Hi Folks,

I have never seen anything as gruesome as the documentary on Sierra Leone 
shown on CNN NewsStand last night. Unbelievable! I saw children under 10
years killing people. Hands and legs of adults and infants alike were
chopped off. Executions of teenage boys suspected to be rebels. A whole
family were set ablaze with stones hurled at them as they were trying to
escape. Unbelievable!!

If you missed it, it will air again on CNN Perspectives on Sunday,
February 20, 9pm (pacific).

Cheers,
        Madiba.
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CRY FREETOWN: http://cnn.com/CNNPromos/cnn/cry.freetown/

It's the story the world has never seen... until now. 

Risking his life to film the systematic murder of his fellow countrymen 
during the civil war, Sorious Samura describes in Cry Freetown, (On CNN
NewsStand; Thursday, February 17th and CNN Perspectives; Sunday, February 
20th) what he calls "a nation in dire need, a nation that was being 
murdered, a country that was dying, that was being left to die by the 
western world, by the so called developed world". 

"Kill every living thing", demanded the rebel forces as they entered 
Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, on 6th January 1999. As the world's
media fled, local freelance journalist Sorious Samura captured on film the
awful truth of what much of the world was ignoring. 

"In this madness my job was to record the history happening in my country,
when random roadside justice was the order of the day", says Sorious 
Samura. "Personally I felt that this was the only way people would be able 
to see what was happening in Sierra Leone. When they see the truth, the 
real pictures, the brutality. It was a very dangerous thing to do at the 
time." 

Captured and threatened by the rebels, Samura, escaped and during the next 
few days, while battle raged between rebel and Nigerian 'peacekeeping' 
forces in his country's civil war, Samura took his handheld camera and 
captured on video some of the atrocities committed by both sides as almost
every-day acts of war. 

Now the award-winning cameraman returns to Sierra Leone in Cry Freetown 
to relive the story of the country's civil war that he risked his life to
document. Cry Freetown includes much of the graphic and disturbing footage 
that Samura shot last year - and raises important questions about how much 
of the reality of war should be shown on television. 

The former British colony of Sierra Leone suffered a vicious civil war 
for a decade which has claimed the lives of an estimated 50,000 people, 
left some 10,000 without hands or arms and made more than one million of 
the population homeless. 

"There was a silent majority suffering for things that they have no idea 
about. People living in this country don't care about the politics, they 
don't even know about the diamonds", says Samura. "Ninety percent of the
country has never seen a diamond and they were having their arms and limbs
chopped off for nothing that was of their own making". 

While most of the atrocities were committed by the Revolutionary United 
Front (RUF), whose calling card was to hack off the hands of its victims, 
the Ecomog peacekeeping force - composed mostly of Nigerians - also had a
brutal reputation. 

Sorious Samura revisits the site of the house set alight by rebels with 
local people still inside. He explains how Nigerian so-called peacekeepers,
assisting government forces, trussed up, beat and almost killed a boy with
learning disabilities because he was in a building they suspected of 
housing a sniper. 

The material that he shot won him both of last year's most prestigious 
awards for the work of freelance camerapeople in news and current affairs, 
the Rory Peck Award and the Mohammed Amin Award. No-one has won both 
awards before. 

The reason so much of Samura's footage is so powerful is also what makes 
it untranslatable on normal news bulletins. But does this self-censorship
of the television industry - by both regulators and broadcasters themselves 
- enable groups like the RUF to be even more brutal because they know that
broadcasters will not show it. It is this point that lies at the heart of 
this powerful documentary. 


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