There is a date that needs correcting before this story can be told properly.

It was not January 1983.

The coup attempt you are remembering happened on 19 June 1983.

There had already been attempts against Jerry Rawlings: an armed uprising at Gondar Barracks on 23 November 1982, and another plot uncovered at Achimota on 27 February 1983. But 19 June was different.

This time the rebels did not merely meet in secret.

They broke prisoners out of jail.

They attacked the state broadcasting station.

They put an armed force onto the streets of Accra.

And one of the young soldiers took the microphone and announced that the country had been taken over.

His name was Corporal Carlos Halidu Giwa.

The man at the head of the operation was Sergeant Abdul Malik.

And Jerry Rawlings was suddenly fighting for his life.

The man Rawlings had overthrown

To understand why people were willing to risk everything to remove Rawlings, remember what had happened only eighteen months earlier.

On 31 December 1981, Jerry John Rawlings overthrew President Hilla Limann.

Limann had been elected in 1979.

He had not seized power.

He had not inherited it from a military junta.

He had won an election.

Rawlings nevertheless decided that the civilian government had failed Ghana and removed it at gunpoint.

The People's National Party government was swept aside.

Parliament disappeared.

The constitution disappeared.

The Provisional National Defence Council — the PNDC — became the government.

Now the man who had overthrown an elected president was himself facing soldiers who wanted to overthrow him.

The country was angry

Rawlings's supporters later remembered the early PNDC years as revolutionary and necessary.

That was not the whole country.

Ghana was suffering an economic disaster.

Food was scarce.

Inflation was brutal.

The government's policies were radical and often chaotic.

There were shortages of basic goods.

Political opponents were detained.

Soldiers and revolutionary committees operated with enormous power.

And the government had acquired something else:

A reputation for violence.

That reputation had not appeared from nowhere.

Rawlings's first period in power, in 1979, had already ended with the execution of senior military officers.

Then came the second coup.

Then came the killings.

Before the coup came the judges

On the night of 30 June 1982, only six months after Rawlings seized power for the second time, four Ghanaians were taken from their homes during a night-time curfew.

Three were High Court judges.

One was a retired army officer.

They were driven to the Bundase Military Range in the Accra Plains.

They were murdered.

Their bodies were soaked in petrol and set on fire.

Rain eventually extinguished much of the fire.

The charred remains were found.

The country was horrified.

The Ghanaian judiciary still commemorates them as the Martyrs of the Rule of Law. r5

Why would anyone kill judges?

This is where the story enters the machinery of the revolution.

The three judges had previously dealt with cases arising from the first Rawlings revolution of 1979.

People imprisoned by military tribunals had appealed.

Some convictions were overturned.

The judges had therefore become associated, in the eyes of revolutionary hardliners, with the destruction of the revolutionary courts.

Major Sam Acquah had his own enemies.

As a personnel executive at the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation, he had been involved in dismissals following labour unrest.

The four victims therefore had enemies.

But enemies are not the same thing as murderers.

Someone had to organize the abductions.

Someone had to provide vehicles.

Someone had to get armed men through a curfew.

Someone had to take four people to a military shooting range.

And someone had to make sure they never came home.

The names of the men convicted

The Special Investigation Board established under pressure from the public eventually led to prosecutions.

The principal defendants were:

The trial produced convictions and death sentences.

But it did not answer the question that would haunt Ghana for decades.

Who was really behind the operation?

And then came the first coup against Rawlings

Among those arrested were men who would become important in the next chapter of the story.

Sergeant Daniel Alolga Akata Pore was one.

So was Tata Ofosu, editor of the June Four Movement newspaper The Workers' Banner.

And there was Kwame Pianim, who would later become a major figure in Ghanaian politics.

The government treated them as part of a coup conspiracy.

They were imprisoned.

But the prison would not hold them forever.

19 June 1983

It was a Sunday.

Accra woke to an armed uprising.

The men behind it were junior soldiers.

The central figures were Sergeant Abdul Malik and Corporal Carlos Halidu Giwa.

They were not generals.

They were not commanding an enormous army.

They were young soldiers attempting something extraordinary.

They wanted to break the PNDC.

And they knew that the prisoners from the previous coup attempt could become soldiers in their own uprising.

The prison break

Rebel soldiers moved on the prisons.

Military detainees were released.

