Sierra Leone - The Scoop

Sierra Leone is a slice of life. Literally if you're one of the 100,000 people who've had a limb sawed off since Foday Sankoh and his RUF tree-trimmers got into the personal landscaping business back in '91. The country has been a tin-pot dictatorship with a rotating list of guest stars and small-time military dictators (with the odd elected president once in a while). When peaceful, Sierra Leone lives off the largesse of outside mining companies. It is the world's second-largest producer of titanium oxide (an ingredient for paint pigment) and a major source of diamonds. When not peaceful (which is pretty much all of the time), it lives off the largess of death and debauchery. For now, it's a nasty place run by heavily armed, Ray-Banned army punks who zoom around the capital and countryside in pickup trucks. A peace treaty was signed between Sankoh and Sierra Leone President Kabbah in July 1999 in Lome, Togo, granting unconditional pardons to guys like Captain 2 Hands, Betty Cut Hands and Dr. Blood, and anyone else who has made it damn tough for Sierra Leonians to pick their noses and do crochet. Nevertheless, the UN put their John Hancock on the deal, ending for the time being a civil war that makes Kosovo look like a weekend paint-pellet fight in the Michigan woods. RUF/AFRC rebels, flocking into Freetown to party with relatives they haven't seen in two to eight years are hiding their weapons rather than surrendering them to ECOMOG. We'll see what happens after they get a little UN-sponsored R&R.

Voodoo Ju-Ju Boom-Boom

Pubescents, beware. In Sierra Leone, the Jombobla secret society is striking terror into the hearts of anyone tuffed at the groin. The group has launched a campaign of sexual violence in the south and east of the country. Jombobla (which translates from the Mende language as "remover of pubic hair") has terrified even its most staunch skeptics with its alleged supernatural powers. In a two-week period in 1997, the group raped at least 10 women in and around the town of Bo. Group members attack women wearing ju-ju charms and a fetish around the neck. After doing the dirty deed, they pluck the pubic hairs from their victims to make empowering fetishes or talismans. Ouch.