Sierra Leone

The millions spent on the trial could be spent on the people of Sierra Leone, to support the people who suffered. There are people for whom surviving is really hard. The wounds are in our minds." - MUCTARR JALLOH, 29, who moved to New York after enduring atrocities during the 10-year civil war in his native Sierra Leone, including the amputation of his right hand and ear, on the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, accused of arming and controlling rebels who raped, mutilated and enslaved civilians NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

SECRETARY of state Madeleine K. Albright was to return this weekend from her third official visit to sub-Saharan Africa (her fourth, if you count her visit as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations), after trips to six countries in West and East Africa. The secretary has made more official visits to the subcontinent than any of her predecessors. This is commendable.The trip brought additional visibility to Africa, not only its challenges but also some of the continent's success stories. The overriding message of Albright's sojourn -- like President Clinton's tour of the continent last year -- is that Africa matters.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Bob Moran, an American food aid worker with Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, described yesterday how he escaped the fighting in Sierra Leone with his 9-year-old son last week.Moran, 49, a program monitoring officer with CRS, was robbed of his Mercedes car and other possessions when intruders forced their way into his house at the height of the clash between rebel forces and troops of the West African intervention force, ECOMOG.His house had become a refuge for about 20 members of his late wife's Sierra Leone family and friends during the fighting.

SKEPTICISM greeted the pledge of democracy that Nigeria's Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar made after succeeding the military dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha, who died of a heart attack last June.Between last Saturday's smooth election of a new parliament and today's election of a president, General Abubakar has been good to his word. He kept the faith with international creditors, let people out of prison, allowed active politics and ran a fair election.That said, the true task of restoring democracy and the economy in Africa's most populous and potentially greatest country has just begun.

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- When drunken rebel leaders staggered into a downtown newspaper office recently and slapped around the editor, nobody was surprised. Nobody did anything about it, either, because the attackers could soon be ministers in the country's new government.The Sierra Leone peace accord, signed July 7 but not yet implemented, stipulates that Revolutionary United Front (RUF) warlord Foday Sankoh will become vice president. His officers have been guaranteed four ministerial positions and his troops, many of whom hacked off the limbs of civilians and raped young girls, have been offered amnesty.

IT'S THE CASE of the (almost) vanishing professor.Septimus Kaikai was teaching a business course and chairing a major academic division at Catonsville Community College early last March when he asked for a few days' leave to attend to his ailing father in Sierra Leone.Several days later, he appeared in news reports as the spokesman for Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. Overthrown in a 1997 coup, Kabbah had just been reinstated after ousting a military junta in the West African nation.

MAJ. JOHNNY PAUL KOROMA shattered the 1996 accord ending five years of anarchy in Sierra Leone. On May 25, he deposed the elected president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, who fled. Major Koroma's troops are children with assault rifles and rebels who launched civil war in 1991.The coup undoes the progress that the poor country of 4.5 million people in West Africa was finally making. It repudiates the 53-nation Organization of African Unity's (OAU) slow march toward stability and democracy in Africa.

AS STEVEN Spielberg's new movie ''Amistad'' ends, the hero, Cinque, is on a boat nearing the shores of his home country, Sierra Leone.A postscript tells the audience that when he landed, Cinque -- and the other Africans who refused to become slaves in the Americas -- discovered that Sierra Leone was embroiled in civil war.More than 150 years later, Sierra Leone and many of its neighbors are still war-torn nation-states, thickets of ethnic rivalries that...

In Sierra Leone, military leader hands over power to civilianFREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- Tens of thousands of jubilant Sierra Leoneans celebrated in their capital, Freetown, yesterday the army returned power to the civilians after four years of ruling over this West African country.Military leader Julius Maada Bio, who seized power in a January palace coup, handed the ceremonial staff of office to President-elect Ahmad Tejan Kabbah at a colorful ceremony in the run-down capital's Parliament building.

THE NOTION that some African countries cannot function as nation states has subsided lately. Sierra Leone held a successful election that appears to have ended its anarchy. Benin just held an orderly election. Newly independent Eritrea, with more baggage of war and ethnic chaos than most, is remarkably successful at nation-building. And -- most gratifying to Americans -- Liberia seemed to end its dreadful civil war last August.Now with a new outburst of fighting, the progress in Liberia is brutally set back.