Among those freed were people already accused of conspiring against Rawlings.

Daniel Alolga Akata Pore escaped.

Sergeant Samuel Kwaku Amedeka, already facing charges in the judges' murder case, escaped as well.

Tata Ofosu and Kwame Pianim were among the political detainees whose names had already become associated with the earlier plot.

The prison doors had become the opening through which one failed coup became another.

Then Halidu Giwa took the radio

The rebels understood something that soldiers had understood in coups across Africa for decades.

You do not need to control the whole country if you can convince the country that you do.

They seized the broadcasting station.

And Corporal Carlos Halidu Giwa went on air.

He identified himself as the rebels' Operational Commissioner.

The message was that the PNDC had been overthrown.

For a moment, the most important voice in Ghana was not Rawlings's.

It was Halidu Giwa's.

Rawlings disappeared — and then returned

The rebellion lasted roughly two hours as a coherent military operation.

But those hours were enough to create panic.

Rawlings's government closed border points.

The curfew was extended.

Loyalist troops moved against the rebels.

And two officers became crucial to the counterattack.

Warrant Officer Joseph Adjei Buadi — one of the original PNDC members — was involved in the loyalist response.

Captain Courage Quarshigah also emerged as one of the officers fighting to restore PNDC control.

Quarshigah would later become one of the best-known officers associated with Rawlings's armed forces.

On that day, he was on the other side of the radio microphone from the rebels.

He announced that the PNDC was back in control.

The coup had failed

The rebels were defeated.

Some were killed.

Many were arrested.

Others fled.

Rawlings remained in power.

But this was not a minor security incident.

Contemporary reporting described it as the fourth unsuccessful coup attempt against Rawlings's military government in a year. r6

And other historical accounts describe 19 June as the attempt that came closest to overthrowing the PNDC. r7

The reason is obvious.

The rebels had managed to combine military action, prison breaks and control of the national broadcaster.

They had given themselves something every coup needs:

A voice.

The men who disappeared

The aftermath was ugly.

Not everyone who opposed Rawlings received a courtroom.

Some were executed.

Some escaped abroad.

Some disappeared from public life.

And some of the men connected with the June uprising would later become part of the unresolved mythology surrounding the Rawlings years.

Daniel Alolga Akata Pore escaped and eventually went into exile in London.

Samuel Amedeka escaped from custody during the June 1983 coup attempt and fled Ghana. He was later tried in absentia for the judges' murders.

He never returned to face the sentence.

His disappearance is one of the reasons the judges' story never acquired the clean ending the state wanted.

And then the firing squads

This is where the two stories — the failed coup and the murdered judges — collide.

Men associated with the judges' murders were imprisoned at Nsawam.

Then came the June coup.

Evans Tekpor Hekli was executed on 13 August 1983 for his involvement in the June 19 uprising.

Two days later, the tribunal convicted him in the judges' murder case.

Joachim Amartey Quaye and Johnny Dzandu were executed by firing squad on 17 August.

Michael Senya was also sentenced in connection with the murder case, although the timing and implementation of his sentence became more complicated in the records.

Amedeka had already escaped.

The men who had been accused of murdering four Ghanaians were therefore being executed while the country was still dealing with another attempted military overthrow.

It was a cycle of coups, prisons and executions.

And nobody seemed able to break it.

The question of Kojo Tsikata

Then there was Captain Kojo Tsikata.

Tsikata was one of the most powerful men around Rawlings.

He served as a senior adviser and later as the PNDC figure responsible for national security and foreign affairs.

His name became entangled with the judges' murders.

The Special Investigation Board's history and subsequent testimony produced allegations pointing toward him.

Tsikata denied the allegations.

He was never convicted of the murders.

And that distinction matters.

But his name refused to disappear.

What did the original investigation say about Rawlings?

This is where the historical record becomes inconvenient for anyone wanting a simple verdict.

The Special Investigation Board did not conclude that Rawlings ordered the murders.

In fact, its final assessment found no evidence that Rawlings or his wife had prior knowledge of the abduction and killing.

Brigadier Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, then Chief of Defence Staff, told the board that when he saw Rawlings after the murders became known, Rawlings appeared genuinely unaware.

The board recommended prosecutions against the men it believed could be connected to the crime.

That is the official historical record.

