The appeal was made as part of a report released on Thursday the latest incident in January when police arrested several activists following disputes with a leading agribusiness firm called SOCFIN based in the northern Sierra Leonean Pujehun district.
Since 2011 SOCFIN has acquired more than 18,000 hectares of land for an industrial palm oil plantation in the Malen Chiefdom in the district. That project sparked a land conflict which has raged between the company, the local authorities and the communities.
In January, the conflict escalated to new levels of violence following a skirmish between community people and the police and military protecting the assets of SOCFIN, two people were reported shot dead.
While the community people said the police shot them, the police insist it was the protesting community people. A total of 15 people were subsequently arrested, all of them members
of the community based organisation called Malen Land Owners and Users Association (MALOA).
A member of parliament representing one of the affected communities in the Chiefdom, Sheka Sama, who has been the head of MALOA and has been leading the anti-land grabbing campaign from day one, was detained alongside scores of people following the January violence. He was
later released.
In its report entitled: “Land Grabbing for Palm Oil in Sierra Leone: Analysis of the SOCFIN Case from Human Rights Perspective”, the Belgium based human rights organisation FIAN, illustrates how the
company, with the assistance of national and local elites, seriously impaired the communities from enjoying their human rights.
“Several issues emerged including the rights to land, food, water and a healthy environment, as well as workers’ rights, women’s rights, the rights of the elderly and the right to education,” the organization said in a statement that accompanied the report. The report also points to “serious allegations” of corruption and a lack of transparency, noting that huge amounts of money, which should be allocated to the land owners as rent payments, were instead provided by SOCFIN to local elites without any transparency on how those funds were used.” As part of the report, a coalition of 34 Sierra Leonean and international CSOs made a six-point demand, among them the immediately release of the land rights activists from Malen who are still in jail without any “convincing” evidence that they committed crimes.
They also called on the state to address the issue of the internally displaced persons from the Chiefdom by identifying and registering them in their present locations and providing the needed relief, and redress the human rights violations and abuses suffered by the Malen communities, and hold SOCFIN and other responsible actors accountable.
The group, which includes Action Solidarité Tiers Monde in Luxemburg, AEFJN International, COPAGEN in Ivory Coast, Ecumenical Association for Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (ECASARD) in Ghana, Enda Pronat in Sénégal, also called on the Sierra Leone authorities to
find a long-lasting solution to the conflict.
“As a first step, MALOA calls upon the government (with the support of the international community) to initiate an independent and thorough investigation of the case, which should be carried out by human rights experts and whose results should inform the measures to be taken to redress all abuses and violations,” the campaigners say.