If you preach liberty, don't ignore atrocities in Freetown

MENTION SANDLINE at Paddy's Bar at the end of another day of war, and they will most likely laugh in your face. Well, Roy certainly will.

He is still trying to get the picture of the severed head of a three- year-old boy out of his mind. As Roy tells it, after a few beers of course, the rebels caught the kid and dangled him upside down. Then one of them took his machete and started swiping at the child. He was a good hacker. Soon enough he separated the head from the body. Roy is a member of the local civil defence and he carries a gun. But he shot too late to save the child. He did manage to kill two of the rebels, and he wounded a third, but the kid was dead.

And now Roy tells his story to people like me at the end of the day in Paddy's Bar. The bar is full of stories and rumours and gossip. Stories about the day's fighting. "Is it true Ecomog have taken Waterloo?" or "Did you hear the militia cut a guy's head off and rode around town with it on a spike?" or "Did you hear that shooting last night? How close was it? Who was firing?" The ordinary rumours of an extraordinary war.

I should point out that Paddy himself doesn't gossip. After 31 years in Freetown the 67-year-old Brit is a good listener, but, like all the best bartenders, he knows how to keep a secret. Thin and tall, with a nut-brown tan and a rogue's smile, Paddy has lived through dictators, coups and civil wars. In better times he owned a restaurant down on the beach. The diplomatic set used to go there. There were fine parties that lasted late into the night.

He remembers the night the Italian ambassador gave a dinner for his staff. It was Paddy's bad luck that the prostitutes staged a pitched battle on the beach that night. The immigrant girls from Liberia fought a turf battle with the girls from Freetown. As Paddy remembers, there was a lot of punching and kicking. The Ambassador's secretary tried to calm them down but was forced to retreat.

"The strange thing, though, was that they didn't tear each other's clothes," remembers Paddy. "They all only had one decent dress each and it was like a point of decency not to destroy each other's working clothes."

When the army coup forced him out of his beach-side place, Paddy moved across the estuary to his current premises - a large open-air bar with a thatched roof. Once settled, he tried to bar the prostitutes. The business down at the beach had left him shaken. But the girls formed a union and picketed the new bar.

There were negotiations. Paddy's streetwise business partner, Alec, persuaded the girls to lift the picket. A set number would be allowed back in on condition that there was no fighting and that customers were not tormented. And they have pretty much kept their word. There is none of the fevered hustling that you find in bars in East and Central Africa. If you don't want to do business you will be left alone.

Paddy's regular crowd starts to roll in around four o'clock. Curfew is at six, so if you want to medicate away the tension and fear of a Freetown day, then you get to Paddy's in time for several beers before the drive home. And you make damn sure not to stay too late. The Nigerian soldiers and local militia who man the checkpoint get jittery after curfew.

The other morning we had to drive in the dark before the end of curfew. It was a 5am start that took us along the empty coast road with its ghostly ocean and abandoned hotels. I wish to record that our driver, a gentleman by the name of Kabbah, was among the most witless whom I have ever encountered.

On the hill near the British High Commission we came up to a Nigerian post where the sentry jumped out into the middle of the road with his gun raised. Our driver decided to reverse, stealing backwards as the sentry screamed abuse and then cocked his weapon and got ready to shoot. I leaned forward and thumped the driver on the back. Yes, thumped.

An act of violence. I admit it. But the man needed to be shocked out of his mad retreat. The thump did the trick and he stopped the car. After many apologies from us, the sentry waved us through.

It is hard to blame the Nigerians for being so jumpy. When the rebels swept into Freetown in early January, many of them wore Ecomog uniforms. Nigerian sentries coming out to greet them were shot down.

To travel through Freetown these days and to listen to the stories of its survivors is to enter a different universe to that occupied by Michael Howard and his Sandline-obsessed colleagues. While the British Opposition was still gnawing at Robin Cook's trouser leg, somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 people were being butchered in Freetown. That is a lot of people to be killed in a few weeks, even by the lamentable standards of our times.

Let us consider the United Nation's estimates for a moment: 150,000 people displaced; 1,000 children who have simply disappeared, many of them forced to become soldiers in the rebel army; hundreds of women and young girls who have been raped; scores of people who have been burned alive in their homes; hundreds of people who have had their hands or legs chopped off by the rebels. Place in your mind for a moment the dreadful image of the psychiatric patients in Kissey (again, according to the UN's report) who were rounded up and executed for their madness, or that of the 10 policemen hacked to death beside the beautiful giant cotton tree that stands in the centre of the city.

And while all of this was going on, did we hear loud voices of protest from the Opposition? Did we hear demands for action to protect these former colonial subjects? Did we hear them call for the defence of Sierra Leone's government (a very imperfect, but democratically elected government)? Not a bit of it. We had Sandline and Sandline and more Sandline.

Robin Cook was right to announce extra aid to Sierra Leone this week and right to insist that the mayhem on the ground was the dominant issue, not Sandline. It is a message that still escapes the Labour-dominated Foreign Affairs select committee and the Tory opposition. Of course, it is right to be concerned about Sandline. The whole murky affair does raise important issues of truth and accountability. But this week's debate had the unpleasant whiff of point-scoring at a time when people were dying by the thousand in Sierra Leone. And when people in Paddy's Bar asked me why so few people in Britain were interested in what was happening in their country right now, I was at a loss to give them an answer beyond saying that Freetown and London naturally operated to different agendas. That's democracy, I told them. It is about cut and thrust. Adversarial politics. Domestic politics. Small politics. But I never got too far in those conversations before they told me that all that stuff was a million miles removed from the reality of their daily lives.

It is possible to take the view that we should be concerned only with Sandline, and that all that really matters is our own domestic political agenda. Those, like Alan Clark, who make this argument are wrong, I believe, but they are at least being honest with us. It is possible to have a clear intellectual disagreement with them. What is much harder to take is the sight of those who have long preached the merits of liberty, averting their gaze when that precious gift is being abused every day on the streets of Freetown.

The writer is a BBC special correspondent