With youthful rebels on a cannibal rampage, Westerners are fleeing the anarchy in Liberia, a country abandoned by the West, writes Phillip van Niekerk
TWO-and-a-half weeks ago, soldiers overran the village north-west of Monrovia where Sensi Momoh lived. They were young, some no more than teenagers, and heavily armed. They fired at random and ransacked the huts. “They killed my brother,” Momoh said. “They opened up his body and took his heart out.
“They put it in a big pan and cooked it in palm butter. Then they ate it. I’ve never seen such a thing. It was unbelievable.”
Dozens of Liberians in refugee camps outside Monrovia described similar acts of cannibalism, believed to endow those who partake with supernatural powers. One woman had seen young warriors of Alhaji GV Kromah’s United Liberation Movement (Ulimo-K) extract the heart and private parts of five boys and eat them.
While his youthful supporters, crazed by the combination of home-grown dagga and easy access to the spoils of war, terrorised the countryside, Kromah sat on the Council of State in Monrovia, the governing body created last year as the centrepiece of the international community’s now hopelessly thwarted attempt to restore order to chaotic Liberia.
It would be unfair to single out any one leader of Liberia’s warring factions, as all are guilty — of outright atrocities or at best of failing to control their legions of young soldiers. “None of us has clean hands,” admitted Franois Masikwa, leader of one of the smaller factions, the Lofa Defence Force.
“Everyone with a big gun gets to sit on the council,” complained Masikwa, whose relatively small faction had won him only the lowly sport ministry portfolio. In creating the council, the Abuja Accord divvied up the government among the very warlords whose troops had nearly destroyed it. Whether out of despair or a desire for a quick fix, the international community — including the United Nations and the United States — acquiesced. “The international community blundered by allowing a government of criminals that defies all norms of civilisation,” said Koffi Woods, of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission.
The aim of the accord, brokered in August, was to maintain Monrovia as a weapon-free zone while the rest of the country was disarmed. Troops from the West African peacekeeping force manned scores of roadblocks in and out of the city to ensure that it remained a “safe haven”. One reason given by the warlord Charles Taylor for moving in to arrest his rival Roosevelt Johnson a week ago, the spark that started the war, was that he was sitting on a weapons stockpile.
The failure of the Abuja Accord was the assumption that the warlords wanted peace. War has always been a means of gaining great wealth. In the post-Cold War world, rebel militias fight more for plunder than for any ideology. Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, for one, is in the business of selling diamonds and exporting hardwoods and rubber.
Why the warlords bartered for peace at all may be because they had stolen whatever there was to steal in the countryside. Even as the government caved in, first prize in Liberia was still to become the biggest of the big men. Taylor has never made secret his ambition to be president. Twice before he attempted to take Monrovia: twice he was blocked by the Nigerian peacekeeping troops.
There can be no doubt that the assault on Johnson’s home was his third attempt to seize power. It was how Johnson saw it when interviewed on the eve of the storming. “This is a set-up. The National Patriotic Front is trying to create a smokescreen for its evil plans. Taylor wants to be president.” It was his last public statement. Taylor’s forces attacked 36 hours later and Johnson has not been seen since.
The peace accord empowered Taylor by handing over to him key functions of the already weakened Liberian state. He was given the police — which he rapidly turned into an adjunct of his militia — and the justice ministry, which he padded with his own appointees.
Taylor also got the information and tourism ministries. Journalists entering Monrovia were forced to buy accreditation for $30, money pocketed immediately by the official on duty. Nor was it useful; word was out that anyone found by Johnson’s people to have such a document would be killed.
There was no small irony in Taylor attempting to charge Johnson with murder, given his own bloody record.
Today Monrovia is ruled by its young soldiers of misfortune, with their red scarfs, dark glasses and AK-47s. Looting is a source of income for youths doomed otherwise to joblessness and life on the margins. One of the UN observers in Monrovia calculated that with an estimated 60 000 combatants, each with at least three dependants, there are about 200 000 people in Liberia who benefit from looting.
Taylor’s troops in particular are noted for indiscipline. They led the population on a free-for-all through central Monrovia, carrying chairs, TVs and computers on their heads, or pushing wheelbarrows stuffed with food and clothes, while the peacekeepers stood back.
Johnson had the backing of the Krahn ethnic group, which included former Liberian soldiers located at the Barclay Training Centre, as well as the troops of George Boley’s Liberia Peace Committee.
Refugees at displaced people’s centres outside Monrovia told of a merciless process of “ethnic cleansing” that has been under way in western Liberia since January. Kromah’s Mandingo have been pitted against Johnson’s Krahn, both factions of Ulimo. Members of the smaller ethnic groups have been killed, their villages looted and burnt.
Last week, I picked my way over the bodies of Liberians littering the streets of Monrovia. Mortar and RPG-7 rocket fire could be heard in repeated barrages as the Krahn held on grimly to the barracks, with hundreds of hostages packed in as human shields.
A city already bursting with refugees from the war in the countryside has created tens of thousands of its own internal refugees. A humanitarian disaster is in the making.
The image that remains is of women, quiet with hunger, holding crying babies, watching helicopters overhead, en route to convey Westerners to safety. Their eyes seemed to be asking the same question: will they ever come back, or is Liberia to be abandoned to its fate?
American officials said yesterday that the round-the-clock military airlift has carried more than 1 500 people of 62 nationalities out of Monrovia, but more people were still seeking refuge at the US embassy. “We were down to the last 70 people in the compound and now they’ve let a lot more in,” Commander Robert Anderson said. “We’ve been told we’ll need about a dozen more sorties.”
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