By Martin Daly, The Age, Australia.
IN THE shanties of Sierra Leone, they care mostly about the next meal and about personal safety.
There’s danger after dark, particularly for women. Jobs are hard to get, the infant mortality rate is high, and people die young, often from disease and malnutrition.
But if there’s a single factor that helps Sierra Leoneans to forget the hunger and the hopelessness of life in West Africa, it’s often sport, notably soccer.
Even so, there wasn’t a great deal of interest in the Commonwealth Games, locals say, partly because the athletes were not well known and partly because, in a country of relatively few televisions, the time difference meant sports events were run in Melbourne as Sierra Leone slept.
When the national team was selected for Melbourne, many people, according to interviews with The Age, knew little about it, and many couldn’t have cared less.
But in the past few weeks, Sierra Leone’s low-level interest in Melbourne has been replaced by shame, anger, and - in some cases - prayers of support for the 14 athletes who, locals say, went to Australia to represent their country, but then ran away.
The saga has also focused attention on what leading lawyers, journalists, human rights campaigners and trade union officials allege is a sports selection system that has in the past stacked international teams with non-athletes and substandard athletes who sometimes paid for places so they could abscond and seek asylum.
Those interviewed by The Age stressed they were not claiming the selection process for Melbourne had been corrupted. But while some said such corruption had been stamped out by the government, others said they would be surprised if the process had been entirely clean.
One of the country’s most respected journalists and human rights campaigners, Paul Kamara, who has been jailed for exposing government corruption, said good athletes had in the past been dumped from international teams so friends and family members of those with connections, or who paid bribes, could travel overseas with Olympic, Commonwealth Games or FIFA teams, and then abscond.
Mr Kamara, editor of the Freetown newspaper For Di People, was recently released from prison after an international campaign. He said it was seen as regrettable, not that Sierra Leoneans had sought asylum, but that the athletes had brought shame on the country by doing so during the Games.
There is a strong belief in Sierra Leone that many who go overseas to represent the country, including musicians, writers and athletes, see the trip as a chance to abscond. But there is also considerable support for anyone who can escape the misery of a notoriously corrupt country where the abuse of human rights is widespread and the rule of law often operates at the discretion of those in power.
Sallieu Kamara, from the Freetown-based Movement for Justice and Development, said people struggling to get one meal a day would say: "If you get a chance to escape, take it."
Fourteen of 22 Sierra Leone athletes went missing during the Melbourne Games. All have since reappeared and been granted bridging visas until mid-April. The athletes have said they fear reprisals if they return to their home country.
But many Sierra Leoneans interviewed by The Age said the athletes were absconding for economic reasons.
Paul Kamara said that even as a human rights activist, he had to accept that the claims reportedly made by the athletes were "only an excuse". "They did it for their careers," Mr Kamara said." And why not?
While some observers said the athletes had no reason to fear for their safety in Sierra Leone - and that they doubted any of the women athletes would have cause to fear circumcision, as claimed - others disagreed.
Gibril Gbanabome Koroma is editor and publisher of The Patriotic Vanguard, a Vancouver-based website for Sierra Leonean and African expatriates. He agrees the athletes are probably trying to escape the economic hardships of home, but said sending them back now "would be like sending a political dissident back to the Soviet Union during the Cold War".
"Their parents and families will be persecuted one way or the other," he said.
"This is Africa. The view from the government will be that if your kids did this, you must have been part of it. The athletes will never get training, never get scholarships, never get a government job, or be allowed out of the country."
Floyd Alex Davies, former secretary general of the Sierra Leone Bar Association, Falla Enda-N’Dayma, national president of the Trade Union Confederation of Sierra Leone, and Charles Lahai, the former head of the National Forum for Human Rights, now executive of the Sierra Leone Youth Empowerment Agency, all said the reaction locally had been largely against the absconding athletes, who should be sent back.
"We had other athletes who did not run away and there were athletes there from other countries who are as poor as our athletes and they did not run away," said Mr Alex Davies. "I think it immoral for them to go to Melbourne and not do what the country sent them there to do."
But Mr Koroma of The Patriotic Vanguard said despite the belief the athletes were absconding for economic reasons, there was widespread support for them in Sierra Leone.
Those who condemned the athletes, he said, were doing so to protect privileged, money-making positions doled out by a government that would read what they say in the media.
"These people are from the privileged classes. They do not feel the pinch ... They do not speak for the masses," he said. "People are praying silently for them (the athletes) to succeed and stay in Australia."
Photo: Some of the "absconders".
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