-Former RUF Commander Confesses
By Atomic Pen
Moriss Hassan Kallon was the RUF Field Commander during Sierra Leone’s brutal Civil War confessing that he claimed the lives of an estimated 60, 000 people in cold blood.
He held the rank of Brigadier said he didn’t gain anything from the civil war: “I don’t own anything in Sierra Leone. I don’t even have neither a kitchen nor a simple bicycle “, Kallon wrote in a texted WhatsApp message.
According to former RUF Second-in-Command, left Bo city after taking his GCE O’Levels at CKC in 1979 and headed to Liberia where he was trained as a professional carpenter in a Liberia technical college.
Subsequently, Kallon said when Samuel K. Doe took power in Liberia, Doe’s wife, Nancy Doe, requested Kallon to join the Liberian Army. Kallon says he and Doe lived in the same quarters where Nancy Doe and Mrs Moriss Kallon had become friends.
So, Moriss Hassan Kallon joined the Liberian Army and was deployed to the Executive Mansion where he worked in the maintenance section doing woodwork.
However, when the Liberian civil war broke out in 1990, he and other soldiers were deployed to the Liberia-Ivory Coast border to contain the NPLF advance. According Kallon, most of the Doe soldiers were dislodged, killed or captured by the NPFL fighters.
Kallon said he later retreated from the battlefront and remained in Liberia until the Sierra Leone civil broke out. Col. Mike Lamin approached him and requested him to join the RUF.
According to Kallon, he fought alongside the RUF throughout the rebel war from start to finish. He said, he was among the RUF rebels that attacked Baiwala in Kaikahun district on 23 March 1991. Though he didn’t take part in the attack on Bomaru on 23rd March 1991, he corroborates the story that the attack wasn’t carried by the RUF.
The attack on Bomaru was carried by NPFL rebels who sold a car to the SLA Major who would neither pay the money nor return the car.
Kallon is very prayerful in prison. He intermittently stops chatting with me to offer his five daily Muslim prayers. He’s full of remorse for his actions in the war.
Kallon says, he’s happy about the peace and stability in Sierra Leone and the acquisition of democracy and the rule of law.
“I don’t even have an ordinary ‘Panbody’ structure in Sierra Leone let alone a plot of land “, Kallon reiterated his lack of material achievement.
Kallon expressed profound gratitude and appreciation to the Rwanda Government and people for taking care of them for the past 23 years. He continued to tender their unreserved apology to the government and people of Sierra Leone for the atrocities they committed during the Civil War.
The four remaining convicts re-echoed their desire to return to Sierra Leone to continue their prison sentences. I noticed a profound sense of remorse and nostalgia from their voice notes.
The four remaining convicts serving their prison terms are Moriss Hassan Kallon, Issa Hassan Sesay of the RUF, Ibrahim Bazzy Kamara and Santigie Borbor Khanu, both of the AFRC.
Kallon says his father and mother passed away while he’s serving his prison term in Rwanda. He has four children but one has passed on.
