By Ibrahim Mansaray (ATJLF/MRCG Fellow 2025)
More than two decades after Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war ended, the country continues to confront a haunting legacy: mass graves filled with the remains of civilians who became casualties of a conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established to document the causes and consequences of the war, described the scale of the violence in stark terms. “Civilians accounted for a large number of deaths at the hands of each faction,” the Commission reported. “All factions specifically targeted civilians.”
Many of those civilians were buried in mass graves, grim markers of massacres that occurred across the country as fighting escalated and people fled their homes. In some cases, the bodies were interred hastily because they died in unfamiliar places or because traditional burial rites were too dangerous to perform. In other cases, perpetrators chose to “dump” the dead deliberately, erasing both identity and dignity.
Leave a Reply