The Congregational Church of Putnam, CT

United Church of Christ

Hope for the Heart of Darkness?
By Ken Evans

When I was asked if I would do a sermon, I immediately saw an opportunity to bring to completion a project that I had been thinking about for some time, one that needed a focus and a form. My message today includes a little bit of history, some politics, some religion, and a lot of personal reflection. It is also a story of connections, of ties. Connections involving a country, this church and myself.

Two weeks after graduating from college, I stepped off a plane, into a wall of heat and humidity at Lungi International Airport, one of approximately 200 Peace Corps Volunteers newly assigned to the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Following a bus ride, then a ferry ride across a wide bay swept with rainsqualls, we reached the ramshackle capital city, Freetown. To this 21-year-old, it felt as though I had entered the pages of a "National Geographic Magazine" article. In the pouring rain I saw shanties with rusting sheet metal roofs, women carrying babies strapped to their backs, and loads on their heads. The smells of cooking fires and open drains and garbage permeated the air. And something else - there were no other white faces to be seen, only black. I had arrived, eager to embark on a great adventure for the next two years as a primary school teacher in Africa.

From quite a young age I have had an interest in faraway places, especially Africa. I recall being fascinated by the tales told by African explorers like Stanley and Livingston; the medieval kingdoms of the Sahara region, Timbuktu; mysterious rivers like the Nile, Congo and Niger; and the exotic sounding names of the newly independent African nations of the 1960’s, Mali, Mauritania, Tanzania. The Peace Corps, I felt, afforded me an opportunity to live, work and travel on this vast continent. It was also a way out of the draft during the height of the Vietnam War.

That was 30 years ago. Today, Sierra Leone, a lush land of rolling green hills, of white sandy beaches lined with coconut palms, of singing and dancing and tie dyed shirts, has become a nightmare land of unspeakable horrors, the heart of darkness. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Sierra Leone is not a country that often commands the world’s news headlines. But once in awhile it does get coverage. You may recall this past May, when more than 500 United Nations peacekeeping troops, assigned to enforce a peace accord ending a bloody 9 year civil war, were themselves taken hostage by the very rebels they were supposed to disarm. That story, and reports of a renewed rebel offensive, did make the evening television news. And just last week, the dramatic rescue of more than 200 besieged UN peacekeepers in the eastern diamond mining area made the headlines.

Listen to this chilling account by a Times of London correspondent about last May’s rebel offensive:

Just past the town of Mile 38, General "One Man One Bullet" and Major "Prayer" (their names are in quotes) are squatting under a palm tree, their rifles leaning against their legs. The exhausted men from the Special Forces of the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) have just captured Masiaka, a strategic town outside the Occra Hills.

The rebels have been temporarily pushed back into the bush. The government soldiers – more boys than men – are celebrating: drinking plastic containers of straight gin that give them "motivation", smoking ganga (marijuana), and howling in celebration. "The rebels are gone! We took Masiaka!" screams 22-year-old Alfayaya. The roadblocks are marked with graffiti: "The SLA are back!"

But further up the road, inside the town, there is more chaos and mayhem than celebration. The aftermath of the battle is eerie: shoes lost during the fighting in the middle of the road, recently used syringes, the dead body of a young soldier killed by rebels. Further away, vultures feast on the body of a woman killed during the battle. There is the smell of death, and the soldiers who have just emerged from the bush have eyes red and wild with drugs and excitement.

The government soldiers are newly integrated with a toxic new militia: The West Side Boys. "We’re the West Side Boys," screams Noa, who is only 14 and says he is a gun commander. They have just come from the front and they look more like gangsta rappers or a Los Angeles street gang than fighters: bare-chested or wearing Michael Jordan or Leonardo DiCaprio T-shirts, wraparound sunglasses, flat-topped haircuts and big sneakers.

The West Side Boys and the SLA say they have not had food or clean water for five days. They have no medicine and only one vehicle. They are furious that the United Nations is taking all the credit for securing Freetown, when it is the militias and the SLA that are doing all the dirty work on the front lines. They scream and shout, "Till we die! Till we die!" Our driver cannot move forward because of the chaos, and his ancient Mercedes is trapped by the crowd. Finally a commander emerges from the mob. "Go, go, get out of here!" he shouts. The boys, howling, disperse.

On the way out we are stopped by Major "Prayer". When we tell him about our treatment, he shakes his head. "I warned you," he says quietly. "They have seen too much war."

Sierra Leone has definitely seen too much war during the past decade. Since 1991, it is estimated that half the country’s 4.5 million people have been displaced. At least 50,000 are dead. The economy is in ruins and the government infrastructure a shambles.

