Sierra Eye: I Would Not Be Speaking to You If It Weren't for the Risks Blair Took

To say Tony Blair is popular in Sierra Leone scarcely does justice to the intensity of feeling towards him in this small tropical corner of west Africa.
His decision seven years ago to send in British troops at the height of a brutal civil war is widely seen by Sierra Leoneans themselves as the critical moment in their country's salvation. It turned the tide in the conflict and helped bring an end to an 11-year nightmare.
The village of Mahera, for example, would almost certainly have been overrun in 2000 by rebels with a well-earned reputation for chopping off the limbs of children had British paratroopers not stood in their way.
The settlement is a dusty cluster of tin-roofed, cinder-block houses next to the airport. When the prime minister dropped by in 2002 he was mobbed, and it is clear that, though his star has long since spluttered and died back home, it still burns brightly over Mahera.
"He is our saviour! Tony Blair is our redeemer!" Kalie Bangura was moved to cry out at an impromptu rehearsal of praise songs the villagers have been practicing since the country's president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, promised this month that their hero would be returning.
"We would assure you and the British people that Tony Blair will get a massive welcome, a heroic welcome, when he gets to Sierra Leone," Mr Bangura, the revenue collector for the Mahera chiefdom, said. "If Tony Blair is not popular in Britain, we would assure you he is popular here. He did all in his power to see the war ended in Sierra Leone."
Mr Bangura was sitting on a low bench at the little village square that Mr Blair visited five years ago, and it has changed little in the intervening years. Hopes that peace would bring development in its wake have long since wilted.
A set of metal taps in the square that provided water for the whole village ran dry about two years ago, after a storage tank sprang leaks and was not replaced. Since then villagers have had to rely on a stream, even though there have been repeated outbreaks of cholera.
On the other side of the square is a forlorn half-built mosque, abandoned for lack of funds, sprouting grass from its foundations.
Travel dangers
At night the main source of light comes from nearby Lungi airport, but even that glow of modernity is deceptive. The road from the rundown terminal around the bay to the capital, Freetown, is so rough that the journey takes five or six hours. In the rainy season it is impassable. There is a ferry that takes even longer, and has few lifeboats or lifejackets.
The only other alternative is taking a seven-minute helicopter ride for US$50 (£25), in the knowledge that the Soviet-era choppers have been known to drop out of the sky. The British historian Simon Schama narrowly escaped death this year when the helicopter he was on caught fire and crash-landed.
That explains why VIP visitors such as Mr Blair prefer the president to meet them at the airport, and why the country is having such a hard job attracting tourists and foreign investors.
Visitors who do risk the short ride can peer down from the helicopter's open windows on to a city that - from a distance - looks largely unchanged from the 60s, when Mr Blair's father taught law there. The corrugated steel roofs descend in a cascade from the green mountains to palm boulevards along the beach.
Closer up, the reality is less inviting. Beneath their roofs the old colonial buildings are falling apart, starved of water, electricity or capital. The overcrowded streets are deeply potholed and traffic stands at a halt for much of the day. The city shoreline is choked by shanty towns and years of accumulated rubbish. Sierra Leone remains crippled by the same chronic ailments, poverty and corruption, that drove it to the brink of national suicide in the first place.
Britain has spent an average of £40m a year on Sierra Leone since the conflict, and remains by far the biggest bilateral donor. The country rests at the bottom of the global economic pile. It has the world's worst child mortality rate (a Sierra Leonean has a one in three chance of not surviving until the age of five) and ranks above only Niger in the UN human development index.
Traumatized
After the horrors of the 1991-2002 civil war, however, most Sierra Leoneans feel blessed just to be alive with their limbs intact. Freetown is still traumatized from the day, January 6 1999, when the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) - led by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, and funded by blood diamonds looted from the gem fields in the east - took over half the city. The ensuing bloodbath left hundreds dead and a generation of amputees.
Moses Kamara was a 15-year-old schoolboy, when a gang of rebels grabbed him at random, and gave him a choice. "They asked: "What did I want to keep: my eye or my leg?" he recalled. "What could I say? I said: my eye. They cut off my leg."
He haunts the streets of Freetown begging with his fellow amputees. It is not uncommon to see young men missing both hands or legs. The only apparent motive for this orgy of mutilation was the desire to inspire terror.
The RUF was eventually driven out by a West African regional force, but a year later it was back on Freetown's doorstep and the city panicked. It was at that moment that Mr Blair sent in British paratroopers.
Augustus Kamara, a news editor for the state news agency, spent much of the conflict in hiding. Even today, he sobs when he relives the stress of trying to keep his family alive. "I would not be here speaking to you [if not for] all these risks Tony Blair took, because it was a political risk intervening where you know some of your troops will die," he said.
When his wife gave birth to a boy in 2001, Mr Kamara named him after his hero. Tony-Blair Kamara is six years old. He is quieter and more sombre than his namesake, perhaps a little weary of life as an embodiment of Sierra Leonean gratitude. But his dad insists the sad-eyed boy remains fiercely proud of his name.
When the Parachute Regiment was deployed in 2000, its primary mission was to evacuate British, EU and Commonwealth citizens and to patrol Freetown. But the operation's commander, Brigadier David Richards, was given wide latitude and found that the RUF melted away when it met a determined show of force.
Later in the year, a rebel gang calling itself the West Side Boys, who had been terrorizing the road into Freetown, seized a detachment of British soldiers and held six hostage at their camp deep in the tropical forest. On September 10, the paratroopers and SAS were sent in to rescue them.
The operation destroyed the West Side Boys as a fighting force, with the loss of one British soldier, and quickly became the stuff of legend in Sierra Leone. The mock-up of the rebel camp used to rehearse the assault is now a village in its own right - home to dozens of families. More importantly, the incident had a dramatic psychological impact. British troops were seen as virtually invincible, and the rebels melted away. Peace was formally declared in January 2002, but in real terms the war had ended months earlier.
Coming a year after the zero-casualty invasion of Kosovo, the Sierra Leone experience reinforced the belief in Downing Street that Britain could save entire populations at minimal cost to British forces - an assumption that clearly played a role in the decision to join the invasion of Iraq.
In Sierra Leone, the premise still holds. A small force of British soldiers has stayed on to train a new national army, and they are perceived in much of the country as a totemic guarantee of enduring peace.
"We have peace in Sierra Leone now, and Tony Blair made a huge contribution to that," said Warrant Officer Abu Bakerr Kamara. He pointed out that the new force he is training with includes former government soldiers and rebels. "We are all Sierra Leoneans," he said. "All these people are one army now."
With elections due in August, however, Sierra Leone is nervous. Most political observers are optimistic that any clashes between rival party supporters can be contained by the UN-trained police, with the army on hand as a last resort. But in a country with an unemployment rate of nearly 70%, including many former child soldiers, there are no certainties.