They have not seen a gunshot wound at Makeni hospital for weeks. Just the steady flow of amputees, mutilated by soldiers of the former junta, coming from villages as close as 13km away. Some are aged under five, others are older than 60. And Awakale, a mother of six who walked 6km with her left arm hanging off after a man posing as an imam rounded up people from her village and started hacking at them. Relief workers tell stories of gang rapes, people burned alive and fathers mutilated because they refused to rape their daughters.
Survivors say many are still hiding in the bush and others have been killed.
They are the daily tales of brutality at the hands of rebels who know they cannot win the war but hope to scupper any hopes of a lasting peace indefinitely by unleashing violence as random in its choice of victims as it is vicious in its execution. Makeni, a small town in central Sierra Leone, is where the leaders of the former junta fled when they were ousted from the capital, Freetown, in February. They started shooting their AK-47s all over the place. Then they broke into the nightclub and took all the cold drinks from the freezer and started dancing. We called it 'Operation Help Yourself'.