But what I have found especially disturbing are the gruesome human rights violations committed on a grand scale in Sierra Leone. The rebels have used brutalization as a strategy. To win the hearts and minds of the population they have resorted to an organized campaign of hacking off the limbs of men, women and even children. They have employed ragtag armies of boys, some as young as 8, to assist in this horrific campaign. The victims of such mutilation are estimated to be in the tens of thousands. At times the situation in Sierra Leone became so chaotic, so out of control, that various international relief organizations stationed there evacuated their in-country personnel, preventing any humanitarian aid at all from getting through to the people. This is not the country I knew 30 years ago. Indeed, something has gone terribly wrong.

Now, let’s shift gears. At the beginning of my talk I said this was a story of connections. You know of my connection to Sierra Leone. What is the connection of that West African nation to the United Church of Christ, and by extension to our own church? That tie involves a ship and an incident that took place 160 years ago.

The ship was the Amistad, subject of a recent movie. The Amistad was a slave ship, sized in 1839 by African captives, who forced it to sail to the shores of Connecticut. They were later freed from jail in New Haven by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. The former captives eventually returned to Africa. Those Africans were members of the Mende tribe of Sierra Leone. They spoke the same tribal dialect as the people amidst whom I lived in a small upcountry town surrounded by slash and burn farms and forest. Their descendants could have been my neighbors.

During their incarceration, the Africans were befriended by people of faith, who raised money to clothe and feed them, and rallied to their legal aid. These were individuals whose Congregationalist legacy is now part of the United Church of Christ. That original Amistad Committee continued to meet after the captives were freed and later evolved into the American Missionary Association, the first anti-slavery missionary association in the United States. That association is still alive and well as part of the United Church of Christ under the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries. Our own church Board of Outreach here in Putnam contributes to this mission effort through its budget.

Since becoming aware of the extent of atrocities being committed in Sierra Leone, I continue to ask myself, how could this have happened? If someone had prophesied in 1971 what Sierra Leone would become today, I would not have believed it. I was young and idealistic then, preoccupied by the day-to-day struggle for existence in a desperately poor country; I was not a foreign policy expert.

Now, 30 years later, I have a resource I can fall back on. I faithfully kept a journal for the entire time I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. I re-read my journal while preparing for this message. Much of what I recorded concerned the weather, food, the daily challenge of teaching in 90-degree heat, friends, social gatherings and the like. However, the number of entries struck me that dealt with suspicion, disputes, incompetence and corruption. In my chiefdom (sort of like a county) there was an ongoing dispute between the paramount chief and his constituents, which affected much of daily life, including matters at the school. Police were always around. Rumors of roving bands of thieves were rampant. The Mende tribe didn’t much like the Temne tribe, and everyone was jealous of the elitist Krios, the decedents of the original settlers. There were military coupes, one shortly before I arrived, one during my stay, and another shortly after I left. The opposition newspapers were full of stories about governmental corruption. It seemed that violence was always seething just below the surface, about to erupt. If these attitudes and events already in place were destined to send Sierra Leone on a spiraling descent into hell, I didn’t realize it at the time.

Does it matter what is going on in Sierra Leone? Do we really care? These are tough questions. In order to address these questions, let’s ask them from different perspectives. Does it matter to you as an individual, as a Christian? Does it matter to us as a nation, as a member of the world community of nations?

Look at two events that happened at about the same time in 1999. In early January of last year rebels unleashed a brutal attack on Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone, which subjected residents to random killings, abductions, amputations and rapes. Human rights organizations have described events of the following three weeks as among the most serious of modern day warfare with 3,000 killed, thousands abducted and more than 5,000 houses set on fire. This was in just one city.

In March 1999 NATO forces unleashed a bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in response to Slobodan Milosevik’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against Albanians in Kosovo. Events in the Balkans made the nightly news for months. Remember the heart-wrenching sight of thousands of refugees driven from their homes because of their ethnicity with only the clothes on their backs? But how many of you were aware of what was going on in Sierra Leone at the same time?

In that Spring there were 50,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, but only a few dozen unarmed United Nations observers in Sierra Leone. Africans see the commitment of troops in the Balkans to mean that the world is serious about peace there. They see the world’s neglect of Africa, and they despair. Africa is simply not important on the world stage. The message this sends to Sierra Leone, and to Rwanda, the Congo and Eritrea is that the West doesn’t care what is going on in those places. One writer even made this observation: what if the thousands of severed arms were white instead of black? What would the response be then?

Should we care about what is happening in Sierra Leone? I know I care. I care because I lived there for two years. I was not just a tourist passing through. I worked and sweated and laughed and cried with these people. I attended their weddings and funerals. I have seen photographs of the child amputees, even babies, victims of the civil war, on various Internet web sites. Some stare at the camera in bewilderment, unable to comprehend what has happened to them. In the faces of these children I see the faces of my students of 30 years ago. They are grown now, but what has become of them? Are they, too, innocent victims of war, or are they the perpetrators of these atrocities? I cannot say, but I do care.