It cannot simply be erased because later testimony made the story more suspicious.

But then came the National Reconciliation Commission

Twenty years after the murders, Ghana tried something different.

The government established the National Reconciliation Commission in 2002 to investigate human-rights abuses committed during Ghana's periods of unconstitutional government.

The public hearings began in 2003.

Victims testified.

Former officials testified.

Former soldiers testified.

And eventually the man at the centre of much of the country's modern political history had to sit down and answer questions.

Jerry Rawlings appeared before the commission on 12 February 2004. r8

It was not a criminal trial.

There was no judge waiting to sentence him.

But for perhaps the first time, the man who had ruled Ghana for nineteen years had to confront the accumulated testimony of people who said that his revolution had destroyed lives.

Rawlings's defence

Rawlings did not walk into the commission and simply confess.

He defended himself.

He disputed allegations.

He separated himself from acts committed by people operating under his government.

And he repeatedly maintained that he had not personally authorized crimes attributed to the PNDC.

This is important because it is easy, forty years later, to collapse the government, the PNDC, Rawlings, Kojo Tsikata, revolutionary cadres and individual killers into one person.

History does not work that neatly.

But neither does the opposite defence work:

"I was the leader, but I knew nothing."

A government can be responsible for creating the environment in which crimes become possible without its leader personally giving every order.

That is precisely why the question of command responsibility matters.

The most damaging testimony

During the later hearings, testimony emerged that linked the condemned Joachim Amartey Quaye to allegations about higher-level involvement.

Squadron Leader George Tagoe, a former Ghana Air Force officer, told the NRC that Amartey Quaye had admitted to him while they were imprisoned that Rawlings and Kojo Tsikata were involved.

Other witnesses made related allegations.

Tsikata rejected them.

And there was a serious evidentiary problem:

Amartey Quaye was dead.

He could not be cross-examined.

The allegations could not simply be transformed into a judicial finding of guilt.

That is the difference between a historical suspicion and a criminal conviction.

But why was Rawlings so defensive?

Because the judges were not an abstract historical episode.

They were killed by people operating under the military government he led.

The government had imposed the curfew under which they were abducted.

The killings happened only months after his return to power.

The victims were taken to a military range.

The investigation was conducted by a government whose own members were among those accused.

And one of the people eventually convicted, Joachim Amartey Quaye, was a member of the PNDC.

Those facts do not prove that Rawlings ordered the murders.

They do make the question of what the leadership knew impossible to dismiss.

The bigger question: what sort of revolution was this?

Rawlings's supporters have an answer.

They say the old Ghanaian state was corrupt.

They say the economy had collapsed.

They say ordinary people had been abandoned.

They point to the discipline and later economic reforms of the Rawlings years.

They point to the fact that Ghana eventually returned to constitutional government and that Rawlings himself eventually accepted electoral politics.

All of that is part of the story.

But it cannot erase the beginning.

The beginning was a coup against an elected president.

And before the revolution had even learned how to govern, it had learned how to execute.

Before Limann, there had been Acheampong

Rawlings's supporters often point backwards to explain why the country was so angry in 1981.

They were not wrong.

Ghana had endured years of military rule.

General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong had seized power in January 1972.

He was eventually overthrown by another military faction.

General Fred Akuffo took over.

Rawlings then overthrew Akuffo in June 1979.

And what followed was extraordinary even by the standards of coup-prone West Africa.

The firing squads of 1979

Rawlings's Armed Forces Revolutionary Council held secret military proceedings against senior officers from the previous governments.

Eight senior officers were eventually executed.

These were not unknown soldiers.

Acheampong had been head of state.

Afrifa had been head of state.

Akuffo had been head of state immediately before Rawlings.

Kotei had been Chief of Defence Staff.

Amedume had commanded the navy.

Boakye had commanded the air force.

Utuka had commanded the Border Guards.

Felli had been a senior diplomat and military officer.

They were shot.

The official justification was corruption and abuse of office.

But the procedures were conducted by a revolutionary government that had itself seized power.

The National Reconciliation Commission later revisited the executions, and questions remained over the fairness and completeness of the proceedings. Contemporary reporting recorded that the men were convicted by secret military tribunals. r9

Rawlings later defended the executions.

He did not pretend they had not happened.

That is important.

But it also reveals something fundamental about his politics.

