Mother who braved hell reveals the ugly side of a flawless beauty
Sarah Koroma also gave evidence to the trial despite the fact that she too lives a long way from the court in the Dutch city of The Hague, so her attendance could also have been said to be, in Campbell’s words, “a big inconvenience”.
She, like Campbell, has family whose safety is her chief concern, so testifying against a powerful and allegedly monstrous figure like Taylor was bound to be intimidating. And she, like Campbell, also had to endure questioning designed to test her memory, shake her confidence and ascertain any ulterior motives for her replies.
But there the similarities between Campbell and Koroma end, for Campbell, as we know, is a flawless beauty with a charmed existence while Koroma — otherwise known as TF1-331, or witness No 69 for the prosecution — is an impoverished mother of six, widowed, bereaved and brutalised by the civil war that tore Sierra Leone apart.
The strife was aided and abetted, the prosecutors contend, by the president of neighbouring Liberia, one Charles Taylor, who allegedly backed the rebel side in return for blood diamonds — like the ones he gifted Campbell.
When she gave evidence, Sarah Koroma waived her entitlement to a pseudonym and a screen to shield her identity, expressing a wish to testify openly.
Compare that with Campbell who had to be ordered to appear, sought to delay her testimony and was then aggrieved that an official photographer had been allocated time — a whole minute — visually to record her visit for posterity.
As with all witnesses, Campbell had to state her date of birth — May 22, 1970 — making her 40, a milestone she celebrated in Moscow with a celebrity bash that brought the streets around her chosen restaurant to a standstill.
When Koroma was asked if she could give her date of birth or knew how old she was, she simply replied, as many in the developing world who are born without official recognition would: “No, ma’am.”
She seemed, however, to be around Campbell’s age — an achievement very much worthy of celebration given that life expectancy in Sierra Leone was 34 when the events under investigation took place. The UN said by last year it had risen to all of 47. Sarah Koroma testified about how the war affected her life. She and her husband and their children fled with other families from their Freetown homes to the bush as rebel forces descended on them.
They met terrified neighbours who told them of killings and maimings and they stayed in the bush for a week, too frightened to move in any direction.
They would have known of others who fled like themselves and then sought protection from government soldiers only to be slaughtered for consorting with the insurgents.
They had no food, having left without supplies, but Koroma brushed off questions about hunger. “I was not even feeling hungry,” she said. Why? “Because we were afraid for our lives.”
After the week, word came from the rebels that they were to return home or else the bush would be raided and all found there killed. With trepidation they left for Freetown but had yet to reach their house when a rebel group surrounded them.
Koroma’s husband was murdered. “They hacked him to death. They hacked him with a machete and then they shot him,” she said.
She then told the story of the “pikin”, the little one. The six-year-old girl was strapped to her mother’s back as they tried to escape. The child was pulled from her mother and her belly split open with a machete.
Koroma’s own children had disappeared in the chaos. She stood petrified as the rebels commanded her to rehearse the refrain: “We want peace.”
She was instructed to go to the president of Sierra Leone and tell him the rebels wanted peace. When exactly were these instructions given, the court tried to clarify? “After they chopped my arm off,” she replied.
Koroma was faint and vomited in the dirt where her severed hand lay but she mustered the energy to head in the direction of the hospital. She had not gone far when she was confronted by more rebels. They were drinking and threw bottles at her, cutting her, scarring her. One of the men kicked her into the gutter, injuring her hip, then tore her underwear to steal the money hidden there.
They called her a bastard and “mother of the president”, a rebel’s greatest insult, then put a knife to her throat and told her she was to be killed. But they seemed to tire of her and, remarkably, one of the men gave her back a tenth of the money they had taken so she could buy drugs for her arm.
She dragged herself back to the bush instead and stayed there for two days in agony before again attempting to reach the hospital. When she got there, the staff had no drugs to offer her, only bandages.
There were many other injured there. “Some of them had amputated legs and some had bullets stuck in their bodies,” she said. “Everybody was lying on the floor. There was no place to sleep. There were no beds.”
She was found there by an aunt and was eventually reunited with her children although she would learn that her seven months pregnant younger sister had been hacked to death. A decade on, she remained in pain and destitute, reliant on the charity of relatives to support her children.
HAD she heard Koroma’s evidence, or read of it subsequently, Campbell might have been moved by her accounts of the atrocities, particularly about the fate of the pikin, seeing as her encounter with Taylor came about because she was, and claims still to be, an ambassador for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund charity.
But from her performance as a sullen, reluctant and unhelpful witness, it is clear she didn’t bother taking the time to understand the importance of the trial. Now she’s attempted a damage limitation exercise, accepting her complaint about inconvenience was ill-advised but insisting reports of it were taken “massively out of context”.
She’s also been stressing her support for charities — as she did when the court asked for her occupation: “I’m a model, I’m a self-employed businesswoman and I do a lot of charity work,” she declared haughtily.
Campbell still doesn’t get it — doesn’t get that the trial is not about her but about people like Sarah Koroma.
Campbell may feel a pain in her ego from the criticisms she has attracted but it is nothing to the suffering of women like Koroma who lost limbs, loves and hope.
It would be unfair to begrudge Campbell her exquisite looks or suggest they were incongruous in a forum where so many mutilated bodies and scarred souls have passed through.
But as she strutted from the court, in all her physical perfection, both hands intact, it just seemed a shame that she used them to give two fingers to the pursuit of justice.
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