Waiting for Justice


  • Photographer
    Tommy Trenchard
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    Freelance
  • Date of Photograph
    2015-2016

Waiting for Justice was shot with the collaboration of the International Federation of Human Rights to help bring attention to the unacknowledged victims of a succession of tyrannical regimes in the West African nation of Guinea. The release of the project, which is being turned into a book and a public exhibition in Conakry, is timed to coincide with the 7 year anniversary of a massacre of 157 unarmed protestors in the national football stadium in 2009. It hopes to act as an affirmation of the survivors' right to be heard, in the face of a 50 year culture of silence and impunity that has allowed for the continuation of a bitter cycle of violence. Each portrait was taken in the site where the atrocity was committed and is accompanied by a first person testimony. Ultimately, the project aims to prevent their experiences from being erased from the national narrative.

Story

Waiting for justice

Thierno Maadjou Sow was in the stands when the shooting started. Right up until that point the atmosphere had been jovial, and at first he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Only after a bullet ripped through the shoulder of the man in front of him did he realise it was real.

On the morning of the 29th September 2009, security forces in the West African nation of Guinea massacred 157 unarmed protestors trapped inside the national football stadium, where they had been demonstrating against the country’s ruling military junta.

At first they strafed the crowd with bullets, then, when their ammunition had run out, they continued the slaughter with knives, batons and bayonets. In the carnage, over a hundred women were raped and subjected to other forms of horrific sexual violence. Sow was stabbed and beaten unconscious as he tried to flee the stadium; he was lucky to escape with his life.

On that morning Sow’s name was added to the long and growing list of victims of abuses by the Guinean state. Up until the stadium massacre, as it became known, Guinea had been ruled by a string of tyrannical despots, under each of whom thousands of citizens were executed, tortured and ‘disappeared’.

But unlike other states undertaking the rocky transition from dictatorship, Guinea has seen no truth commission to establish a unified narrative of the country’s history. Neither were any memorials built; no sites of remembrance for survivors to visit. Until today no member of the Guinean security forces has ever been convicted in a proper court of law, nor have any reparations been made to their victims.

One woman, whose husband was murdered on the orders of a former president, described Guinea’s past as a festering wound. To break the cycle of violence and allow the fledgling democracy to move forward and form a sense of national identity, the country must first address the horrors of its history.

For the victims, it’s almost as if their suffering has been denied altogether, the atrocities they endured erased from the public consciousness by an elite that would prefer not to look back into its murky past.

Now, for the first time in the country’s history, progress is being made towards a landmark trial that could see the perpetrators of the stadium massacre brought to justice, drawing a line under half a century of impunity.

This photo project was carried out over the course of several months with the collaboration of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) to try to bring attention to the overlooked victims of Guinea’s dictatorships. Each portrait features a victim of the Guinean state photographed in the location where the crime was committed, along with a first person testimony.

The project, which is being turned into a book and a public photo exhibition in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, aims to act as an affirmation of the survivors’ right to be heard, and a reminder that history cannot be so easily erased.

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