Does it matter what is happening in Sierra Leone? Should we care? We must care. We cannot, as Christians, turn a blind eye to the crimes against humanity being committed in the name of who-knows-what’s political agenda. We cannot ignore the growing trend, in Sierra Leone and elsewhere, of recruiting children, usually by force, into the military. Currently an estimated 300,000 children have been forced into labor or combat in conflicts around the world. For them, a normal childhood is only a distant vision. Just imagine a world with wars of young against old, or of children fighting children, armed with AK-47 assault rifles. It’s really happening!

In the international power vacuum created by the end of the Cold War, conflicts, such as the one in Sierra Leone, have been erupting all around the world. Nasty little wars like those in Chechnya, the Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea and Timor, are rarely reported on the front page of newspapers. In these conflicts uncounted innocent civilians are being slaughtered. The humanitarian work of relief organizations, governmental, private and religious, is needed now more than ever, and is expanding rapidly into this area of man-made disasters, caused by these wars.

Strip away the Cold War rhetoric of East vs. West and a whole series of conflicts emerge. These conflicts are now revealed for what they really are: ethnic and religious wars, rivalries between local warlords for turf, rivalries between crime bosses for control of the drug trade, wars fueled by greed, for control of the diamond trade, as in Sierra Leone. This is the warfare of the new millennium. Unfortunately, this warfare comes in the wake of democratic progress and threatens to destabilize the fragile governments of neighboring countries. Unfortunately, this warfare produces an ever increasing tally of human rights violations.

Remember the "New Age" as foretold in the passage from Isaiah? "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." If that "New Age" is ever to be realized, nations, people, must learn to use ballots, not bullets, to affect change. People need to talk more, to solve their problems through discussion and dialogue, and not resort to using arms.

Does it matter what is happening in Sierra Leone? Should we care? Remember the story of the slave ship Amistad and its 53 captives from Sierra Leone? The Amistad sails again. A replica of it was launched last spring. I had the opportunity to see it recently during New London’s Opsail 2000 event. The Amistad will now serve as a floating classroom, its mission to shed light on such issues as slavery, freedom, cooperation, leadership, equality and human dignity.

The Amistad message also calls attention to the issues of racism, bigotry, greed, injustice and intolerance, which are the causes of so much violence in the world today. This is, after all, the same message that Jesus Christ brought to the world 2000 years ago. Conference Minister Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree writes that the Amistad message reminds us, the United Church of Christ, of our "spiritual heritage in the antislavery movement and our long-standing commitment to justice for all people."

The United Church of Christ is a Founding partner of the Amistad America Project and helps raise funds for its educational mission. You now have the opportunity to join in that effort through a special offering. Oh, I know some will say that Ken’s asking for mission money again. Yes, that’s true. A collection box for this UCC offering is the chapel.

There is also a display in the chapel relating to the Amistad event, as well as the current situation in Sierra Leone. After much deliberation, I decided not to include any photographs of the atrocities of which I spoke earlier, photos that are readily available over the Internet. I feel many of you would find them very disturbing, as I do. I don’t want to caution or upset anyone here because of them. The images in the display include works by my students, as well as photos of the British military mission to secure Freetown during last May and June.

The title of my talk today is phrased as a question: Hope for the Heart of Darkness? Is hope certain, is it guaranteed, or is it just an elusive concept, a dream? I’m afraid I can’t answer that question right now. Only time will determine how that tragedy is played out. But we must certainly pray that hope for peace can be found for Sierra Leone, and for the other hearts of darkness around the world.

Today, the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone is the biggest in the world with 13,000 troops. The British government, the former colonial ruler of Sierra Leone, has guaranteed increased ammunition and training for the Sierra Leone Army. The United States, for its part, has pledged financial support for the United Nations peacekeeping force, mostly composed of troops from other African, as well as Asian nations.

These responses are positive. The United Nations peacekeepers are finally getting some well-deserved muscle after several months of embarrassing reversals. But be aware that these responses are, in reality, swords, not plowshares. It looks as though the West is resigned to a military solution to achieve peace in Africa. And why not? So far all other options, various peace accords, have failed. Let’s not forget that Sengbe, the Sierra Leonean leader of the Amistad revolt back in 1839, also resorted to violence and bloodshed to achieve the liberation of his countrymen, and ultimate return to their homeland.

Here’s another blow for peace. The world community of nations is now united in an effort to end the illegal trade in so-called "blood diamonds", in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in Africa, which is fueling the civil war and the rebel atrocities against innocent civilians.

I believe that the best hope for peace comes from awareness, on the part of people everywhere, people like you and me, of what is going on in the world. We need to be aware of 21^st century human rights violations around the world and respond to them. We need to speak out, as I am doing. More than a half-century ago, European Jews in the millions were being exterminated, while the world went about its wartime business unaware. Did anyone speak out? That can never be allowed to happen again.

This church, in partnership with other churches and denominations, is responding through educational programs and special offerings, such as One Great Hour of Sharing, which are targeting the suffering of refugees in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Know what is going on in the world, speak out, and respond. But above all, remind yourselves, over and over, that suffering and death never have the last word. Amen.