, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone. Caulker has been pressing their case for reparations for nearly 10 years.

Though preaching reconciliation to his countrymen, Caulker still hadn't made peace with his mother's sisters. "I'm talking to people about forgiveness, about reconciliation – and I realized I have something to address within my family," he remembers. "I was so angry; these were people I thought I would never make peace with.... But I just thought, I'm doing it for my mother. The way she brought me up was not to keep things in my heart."

He met his aunts again at his maternal grandmother's funeral in 2002, four years after his mother died. "We need to talk," he told them. He explained what he remembered and how he felt; his aunts argued. He can't remember the conversation precisely, but what matters, he says, is that they have accepted each other and the pain between them. "It will take time for us to really get to where we were before my mother died. It is a process," Caulker says. "You accept, and you continually accept, even when you think it's finished."

This, then, is how Caulker thinks national reconciliation – as a personal, one-on-one encounter he thinks Sierra Leoneans have never had – might finally begin. One gesture of acknowledgment at a time, relationships can be repaired. Unheard stories of suffering, and unvoiced pleas for forgiveness, can be shared. And in the morning, perhaps villagers, too, can leave the memory of a brutal war behind. Perhaps, he thinks, communities can be turned into fambuls again.

So, one village at a time, that's what Caulker set out to do.

• Tomorrow: John Caulker coaxes war crimes perpetrators out of the bonfire's shadows.

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