Title: Trauma in Togo.

• Author: Wentling, Mark

Text:

In April 1991, while I was serving in Lome, Togo as the USAID Representative for Togo and Benin, protests in Lome against the dictatorial regime of President Eyadema reached the boiling point. One night, President Eyadema's barbaric soldiers entered the original neighborhood of Lome, Be, and killed a couple dozen people or more. They collected the bodies and threw them into the lagoon which cut across the northern part of old Lome. Their morbid idea was that when the people saw the dead bodies, they would cease revolting against Eyadema, his cronies and all for which they stood.

The opposite happened. Angrily, the people of Be gathered the dead bodies and put them in a dump truck. Thousands of people marched with the truckload of bodies from Be, on the eastern side of Lome, into the heart of Lome. The idea of the protest leaders was to dump these bodies in front of the French embassy. Many people held the French responsible because they still backed the Eyadema regime. They thought that maybe when the French saw the dead bodies, they might change their minds about supporting such a corrupt and murderous regime.

I happened to be in the U.S. embassy when the protest marchers were coming in our direction with their load of bloated dead bodies, marching in front of the U.S. embassy before going on to the French embassy. I was on the second floor of our embassy with our new ambassador, the late Harmon Kirby, observing the protest marchers coming our way. We also observed coming from the opposite direction a large contingent of well-armed security forces. There was no way to avoid a violent clash between these two opposing groups.

Before our eyes, there was indeed a bloody clash. The protestors were out armed and spread in panic in all directions. Some protestors jumped the wall of the embassy, causing the small group of Marines to go into react mode while they rounded up protestors who had sought sanctuary. Our warehouse across the street from the embassy suffered damage from the stun grenades and tear gas canisters launched at the protestors.

In this ugly melee, the dead bodies were dumped in a pile in front of our embassy parking gate. Seeing all these dead bodies was perhaps the most horrific sight I have seen in Africa, especially as most of the bodies were women with their babies still tied to their backs with their traditional African cloth. The sight was so terrible that we were all awoken to the kind of evil atrocities Eyadema was...