THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS

- Chronicle Team on the prowl Kobina Amakwa, Augustine Nelson, Kofi Coomson, Andrews Biney, Amos Safo and Osbert Lartey & Public calls

It happened too quickly. The transformation of Ghanaians renowned as peace-loving people into ruthless angels of the prince of darkness.


At the price "Zoom Zoom" gin, Indian hemp, C5,000, T-shirts hurriedly churned out by ASHTEAD (3,000 pieces personally commissioned by a serving Minister of State), a crude assortment of instruments of death, fellow Ghanaians shot, hacked and stabbed their fellow countrymen to death during last Thursday's Kumepreko Freedom March which witnessed the largest turnout since independence of Ghanaians united against a regime and its cruel economic policies.


Across Accra, unbelievable spectacles of man's inhumanity to man played out in various forms.


A young man lay dying on the side of Rawlings Park, blood oozing out from around his upper body, life seeping out of him as the seconds ticked by. From nowhere another man suddenly went close to him. For a split second, it appeared he was going to his aid. Then the unthinkable happened. He picked up an object, aimed and delivered the coup de grace, following it up with a rude gesture at the dying man. He wore what had come to characterise the symbol of the ruling NDC party - The Mark of The Beast - A T- shirt of the ACDR, Association for the Defence of The Revolution led by their lanky secretary who is just finishing his posh house at Tantra Hills.


When the police came to the scene moments later to pick the body, the grey contents of the man's head lay splattered on the floor, soaked in his blood. He has been shot.

One of the on-lookers was veteran journalist, BBC's Ben Ephson. A toughened character who had seen some of the excesses of this administration from the time when they actually cut the back of Kyeremeh Djan and forced him to eat it while he lay in detention. Even he couldn't stand the sight. (pictures available)


Thirty metres away, another young man lay groaning in pain, blood oozing from his abdomen as he oscillated perilously between life and death, cut down by bullets from the ACDRs who had been commandeered by The Minster for Youth and Sports Mr E. T. Mensah, (also putting finishing touches to his mansion at Prampram) and Said Sinare, an Egyptian Mossi kid who was spawned in Ghana several years ago and has grown to be the dumbest parliamentarian in the country.


The motive was to terrorise and break up the peaceful progress of the now famous Kumepreko march organised to signal the Ghanaian's sense of despair over the biting economic hardships.


The collusion of E. T. Mensah is almost without question as calls after calls and Chronicle's own intelligence reports and eyewitness accounts put him. Said Sinare who drove round in a BMW with no registration number and later pajero with a car registration number known to use monitored the progress of their Hell's Angels.


As in most civil conflicts there were a lot of stray bullets and definite reports of "Collateral damage".

Young Ahunu Honger stepped out of his house that fateful Thursday around Tudu to buy "waakye". He never returned. He caught a stray bullet in his chest, very close to his heart. He fell. A motor cyclist showed up on the scene shortly afterwards, strapped the lad awkwardly on the back of his bike and sped off to Korle-Bu, some five miles away. Unknown to him, the boys feet were jutting out. By the time he got to Korle-Bu, his toes had been eaten away by asphalt.


CHRONICLE correspondent Kobina Amoakwa described the scene at the Korle-Bu teaching hospital with a heavy heart. He had earlier rushed to the CHRONICLE office from his assigned beat at the hospital to collect money to pay for the injured who had no money to pay for their treatment:


"It was reminiscent of Ernest Hemigway's vivid description of the "madhouse clinics" of World War I - a steady stream of wounded to the emergency ward, nurses and doctors barking at each other as they battled to save lives.


A muscular male nurse who received Ahunu at the door as he was off loaded from the bike immediately began efforts to resuscitate the boy with powerful heaves on his chest as people stared anxiously.


But alas, the rhythmic heaving of the nurse, broke into a staggered mode, and finally stopped, not because the nurse was tired, but because the little child of God had joined his Maker at age "14".

"Young man", muttered the matron in charge, "we prayed unceasingly this morning but look at what is happening". Kobina Amoakwa, had not response to that one.


But beyond the din at Korle-Bu, CHRONICLE's second team led by Osbert Lartey stumbled upon a scene straight from the horrors of the Liberian civil war.


IN front of the UTC stores, he saw a young man hoisting a blood soaked ACDR T-shirt. Asked how he came about the shirt, he said they were attacked in the morning by the ACDRs who went about in an orgy destruction. When they were pursued by a growing number of people in the area, they began to flee. Two of them were overpowered and beaten, and left for dead.


"They appeared to be lifeless when I saw them", reports Osbert, "and they had no shirt on but blood stained shorts and trousers. There was no police in sight".


The policemen had been overworked. While they identified with the cause of the marchers, they appeared to be cowed by the ACDRs. They knew they where they were drawing their power from.

They had instructions NOT to disarm ACDRs according to one policeman who obviously begged for anonymity. The police were to pointedly deny the spate of "Psyops" and propaganda press statements that went over the air and were credited to them.


News trickled in a day before the march that the leaders had been targeted for possible elimination, and this filtered through to the leaders, but they courageously defied the temptation to postpone the march.


Approaching Bank of Ghana, Kweku Baako tried desperately to divert the multitude away from the armoured tanks and armed soldiers and policemen who had pitched in front of the Bank. From the shadows, four men stepped out pistols drawn. A policemen rushed to Kweku Baako and advised him to move off because his Kumepreko T-shirt made him stand out as a possible ring leader. He gratefully obliged.


"The men just couldn't be ordinary ACDRs. They moved like trained pros", Kweku Baako was to say later.