FREETOWN: Swaying on his bed and staring as straight as he can while the tranquillisers wear off, former rebel Bimba Turay’s face shows a ground-in pain that Sierra Leone’s return to peace will not soften quickly.

On the other side of this city, Lamin Jusu Janka grips a pen in the metal claws that have replaced hands hacked off by rebels, triumphant in the fact that he can painstakingly write his own name.

Both men hope that elections on Tuesday will close a bitter chapter in the history of the West African country. Much more difficult is moving on from the nightmare of a society mutilated mentally and physically by a decade of war.

“Post traumatic stress syndrome affects some 60 percent of the population, depression is out of control and as a result of the war, drug use has become widespread,” said Edward Nahim, government psychiatrist and head of the medical association. ”Nobody is doing anything about it and it is very dangerous,” he said.

Some 50,000 people are thought to have died in Sierra Leone’s war since 1991 — but uncounted numbers were also mutilated, raped, tortured, robbed, driven from their homes or forcibly conscripted to fight. Others were forced into lives as scavengers, criminals or prostitutes.

Janka’s hands were cut off during an attack by rebels and renegade soldiers on this city in 1999. They came to his house to demand his teenage daughter, and when she escaped through a back window, he was made to pay the price.

“The man who did the amputations was “C.O. Cut Hands’. He amputated two men in front of me and then they took them away and finished them, shot them, he said, swinging his pincers in the air for emphasis.

“When it was my turn, he took the axe and chopped off both hands. They were going to shoot me too, but one of the rebels said “there is no need, he is finished already” so they left me there to die with the blood pumping out.”

Janka, 43, was rescued and ended up as head man at a camp for hundreds of amputees here. On Tuesday, he plans to vote with his big toe to mark his ballot paper instead of the thumb that most Sierra Leoneans will use.

Turay, 23, is more likely to be confined on voting day to his bed at Kissy mental hospital, known as the “Crazeyard”, where drug addicts — many former fighters — are chained up to stop them fighting or sneaking off to score supplies.

He had left his rice farm in northern Sierra Leone to look for palm wine, an alcoholic drink tapped from the top of palm trees, when rebels caught him and pressed him into their ranks.

Then they encouraged him to take drugs. “That is when I started it,” said Turay. “I am trying to stop. It is not easy,” he said at the Kissy mental hospital, picking his way word by word. “Now the elections are here it is better. There is peace. I want to continue my studies.”

The more obviously damaged have a better chance of being helped by foreign aid agencies or the government than those who carry less visible scars and have expectations of a new start that may prove unrealistic.

Anger is already brewing among former fighters from both rebel and government militias. They gave up their weapons for money but feel their other concerns are being neglected now they are no longer seen as dangerous.

Their pain at having no obvious way out of their situation is only sharpened by their memories of killings and addictions to drugs and alcohol.—Reuters