He believed that extraordinary violence could be justified as the price of cleansing the state.

Then the revolution began eating itself

That is what makes the 1982–83 story so sad.

The men who had helped create the revolution were now being arrested by the revolution.

Soldiers who had once fought alongside Rawlings became enemies.

Labour activists became prisoners.

Judges became victims.

PNDC members themselves were accused of murder.

And young soldiers began plotting to overthrow the man who had taught Ghana that coups could be presented as liberation.

The revolution had become a machine that could only justify itself by finding another enemy.

The June 1983 coup was different

Sergeant Abdul Malik and Corporal Carlos Halidu Giwa were not trying to restore Hilla Limann.

They were not simply defending the old political class.

They were soldiers challenging a revolutionary military government from inside the same army that was supposed to protect it.

That tells you something about how deeply the PNDC had fractured the armed forces.

There were now competing visions of what Ghana's revolution was supposed to be.

Some wanted Rawlings.

Some wanted a harder revolution.

Some wanted military order.

Some wanted civilian government.

Some wanted the old political class back.

And some simply wanted Rawlings gone.

Who were the men who fought back?

The loyalist side also had names.

The names tell the story better than ideology does.

Friends became suspects.

Prisoners became rebels.

Rebels became fugitives.

And some fugitives had once been members of the government.

The man who became a voice of the rebellion

Carlos Halidu Giwa is one of the saddest figures in the story.

He was young.

He had enough confidence to take control of Ghana's national broadcaster.

He went on air and declared the new order.

For a few hours, he was the voice of a government that did not exist yet.

Then the loyalists came.

The rebellion collapsed.

Giwa was captured.

His name entered the history books as one of the soldiers who had dared to challenge Rawlings.

His family would later speak of the pain and anger left behind by his execution.

That is the human cost that disappears when coups are reduced to dates in a chronology.

And Ghana was starving

There is another reason the June 1983 uprising mattered.

Ghana's economy was collapsing.

Then came the expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria.

In January 1983, Nigeria ordered the expulsion of huge numbers of undocumented migrants, sending an estimated one million or more Ghanaians home.

They arrived in a country already suffering severe economic hardship.

The crisis became known as Ghana Must Go.

It was one of the largest population movements in Ghana's modern history.

So when the June coup came, the country was not calm.

It was frightened.

Hungry.

Economically exhausted.

Politically divided.

And governed by soldiers who had overthrown the elected government.

That is why the coup mattered

If Ghana had been prosperous and politically stable, a failed barracks revolt might have been just another failed barracks revolt.

It wasn't.

The state was weak.

The army was divided.

The economy was collapsing.

Political opponents were imprisoned.

There had already been secret killings.

There had already been executions.

And now the men with guns were fighting among themselves.

That is what made 19 June dangerous.

The rebels did not need the entire army.

They needed enough of it.

They almost had the ingredients

They had the prisons.

They had the radio.

They had armed men.

They had political detainees.

They had the element of surprise.

They had a population increasingly exhausted by political upheaval.

What they did not have was enough loyal military support to finish the job.

That was the difference between a coup and a failed coup.

Rawlings survived because the chain of command did not collapse.

Once loyalist troops regrouped, the rebellion was crushed.

But Rawlings did not simply walk away

The answer to an attempted coup by a military ruler is rarely more democracy.

It is usually more security.

More arrests.

More surveillance.

More suspicion.

More power for the people who control the security apparatus.

That was the Ghana that emerged from June 1983.

Rawlings tightened his grip.

The PNDC survived.

And the revolution became increasingly institutionalized.

What happened to the people who opposed him?

Some went into exile.

Daniel Alolga Akata Pore eventually lived abroad.

Samuel Amedeka escaped Ghana and remained a fugitive.

Others were executed.

Still others were detained for years.

Some accusations were later shown to be weak or politically motivated.

Some crimes were real.

Some victims were never properly accounted for.

This is why the history of the PNDC cannot honestly be divided into "the revolutionaries" and "the criminals."

There were criminals inside the revolution.

There were idealists inside the opposition.

There were criminals among the opposition.

And there were people inside Rawlings's government who genuinely believed they were saving Ghana.

That is precisely what makes the story tragic rather than merely political.

So did Rawlings order the judges' murders?

Here is the answer I would want on a serious historical website:

We do not have sufficient evidence to state it as an established fact.