Here's the message I'm trying to get out to friends and acquaintances these days: Don't forward any more stupid Internet jokes to my in-box. Don't forward any more videos with the subject line "YOU GOTTA SEE THIS!" that show a frightened deer leaping across six lanes of interstate traffic or a cute 5-year-old landing a 600-pound shark on his dad's fishing boat. Don't forward another "HEALTH ALERT!" about the latest killer staph infection or another "COMPUTER ALERT!" about the latest virus that's going to wipe out my hard drive.

I used to think no one in the whole world hated e-mail more than me, but that turns out to be wrong. Doctors, it seems, really hate e-mail. In fact, a new survey shows only 31 percent of doctors use e-mail to answer questions from patients outside the office. The rest still prefer the time-honored method of having a bored receptionist take your call, then calling you back days later, usually after your symptoms have subsided. According to a recent Associated Press article on the survey, there are lots of reasons doctors don't like e-mail.

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS Product of `farm system' Rookie linebacker Antwan Barnes, a fourth-round draft pick from Florida International, looks to be the latest example of a player coming up through the "farm system" on the Ravens' defense. Sports baltimoresun.com/steele A jaw-dropping number What number of killings in a year will engender outrage in Baltimore? The columnist answers. Maryland baltimoresun.com/kane other voices Laura Vozzella on cellist, demolition -- Maryland Rob Kasper on the bounty of basil -- Taste 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY Poetry meeting -- At 7 p.m., check out Poet's Ink, a monthly meeting sponsored by the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society.

The millions spent on the trial could be spent on the people of Sierra Leone, to support the people who suffered. There are people for whom surviving is really hard. The wounds are in our minds." - MUCTARR JALLOH, 29, who moved to New York after enduring atrocities during the 10-year civil war in his native Sierra Leone, including the amputation of his right hand and ear, on the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, accused of arming and controlling rebels who raped, mutilated and enslaved civilians NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON -- Nothing concentrates your mind out in the back roads of rural Africa like having a kid from some rebel army hold you up at gunpoint with a large, Russian-made assault rifle. Rory Anderson, a senior Africa policy adviser for World Vision, a Washington-based Christian aid and development organization, knows that experience. It happened to her and a carload of colleagues in 2003 in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, near Uganda's border. "Suddenly I was both frightened and brokenhearted," Ms. Anderson recalled in an interview.

SIERRA LEONE SERENADE The Refugee All-Stars of Sierra Leone, a six-musician group, came together at the Kalia Refugee Camp in Sierra Leone, on the border of Guinea. When rebel forces attacked Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, thousands of civilians were forced to flee. The group will perform a free outdoor concert of original songs written in exile Sunday at the Kennedy Center in Washington. After the concert there will be a free screening of the documentary The Refugee All-Stars, which chronicles a three-year period in which the band left the refugee camp to go back to Sierra Leone.

CHICAGO -- A reporter asked Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf why she had come to America. She responded with five words that open doors, launch jetliners and move motorcades almost everywhere on the planet: "I was invited by Oprah." Of course, it is important to note that Ms. Sirleaf also was drawn by a humanitarian mission. She brought with her Musu Gertee, a 9-year-old Liberian girl who was fitted with a prosthetic replacement for the right arm and hand she lost in a rocket attack three years ago. Oprah Winfrey's staff alerted Ms. Sirleaf's government to Musu after the child was featured last year in a Chicago Tribune report about Liberia's young war victims.

Chimpanzees are supposed to be the "good" apes, cute and funny, the hairy little people depicted in thousands of films and TV shows. But recent news out of western Africa shows they can be brutally fierce. A chimp attacked and killed a Sierra Leone man who was driving Americans to a wildlife refuge last month. Another man lost part of his hand in the attack. Some news reports said a group of up to 20 chimps that had broken out of their enclosures gang-attacked the men, while other stories have pinned responsibility on one animal, possibly a chimp named Bruno, the undisputed alpha male of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary.

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- Unshaven and looking haggard, Africa's most wanted war criminal, former Liberian President Charles Taylor, was placed in a detention cell at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone yesterday after his early-morning arrest while trying to flee Nigeria carrying large bags of cash. A U.N. helicopter carrying Taylor landed in the compound of the U.N. Special Court in Freetown. Taylor, handcuffed and wearing a bulletproof vest over a white tunic, stepped out and was bundled into a four-wheel-drive vehicle and driven about 100 yards to the door of the detention center.

The U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone unsealed an indictment nearly three years ago charging Liberian President Charles Taylor with 17 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law during that country's civil war. But he's still a free man. The indictment, handed down June 4, 2003, charges that Mr. Taylor "bears the greatest responsibility" for murder, rape, torture and the use...