Charles Mbayo, NPRC and impunity in Sierra Leone : There is no longer any hiding place in the world

By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)

Geoffrey Robertson QC notes in the Preface of his influential book, “Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle For Global Justice”, that, “The logic of the crime against humanity…[is] that…state agents who authorized torture or genocide against their own populations [a]re criminally responsible, in international law, and might be punished by any court capable of catching them”.

That book was first published in 1999 just a year after Charles Emile Mbayo, who was one of those complicit in the extra-judicial killings of Bambay Kamara and 28 others accused of plotting a coup against the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), entered the United States of America on an F-1 Student Visa.

About seven years before Charles Mbayo left Sierra Leone for the United States of America, his NPRC government had arrested and detained at the then Pademba Road Prison Bambay Kamara, the former Inspector General of Police, and 28 others mostly supposedly members of the All People’s Congress (APC). Nearly eight months later, whilst they were still detained, the detainees were accused of plotting a coup. They were summarily executed and their bodies buried in mass graves!

And to give you an insight into how the NPRC, of which Charles Mbayo was one of the kingpins, was lording over Sierra Leone from 1992 to 1996; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report Volume 3A gives us a clear picture. On Page 164 we are told that: “According to Maada Bio, who had known in advance of SAJ Musa’s volatile temperament and the likelihood that he would attempt to carry out some kind of summary justice, some of the implicated men were taken to Musa’s own residence and subjected to torture by Musa himself: “When I [this is Maada Bio now speaking] went there at night, he had actually tortured them very seriously—their ears were cut off and they were practically dead”. SAJ realised that by daybreak they had been really badly tortured in his compound; so he confronted the gruesome, “it was better to do away with them than to keep them in his hands in this terrible state.”—he was then alleged to have organised the summary executions….”

And to make the gruesomeness of the grotesque more gruesome, the TRC Report reports that, “Having got them executed, SAJ Musa according to testimony before the Commission poured acid on the… [corpses] and then had them buried at different graves at the Kingtom Cemetery….[And] In spite of having killed them extra judicially, the families of the alleged suspects began to be targeted….(page 169 )”
Such testimonies at the TRC hearings are reminiscent of the modus operandi of either Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia or the Death Squads in El Salvador of old. Even the Chairman of the TRC, Bishop Joseph Christian Humper, is “dumbfounded to think that the Government of Captain Strasser [of which Maada Bio and Charles Mbayo were henchmen], first killed people and then put them on trial (page 169)” posthumously!
And the Truth and Reconciliation Commission does not buy Maada Bio’s seemingly attempts to squarely lay the blame on SAJ Musa’s shoulders for the grotesque manner in which the detainees were executed in gangland styles evocative of Columbia’s Medellin Cartel. As we are told on page 164 that, “Maada Bio’s account is an attempt to shift responsibility for a gross failure of leadership by their government to the shoulders of one man…” So, in essence, what this portion of the TRC Report is inferring is that Maada Bio, Captain Strasser, Charles Mbayo and other NPRC henchmen bear “collective responsibility” for the extra-judicial killings of Bambay Kamara and 28 others even though SAJ Musa might have been the only one, supposedly, to have done the grotesque deeds at his residence (Well, my Krio relatives would say: “Nar dieman den kin lie pan”.)!

And it is that legal concept of “collective responsibility”, on the part of every former henchmen of the NPRC, that has caught up with Charles Mbayo in the United States of America. Reports say that, “Mbayo has been in ICE custody since ICE Homeland Security Investigations arrested him on June 30, 2025.” And we are also informed that, “ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations removed suspected war criminal and criminal illegal alien Charles Emile Mbayo from the United States to Sierra Leone”. He had thought he would have been safe from the haunting ghosts of 29 December 1992 but here he is today being referred to as a “suspected war criminal and criminal illegal alien”.
Almost 33 years after Bambay Kamara and 28 others were extra-judicially killed; karma has caught up with one of those who might be “criminally responsible” for those killings. Nemesis has caught up with Charles Mbayo today. This brings to mind Wole Soyinka who notes in the Preface of his prison memoir, “The Man Died”, that “Even in totalitarian states, the time comes when past ‘errors’ are admitted, [and] high-placed criminals unmasked….”

So, someday, somehow, and somewhere; the International Criminal Court (ICC) might decide to unmask those who planned and gave the orders for the “peacekeeping operations” that were carried out in Makeni, Lunsar, Tonko Limba, Mile-91, Tombo, the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown, and the APC Brookfields national headquarters after the 2023 general elections. Even the “terrorists” who incited the “August 10 terrorists” (I’m now sounding a little bit Ngor-ish here) might also be unmasked someday, somehow, and somewhere. As Robertson notes in his book, quoted in the intro of this One Dropian dropping, “The logic of the crime against humanity… [is] that… state agents who authorized torture or genocide against their own populations [a]re criminally responsible, in international law, and might be punished by any court capable of catching them”. Some people in Sierra Leone have to be brought to book for the crimes they committed against other people (Wow, I’m sounding somehow Sovula-ish here!).
It is on that note that I will close today’s One Dropian dropping by quoting Robertson for the last time that, “Punishment cannot be left to history (which depends, after all, on who writes it) or to hellfire (even the Pope now doubts the availability of this sanction). There is a legal duty on all states to investigate and… to prosecute persons suspected of…widespread and systematic murder, torture…or persecution of innocent civilians pursuant to a political policy.”

Today, Charles Emile Mbayo is facing some of the consequences of being one of the henchmen of NPRC I and II. Who knows what awaits the other higher-ups of that regime which authored one of the darkest chapters of Sierra Leone’s chequered history.
medsankoh@yahoo.com/+232-76-611-986; https://nationalistsl.com