The Special Investigation Board did not find evidence that Rawlings or his wife had prior knowledge.

The convicted perpetrators were identified and prosecuted.

Kojo Tsikata was accused but denied involvement and was never convicted.

Later witnesses gave testimony alleging higher-level involvement.

The National Reconciliation Commission revisited the case decades later.

And Rawlings continued to deny responsibility.

That leaves a gap between what can be proved in court and what many Ghanaians have continued to believe.

That is a much stronger historical statement than simply calling Rawlings a murderer without evidence.

It also makes his repeated denials more interesting, because the question was never only whether he pulled a trigger.

The question was:

What did the man at the top know about what was being done in his name?

Rawlings's greatest defence — and his greatest problem

Rawlings could always point to the fact that he did not personally control every soldier.

That is true.

Military governments are messy.

Revolutionary movements are even messier.

But Rawlings was not a powerless figurehead.

He was the Chairman.

He controlled the state.

He controlled the security apparatus.

He had survived coup after coup.

He had executed senior officers in 1979.

He had overthrown an elected president in 1981.

His government had imposed the curfew under which the judges were abducted.

His regime imprisoned the men who challenged it.

His regime executed some of those men.

Eventually his regime became strong enough to survive.

That does not make every crime committed during his rule his personal crime.

It does mean he cannot be treated as an innocent bystander to the political system he created.

The tragedy of June 19

The saddest part of the June coup is that the rebels were not overthrowing a functioning democracy.

They were trying to overthrow another military government.

And if they had succeeded, there was no guarantee Ghana would have become democratic.

It might simply have acquired another group of officers.

Another council.

Another curfew.

Another list of enemies.

Another firing squad.

That was the trap Ghana had entered.

And that is what Rawlings understood

After June 1983, he knew exactly how vulnerable he was.

He had not inherited a stable state.

He had inherited a country in which the military had become the ultimate political institution.

He had helped make it that way.

And now he had to survive the consequences.

He did.

For another decade, he ruled Ghana through the PNDC.

Then, in 1992, he transformed the military regime into a constitutional political system.

He won the presidential election.

He won again in 1996.

In 2001, he finally left office.

He had gone from failed coup leader to elected president.

It is one of the strangest political transformations in modern African history.

But Ghana never forgot the bodies

The judges are still remembered.

Their names are still spoken:

Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong.

Fred Poku Sarkodee.

Cecilia Koranteng-Addow.

And:

Major Sam Acquah.

The Ghanaian judiciary calls them the Martyrs of the Rule of Law.

Their busts stand at the Supreme Court.

June 30 became a day of remembrance.

Their deaths became part of Ghana's institutional memory.

Not because they were politicians.

They were judges.

They represented the idea that even a revolutionary government had to answer to law.

And someone killed them.

The men who shot them did not all survive

Joachim Amartey Quaye was executed.

Johnny Dzandu was executed.

Evans Tekpor Hekli was executed.

Michael Senya faced the death sentence.

Samuel Amedeka escaped.

And the man whose name hovered above the case — Kojo Tsikata — lived on to become one of the most powerful and controversial figures of the Rawlings era.

The official investigation said Rawlings did not know.

Later testimony raised questions.

Rawlings denied them.

And the dead could not answer.

The other dead

There were also the eight senior officers executed in 1979.

Ignatius Kutu Acheampong.

Edward Kwaku Utuka.

Akwasi Amankwa Afrifa.

Fred William Kwasi Akuffo.

Robert Ebenezer Abossey Kotei.

Joy Kobla Amedume.

George Yaw Boakye.

Roger Joseph Felli.

They were shot by a revolutionary government led by the same Jerry Rawlings who would later be forced to defend his own government against soldiers attempting another coup.

The circle is almost impossible to miss.

The irony Ghana cannot escape

Rawlings came to power saying Ghana needed cleansing.

He executed men accused of destroying Ghana.

He handed power to civilians.

Then he overthrew the civilians.

His new government imprisoned opponents.

Four people were abducted and murdered.

His government prosecuted some of the accused.

Then soldiers tried to overthrow him.

Those soldiers broke prisoners out of jail.

They seized the radio.

They announced a new government.

And for a few hours, the man who had overthrown Ghana's government was himself fighting to prevent Ghana from being overthrown again.

