In Sierra Leone, a ‘women’s project, for women’

They gather every day in a tiny former dry goods shop on a residential street here in this West African capital, and to the neighbors they are what they seem: seven women in front of sewing machines learning to make brightly colored dresses, dashikis and slippers. But the women share a secret.

“It’s a very long story,” said one of them, Christiana John, a tired look on her face. “I don’t like to remember most of the things that happened to me.”

Among the many victims of Sierra Leone’s brutal, decade-long civil war are the “bush wives,” the girls and women who were kidnapped, raped and forced to “marry” combatants and bear their children. Even now, seven years after the war ended, they remain ostracized by their families.

The daily sewing class, a few blocks from the international tribunal that has tried and convicted the worst of the war criminals, is one woman’s effort to help some of those victims learn a skill -- and, perhaps, win back a scrap of their self-respect.

The “small skills tailoring institute” was launched 15 months ago by Renate Winter, an Austrian judge who presides over the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and it is both unofficial and deeply personal. Winter raised money for the project primarily from friends and former colleagues -- women in Austria’s justice and foreign affairs ministries, including the minister of justice. It is, Winter said, “a women’s project for women.”

Thousands of former men and boy fighters have been disarmed and re-integrated into Sierra Leone society since the war ended in 2002. But many of the tens of thousands of women affected by the war have not been as fortunate.

One reason is cultural -- in Sierra Leone, as in many parts of Africa, families and clans are reluctant to welcome back women who were forced to marry war combatants. And families are especially reluctant to embrace the children of those unions.

“The worst of all the victims in this war, like in Rwanda, were the women,” said Winter, 64, a specialist in juvenile and women’s justice who joined the court in 2002 after U.N. assignments in Rwanda and Kosovo.

In 2004, the U.N.-backed court in Sierra Leone added “forced marriage” to rape and sexual slavery as offenses prosecutable as crimes against humanity. It was the first court in the world to single out forced marriage as a criminal charge; three defendants have been convicted of the charge. Their appeals are pending.

A short walk from the heavily guarded court complex, on a rare tranquil block in this gridlocked capital of 2.5 million, these women damaged by war sit on wooden benches, chatting with one another. A few work the pedals on Chinese sewing machines. Some are hand-stitching shirts, dresses and slippers. Everything is hand-designed and made to measure.

The tailoring institute had just six women in the first six-month class and has seven in the class now ending. Winter has kept it small on purpose, “so it’s not interesting to anyone who might come along and demand a bribe,” she said. “That happens quite a lot with these projects.”

When the women graduate from the program, their clothing is displayed and sold in a show at the Special Court. The women are given those proceeds, a sewing machine and $100 in seed money and sent back home to start their own businesses.

The women who graduated from the first class say they long for the sewing bee atmosphere and would like to work together again. But they don’t yet have enough money to rent a sewing room. For now, they work in their homes, hoping that business will pick up around the holidays, when Sierra Leoneans return from abroad and stock up on traditional African clothing.

On a recent day, the students, ranging in age from 21 to 55, showed an easy camaraderie. Much of the discussion focused on a rumor sweeping Freetown that the government was introducing a new electricity source and everyone would need to turn off major appliances at 3 p.m. “It doesn’t really matter that much to me,” Christiana John said dryly. “I don’t have power in my house.”

The women enjoyed teasing their instructor, Morlai Kalokoh, 40, a tailor. He took it all with a genial smile. In the afternoon, the group turned its attention to Kalokoh’s radio, which he tuned to the BBC’s “Focus on Africa.”

What they don’t talk about is the past. Each woman’s privacy is strictly respected. “We don’t ask each other about why we are here,” said John, 55, who has a youthful face framed by long braided hair.

But in private, outside the room, she recalled the war in detail.

The day was Jan. 8, 1999, and John was at home in the town of Kissy with her four children, ages 7 to 25, and other relatives. About 10 soldiers stormed her house and held them for two days, raping the women and threatening to chop off the children’s arms. “They took us as their slaves and forced us to be their wives,” she said.

Over the next six months, she tried to escape but was recaptured, beaten and stabbed. She was fortunate that she didn’t become pregnant, she says. “If I had, I would have committed suicide.”

Finally, she managed to escape and hid in the countryside for a week before hitching a ride to Freetown. Asked what happened to her husband, she laughs ruefully. “I heard he died in battle,” she said.

Only a few of her closest friends in Freetown know about her past, and she has never returned to her hometown. “If most people knew, they would not have anything to do with me,” she said. But she has another reason too: “I’m ashamed of myself.”

John sees the class as a way to break away from that past, “to stop thinking about my status” and to have a career -- to open a tailor shop, perhaps with some of her classmates. “I’ve been starving for too long,” she said. “And this is food for my life.”

The civil war began in 1991, when young men expelled by the military regime returned to battle for control of the nation and its diamond riches. Tens of thousands died, and the Revolutionary United Front rebels were known for their brutality, which included amputating limbs and forcing children to kill their parents.

One of John’s younger classmates is Zainab Bangura, 27. She was 14 when the rebels arrived in her village, in the diamond-mining region of Kono. Her mother was taken away; she hasn’t heard from her since.

“And they killed my father in front of me,” she said. “They shot him and he fell. Then they took a knife and cut him.”

As Bangura spoke, tears streamed down her face. “After that, I had no one.” She was forced into marriage but managed to escape a year later. She won’t return to the village because the memories are too painful. Now she lives with her uncle in Freetown. “He’s the only family I have,” she said.

Winter and her legal administrator, Josephine Buck, a Sierra Leone native from Jacksonville, Fla., who returned in 2007, select the program’s participants with help from the Special Court’s victim and witness office. Though the court has no authority to compensate victims, judges say that sometimes being acknowledged as a victim is an important first step in the reconciliation. process.

“If a victim can come and say, ‘This is my story,’ that is very important, especially for the women, who are always blamed for everything that has happened to them,” Winter said. “This court has given them a voice. And we tell them that what has happened to them is not their fault.”

A new group of war victims will begin learning to make garments in September. But that will be the last class because the Special Court is scheduled to end its Freetown work in a few months, when the final appeals are decided, and both Winter and Buck will be leaving the country. (The trial of former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor will continue for several more years in The Hague.)

For that last class, Winter and Buck plan to select six people. Three of them will be men, a recognition that many were maimed or traumatized by the marauding fighters.

“Justice Winter was a bit apprehensive to include men at first,” Buck said. “But believe me, this will work. Many men in Sierra Leone are tailors. And until the war came, men and women were used to working together. They will be fine.”

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scott.kraft@latimes.com