The war in Sierra Leone is the longest war, the bloodiest war and the ugliest war of this decade, and yet this is a war that has been fought essentially in the dark. It has been virtually ignored by the U.S. government and the media. After a 10-hour meeting, Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and Cpl. Foday Saybana Sankoh, the leader of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, agreed to a ceasefire effective May 24. Yet there was little media coverage of the peaceful developments.
I have observed quite the opposite response from the media in its coverage of the war in Kosovo. In the same spirit that led me to Sierra Leone, I traveled, as part of a 19-member religious delegation, to war-torn Yugoslavia in late April. Our mission was to meet with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to secure the freedom of three U.S. soldiers who were being held in captivity. After prayer and counsel and a call to end the ethnic cleansing and bombing, Milosevic agreed to release the soldiers. God blessed us to have them home with their families on Mother’s Day.
From the moment we embarked on this successful mission to free the three prisoners of war, the cameras started rolling. And they have been rolling ever since. The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition has been overwhelmed by thousands of calls from the media seeking interviews about the war in Kosovo, the delegation’s experience in Belgrade and our call for a peaceful resolution. Because of the round-the-clock media coverage, Americans are moved and saddened by the atrocities in Kosovo. We want the war crimes to stop and those who have been pushed into exile returned to their homes. We want to see the bombing stop and peace given a chance. No longer do we want to see misguided missiles striking a school bus, an emergency vehicle or an embassy, claiming the lives of the innocent.
There are amazing parallels between the war in Kosovo and the war in Sierra Leone. Both are intracountry conflicts. The carnage and destruction is devastating. Many natives have been forced to live elsewhere. But the similarities stop here. These are two different countries with two different tales.
When the ethnic Albanians are driven out of Kosovo, our government and NATO comes to defend them. In Sierra Leone, there is only an Africa crisis-response team, leaving the impression that there is something unsafe about risking a life to save an African. While we defend those in Kosovo, NATO and America leave the Africans to fend for themselves.
We also notice these disparities when it comes to U.S. aid for Africa. ECOMOG, the Sierra Leone government’s forces headed by Nigeria, was offered $15 million to fight the rebel forces. For Kosovo, the down payment was $13 billion. Congress has approved an additional $30 billion for the bombing and $60 billion more to rebuild what they are bombing. And while we have every moral obligation to defend the people in Kosovo, who have been driven out of their homeland by ethnic cleansing and genocide, it is morally wrong and repugnant for us to stand idly by and ignore the devastation in Africa.
In Yugoslavia, there is an incentive to end the fighting. When the war is over, Yugoslavs can put their guns down and pick up their hammers and nails. They will have money to rebuild roads, bridges, hospitals and schools. But in Sierra Leone, they will have nothing. They get paid more to shoot than they get to study. They will have no books, and they will have no jobs. The youths of Sierra Leone need a peace dividend, not a war dividend.
The media have a special obligation to see both people as people. If Americans could see the carnage in Sierra Leone, they would be upset. But Americans have not been allowed to see this. This is not about America’s being racist. This is about Americans’ not being exposed. When Americans saw dogs biting us in Birmingham during the civil-rights era of the 1960s, American blacks and whites responded. When there were pictures of marchers being terrorized and brutalized in Selma, blacks, whites, Jews and Gentiles responded. When people can see, our humanity transcends our politics. And so, we should cover the war in Sierra Leone like we cover the war in Kosovo.
I appeal to President Clinton and the congressional foreign-relations committees to provide more aid to Sierra Leone and for the press to cover the story. Please allow the American people the chance to become engaged. If we had not seen U. N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan walking down the road, we would not have known there was a Kosovo, an Albania and Macedonia. But the media put light on it, and the American conscience took over. I have found that many politicians under the light behave differently than politicians in the dark. As long as the media allow politicians to operate in the dark, politicians can continue their double standards.