That is not a contradiction in the story.

It is the story.

The uncomfortable part

Rawlings was not simply a monster.

That would make the history much easier.

He later presided over Ghana's transition to constitutional rule.

His governments implemented economic reforms that eventually stabilized the country.

He became an elected president and left office peacefully.

There were people who genuinely admired him until the end.

There were people who believed he had saved Ghana.

Some of them were not fools.

But none of that cancels the beginning.

A man can eventually become a constitutional president and still have come to power by overthrowing an elected one.

A government can later become legitimate and still have committed abuses while it was a military dictatorship.

A leader can be innocent of a particular murder and still be responsible for the political culture in which that murder became possible.

History is not a courtroom in which every man must be either completely guilty or completely innocent.

Sometimes the evidence leaves a darker answer.

What we know

Why this belongs on africanindependence.com

Because African independence is not a story about flags.

It is a story about what people did once they had the state.

Ghana was one of the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence.

It became a symbol.

Then it became a laboratory for coups.

Nkrumah was overthrown.

Acheampong overthrew Busia.

Akuffo overthrew Acheampong.

Rawlings overthrew Akuffo.

Rawlings handed power to Limann.

Rawlings then overthrew Limann.

Soldiers tried to overthrow Rawlings.

And all the while ordinary Ghanaians were expected to believe that the next man with a gun would finally be the one who could save the country.

That is the tragedy.

Not that Ghana had too many bad men.

It is that the political system had taught good men and bad men alike that the shortest route to power ran through the barracks.

The final irony

Jerry Rawlings survived every coup.

He survived the soldiers.

He survived the politicians.

He survived the opposition.

He survived the economic crisis.

He survived the accusations.

Eventually, he survived long enough to become the elected president of the country he had twice seized by force.

And that is why the June 1983 coup is so important.

Because it shows Rawlings before the later democratic image had settled around him.

It shows him when he was still what he had made himself:

A military ruler defending a military government from other soldiers.

For two hours on 19 June 1983, that government nearly disappeared.

The radio was seized.

The prisoners were free.

The rebels were in the streets.

And somewhere in Accra, Jerry Rawlings knew the truth that every coup leader eventually learns:

The men who can put you in power are the same men who can take you out.

The coup failed.

Rawlings survived.

Some rebels died.

Some fled.

Some were executed.

The judges remained dead.

And the question of who ultimately bore responsibility for the darkest crimes of the revolution followed Ghana into democracy.

It never received the clean answer everyone wanted.

Perhaps that is the most honest ending possible.

Not every mystery is solved.

But the bodies are real.

The coups are real.

The executions are real.

The prisons were real.

The radio takeover was real.

And the man who survived it all really did begin his political career by overthrowing a government that had been elected by the people of Ghana.

That is the part no amount of later political success can rewrite.

Verified: 5 September 2026.
This article distinguishes between established events, contemporary allegations and unresolved historical questions. The 31 December 1981 overthrow of President Hilla Limann, the November 1982 Gondar Barracks uprising, the February 1983 Achimota arrests and the 19 June 1983 coup attempt are documented in historical accounts of the PNDC period. The June 1983 operation was led by Sergeant Abdul Malik and Corporal Carlos Halidu Giwa, who announced himself on radio as the rebels' operational commissioner. The loyalist counterattack involved officers including Captain Courage Quarshigah and Warrant Officer Joseph Adjei Buadi. Daniel Alolga Akata Pore, Tata Ofosu and Kwame Pianim had been among people arrested after the November 1982 episode, and some detainees escaped during the June 1983 uprising. The 30 June 1982 murders of Justices Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong, Fred Poku Sarkodee, Cecilia Koranteng-Addow and retired Major Sam Acquah are documented by the Ghanaian Judiciary and subsequent historical investigations. The original Special Investigation Board did not find evidence that Rawlings or his wife had prior knowledge of the murders. Later National Reconciliation Commission testimony revived allegations concerning senior PNDC figures, including Kojo Tsikata, who denied involvement. Those allegations are therefore presented as allegations, not as proven facts. The National Reconciliation Commission was established in 2002, began public hearings in 2003, and Rawlings testified in February 2004. The eight senior officers executed by the AFRC in 1979 are identified individually in the article. The purpose of this page is historical documentation, not a criminal finding against any person.