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April 26th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
While he was away, the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the army that
Charles Taylor “aided and abetted” with guns-for-diamonds deals,
swept through his village.
When Mr Williams returned, dead bodies littered the paths, his mother had
disappeared and the fighters still patrolling the area abducted him into
their ranks.
“I have never, to this day, seen my mother again,” he said.
“They took us and gave us war training, even though we were only
children, and then soon after we were fighting, or we were being made to
carry heavy loads through the bush. It was so, so bad.” Over the next
three years, Mr Williams escaped from the rebels, was forced to fight for
the government army, joined a Unicef rehabilitation programme, returned to
the bush to fight again, and eventually laid down his AK-47 for good in
1994. He was nine years old.
He is now a 27-year-old studying Literature and Linguistics at Sierra Leone’s
Njala University, and he wants to be a teacher.
“I have spent so much of the last few years working with the community
that was traumatised by us child soldiers, as a way for me to show my true
remorse,” he said.
“We are stigmatised, but people should understand that I did not do those
terrible things because I wanted to. We were brainwashed, some were drugged,
we were forced to do it.” The stigma that Mr Williams talks about means
that many former child soldiers are now unemployed and increasingly restive,
he said.
Charles Taylor’s conviction must not mean that international focus on the
legacy of Sierra Leone’s war should fade, said Henry Sheku of the country’s
Human Rights Commission.
“Of course it is important to see that justice has won, but for many of
the civil war’s victims, there continues to be a grave daily struggle,”
he said.
Promised compensation schemes to boost ex-fighters and amputees into work have
so far failed to pay out.
At the same time, there is a perception that the millions of pounds spent on
the Special Court for Sierra Leone could have been better used on aid to the
country, said Ibrahim Bangura, a civil rights activist who helped coax child
soldiers out of the jungle after the war ended in 2002.
“Many Sierra Leoneans I speak to look at the current challenges they face
in terms of lack of access to the means of production and not to the war
period,” he said.
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