“Blessing and peace be ever thine own…”; “So may we serve thee ever alone…”; “All that we have be ever thine own…” Touching promises from the national anthem of a country whose history persistently fails to reflect the abundance of nature’s generosity to her; and each followed by the declaration “Land that we love, our Sierra Leone”. How such simple promises have failed to put that country on an axis better than that traveled to date is anybody’s guess. I suspect an inability or failure by most of her citizens to truly see the country as one land is significant to any analysis. I even propose the often heard lusty rendition of what is the last line of each verse is a brilliantly, though not necessarily deliberately, sustained act of collective lip service.

I was and continue to be horrified by the mindless brutality of Sierra Leone’s civil war, the rampant corruption that plagues the country, the unfathomable tendency to pull compatriots down, and a total lack of empathy for each other. Add to all this the indifference shown to developments in parts of the country away from those with which there is a connection, and I am left wondering what ‘our Sierra Leone’ means to most Sierra Leoneans. Is it limited to the place they grew up? Is it about where their parents come from? Is it simply about where they live or have close family? In effect, is ‘our Sierra Leone’ defined in most by the narrow interest of direct connection, rather than as a whole that all should feel part of and be proud of with understanding and acceptance that a problem in any part should be a concern for all parts?

It was only ten weeks ago that we had out there and everywhere, as much as it has been in one form or the other for the previous sixteen anniversaries, commemorations of the January 6^th 1999 incursion into Freetown by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The code name ‘Operation NO LIVING THING’ made the RUFs intent abundantly clear and there is no doubting the terror and trauma inflicted on people trapped in Freetown as well as on family and friends in the rest of the world. However, there are some facts that cannot be hidden behind recounts of the rebels’ brutality.

The civil war, of which Op NO LIVING THING was a phase and not the entirety, had been raging mainly outside of the Western Area – of which Freetown is a part – for almost eight years before the breach of Freetown’s defences on that January morning. There had since 1991 been tales of atrocities by the RUF in the country away from Western Area. Small arms and even heavier pieces had been used in raids on towns and villages from Jendema on the Sierra Leone side of the Mano River Border Crossing Point through to places within sniffing distances of capital, as well as in places far away from the axis that pointed towards Freetown. Rapes, pillaging, mutilations, cannibalism and other previously unimaginable acts of wickedness went with attacks which even the country’s regional capitals and other big towns either succumbed to or were forced to repel.  However, in a manner not dissimilar to the response when Ebola was still a long way from ‘home’, a business as usual posture prevailed in Freetown. In effect, the RUF, whether by design or otherwise, by conducting its initial operations very far away from Freetown, escaped attention and reaction from the government and most Sierra Leoneans.

It was pretty much ‘situation normal – carry on’ with what the familiar “it’s only happening if it happens in Freetown” thinking. All the horrible tactics imported from Liberia’s conflict were being consistently visited on large swathes of the country at the same time as someone said to me “as long as it doesn’t get to Freetown because that’s where our people are”. What defined ‘our people’ for this person obviously didn’t include villagers running from an advancing barbarity and trekking huge distances through jungles propelled only by extreme fear and survival instincts. Needless to say my input to that conversation probably disqualified me for a role in the diplomatic corps.

So why my rant about all this?

Today, March 23^rd 2016 marks the 25^th anniversary – a quarter of a century – since the Sierra Leone civil war started. I offer myself for correction but I haven’t seen or heard anything like the posts on social media and announcements from government or its agencies to mark this day. Nothing like the collective anger and reflection that have rightly marked each and every ‘J 6’, all seventeen of them, since that very terrible one in 1999.

Yes, it was on this day in 1991 that Foday Sankoh’s mob crossed over from Liberia to launch the spate of banditry, barbarity and brutality that left the BBC’s Fergal Keane describing Sierra Leone as “a country whose agony words can no longer describe”. For many, Jendema had not mattered; and nor had Potoru, Masiaka, Yengema, Koribondu, Rotifunk, Makeni, Magburaka and many other places in all the districts of the country. All of these places, though part of the ‘land that we love’, had not mattered. It all started on 23^rd March 1991 and in only two months less than eleven years claimed tens of thousands of lives, saw thousands mutilated, raped and brutalised in various other ways, destroyed communities and livelihoods. All of the victims, irrespective of where in Sierra Leone they lived or came from, were members of communities that someone somewhere would have called ‘our people’. As this anniversary is marked, let there be thought given to what the narrative could have been if all had from the start had reacted as if the land that they love was in trouble. We can only now wonder about what the outcomes from more recent disasters in the country might have been if the responses reflected that fine assertion – ‘Land that we love, our Sierra Leone’.