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"The war would have been over in three months," he said. "Do you know how many lives would have been saved?" But the lives weren't saved, and the war continued killing, wounding, displacing, and destroying Sierra Leone until the week before I arrived to stay with Cobus. As a way of saying thanks for his part in ousting the rebels, the government farmers and cut off the hands of 5 others to dissuade people from registering for the election. Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected as president, bur on March 7 the rebels marched into one village and amputated more than 50 hands from men and women who had voted. In the north and in Bo, the rebels branded the words "no election on villagers' backs." Things were falling apart quickly. On January 6, 1999, with no one to hold the rebels back, they attacked Freerown. The atrocities started in earnest. Unorganized hordes of rebels waving guns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and rogue government soldiers invaded in an operation called No Living Thing. This well-named invasion forced President Kabbah ro escape to nearby Conakry in Guinea. The rebels' policy of raping, looting, burning, maiming, and killing people was not an outgrowth of their violence; rather, it was the carefully planned core. The RUF rebels yelled for the people to come out of their houses and sing for them. Once outside, they hacked the civilians' limbs off and laughed as the amputees staggered around with bloody fleshy stumps where their hands had been. Child soldiers, high on ganja and injected cocaine, burned our the eyes oflittle girls with melted trash liners, and then stabbed and hacked the screaming children to death with machetes for fun. They tortured people, burned them to death, and dismembered them, then left their bloated bodies to rot in the hot streets. Homes were burned, stores were looted, and people were terrorized. Freetown residents covered their windows with mattresses and hid in their houses for weeks. There was no darker, more violent, more hopeless place on earth than Freetown in January 1999. When I visited, vendors were selling videotapes of those dark days on the streets. The rogue soldiers and rebels had virtually played to the amateur video cameras capturing the horror. They rounded up citizens, selected some at random, and shoved them into the street. Then the rebels casually pumped bullets into their victims, even as the victims stared straight up at their killers. The civilians had an odd sense of acceptance. No one struggled as they were led to their deaths or as they bled silently to death in the jungle. Cobus told me about another time he tried to save Sierra Leone. "The plan was simple: We were advised by a consultant that we could raise $6 million if we could sell the exclusive fishing rights for Sierra Leone. We would use that income to finance our plan to restore President Kabbah to power. The Sierra Leone cabinet, sti ll in exile, agreed to the deal. The British and Americans blessed the plan in secret, and Kab bah said, 'Just end this war. '" Cobus's plan was to attack the rebels and finish them off in six months. It would be based around serious air power: helicopter gunships fitted with thermal imaging sights and side-firing guns. A 40-man special forces group would focus on killing the rebel commanders and destroying their headquarters in a plan not unlike the Americans' Phoenix program. "We would focus on the leaders: pur a price of $10,000 on each commander's head and have their own fighters bring them in dead or alive. We were also going to use psychology against them. We would only fight at night using blacked-out gunships flying in on night vision, music, and psy-ops from loudspeakers. The FUR (forward looking, infra red) technology illuminates body heat so no matter where the rebels ran they would glow in the dark through our scopes. We would pop them off one at a time and where they least expected it. At night in their camps, rebels would wake up with their comrades exploding into sprays of blood. They would never sleep. "I negotiated the mandate to sell the country's fishing rights and hired a Sourh African consultant. We quickly learned that nobody would pay to fish in a country that was in chaos. We found only one Russian investor, who agreed to pur in $2.2 million. We were given the rights for 30 days and after rwo weeks we realized it couldn't be done." Cobus knew that this could have been his finest hour: the culmination of years of combat expetience, planning, and the combined skills of a tight-knit group of South Africans and locals. More important it was a chance to do something right, something good. of Sierra Leone gave Cobus the exclusive right to conduct marine security and monitoring on the premise that he was experienced and was willing to purchase a small patrol vessel and donate it to this cause. In his previous career as a mercenary Cobus had been there to protect not only the president but also the people of Sierra Leone. He also learned some of the tricks of the trade during those days. Sometimes he was paid, sometimes he wasn't. He didn't plan on getting into pirate hunting, bur, as he put it with a smile, "Those early days were different from what we do now." I decided to travel around the uneasy countryside while Cobus made arrangements for another trip. A few weeks before it would have meant braving the roads, whose checkpoints consisted of a small piece of string, a cluster of kids in ragged T-shirts, and a bristling collection of rusty, battered automatic weapons. The checkpoints were a way to make money here, and passage was a very arbitrary process that required negotiating skills, money, and gifts. If you used too many of your resources you'd never make it ro the next checkpoint, or the one after that. There was also no chain of command, no one to appeal to if your new hosts wanted to have a little cocaine-induced fun, and no one to come looking for you if you disappeared in the overgrown bush that surrounded the red dirt roads. The checkpoints were usually manned by sroned children, pugnacious teenagers, and zombielike adults. In places like Rogberi junction there had been rotting corpses with thin blades of green grass growing through the white bones and blackened skins. On May 24, 2000, 52-year-old Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork and 32-year- old AP cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno do Mora were gunned down in a short, violent ambush. Foreigners were kidnapped regularly, and entire towns encircled and besieged. There were enough srories ro make travel by helicopter seem the perfect choice. The UN was very helpful to visiting writers and journalists, and provided transportation around the country so that the journalists would cover their various efforts at peacekeeping and rehabilitation. With a quick letter, a homemade press pass, some paperwork, and a handshake, you had an entire fleet of helicopters at your disposal. . Like Cob us, the UN had a plan to save Sierra Leone. Although Cobus figured It would cost $6 million to wipe out the rebels, the UN had a larger view and a much Stronger military stance. They had already deployed 17,000 fore ign troops and civilian employees, a fleet of aircraft, trucks, cars, troop carriers, helicopters, water trucks, and copy machines in their half-a-billion-dollar-a-year plan to save Sierra Leone. .. The UN used its big budget ro maintain 17,500 military personnel, including 260 military observers and 60 civilian police personnel-more money than Sierra Leone's gross domestic product and 30 times the Sierra Leonean government's budget. What the world got for this was mountains of statistics, press releases, interviews, and dog-and- pony shows. Success was never absolute here, only incremental. The UN has become a cottage industry for many poor nations. They didn't spend their money inside the country, but let the spillover create instant new economies. Most of the troops that filled the peacekeeping roles in Sierra Leone came from equally poor countries-Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Ghana. The UN paid the provider COUntry $988 for each soldier, a clothing allowance of $98, and $5 for ammunition for training purposes. Other perks included compensation for transportation, leave pay, food, and housing of a caliber higher than their normal home base. This made it unattractive for first-world countries ro contribute troops, because they had to make up the shortfall. In the case of developing countries, it was a very profitable venture, since the country kept the difference berween the UN salary and the local wage. A soldier in Sierra Leone made an average of 120,000 leones, or US$55 a month. Nigerian soldiers made around $150 a month. Civilian employees of the UN made professional-grade salaries that were comparable to what they would be paid in Europe or the United States, and as first-world bureaucrats they lived like pashas. They rented homes, usually in the few well-to-do neighborhoods, at inflated prices: The rent for a house in a coveted area started at $1,500 a month. The average annual income for a local was $130. The UN's purpose was clear. They were there to StOp the fighting, disarm the rebels, and introduce a measure of stabili ty until the country returned to relative normality. The only flaw was that they were acting on behalf of a local government that caught the next plane out whenever gunshots were heard, and worked with both sides to 52