Then they said they were going to give me a message to bring to Bo

"Then they said they were going to give me a message to bring to Bo. They cut off my arm with one stroke and left me".Originally displaced in 1991 and again early last year, Mr Eissah is now living with his wife and four children in a camp run by the aid agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres. Like the other amputees, he has little chance of finding work in a war-torn country where even the able-bodied are forced to beg in their tens of thousands.Some of those mutilated by the RUF have had both arms amputated. In the meantime, they will have to rely on the groundnuts, seed rice and tools supplied to them by the aid agency, Care.It is in the villages around Bo that some of the worst atrocities have been committed. Among the thousands of displaced people now living in camps in the town are more than 50 men, women and children who have had limbs hacked off by machete-wielding rebels.James Eissah had gone in search of food for his family when he fell into RUF hands last December. Travelling north from Bo, Sierra Leone's second town, one passes village after village burned to the ground.Palewahun, a collection of wattle-and-daub houses by the roadside, was once home to 18 families.

But, like many settlements in the area, it was attacked earlier this year and is now deserted, its roofless huts blackened by smoke. More than a dozen people were put to death by the rebels in this village."My brother and uncle were killed in Palewahun", says Joseph Lamboi, one of hundreds of local people now encamped in the bush "The rebels took our seeds so now we have nothing to plant. We live on bush yams and the cassava which we planted last year".Mr Lamboi and his fellow-villagers have heard of the ceasefire but they do not trust the RUF. They say they will wait for real peace before they start rebuilding their homes. The two sides agreed to work towards disarmament and demobilisation. While this ceasefire continues to hold, the rebels, who remain in the bush and have yet to lay down arms, persist in looting villages for food and committing atrocities against civilians.Not surprisingly, many people who have been displaced by the fighting - about one million people, a quarter of the population - are afraid to return to their homes Frequently, they have no homes to go back to.

Bio promised elections which were held in February and March, and a ceasefire was agreed with the RUF's enigmatic leader, Colonel Foday Sankoh.An extension to the ceasefire was signed when Sankoh met the newly elected civilian president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, in Ivory Coast last month. Despite a pledge to wipe out the RUF, Strasser made little headway against the rebels who by this time last year had advanced to within 25 miles of the capital.The first intimations of peace came after Strasser was himself overthrown by Brigadier-General Julius Bio in February of this year. There can be no reason for such gratuitous cruelty apart from inspiring terror in the civilian population".Terror has been the RUF's principal weapon in its struggle to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone, a nation of some four million people which gained its independence from Britain in 1961. Launched in 1991 with backing from Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the RUF embarked on a Taylor-style campaign from its bases in eastern Sierra Leone: terrorising communities, looting supplies, taking hostages and attacking mines which are the country's economic lifeblood.After the overthrow of Major-General Joseph Momoh in 1992, the RUF continued its war against the military government of his usurper, the youthful Captain Valentine Strasser.

The attackers also clamped padlocks on the mouths of two men and on the vagina of a woman. The victims are now recovering in the Wilberforce military hospital in the capital, Freetown. What occasioned such degeneracy on the part of the rebels is unclear. Those inhabitants who had their mouths padlocked were accused of revealing RUF positions to the government forces."We have documented horrific human rights abuses here", said Tessa Kordeczka of Amnesty International, which has just completed a mission to Sierra Leone "But what happened at Magburaka defies understanding These are the most gross atrocities imaginable. In recent raids by RUF guerillas, four pregnant women were brutally raped. Four women who refused the sexual demands of the rebels had their vaginas and rectums sewn up with fishing line. Using needles for the making of rice bags, the guerillas then proceeded to close the rectums of four men. The scene for the latest outrages in the five-year old civil war is the district around the central town of Magburaka.