It was time for a break at Clay Junction, Liberia’s front line 50km north of the capital, Monrovia, and the kids wanted something to smoke. Boy soldiers in women’s wigs and girl soldiers in shower caps loitered by the road or practised penalties with spent sub-machine-gun cartridges.
One fighter found a more amusing toy. He twisted the thigh bones from a putrefying corpse and thwacked them together. The kids loved it. Leaping and shrieking, they forgot their urge for dope and danced to his grizzly percussion.
Breathless and glistening with sweat in the soup-like tropical air, one teenage gunman explained the deadlier game plan. ”We’re chasing rebels all over this country for freedom, we’re fighting to free our country,” said Private Forkpa in creole, from beneath a fluffy semi-perm weave. ”We’re killing for our country, we’re fighting to save our president.”
That President is Charles Taylor, a United States-educated, Libyan-trained guerrilla, who has turned democratically elected leader.
For more than a decade Taylor’s fighters and the rebel groups he has allegedly backed in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire have been setting West Africa ablaze. More than 400 000 people have been killed and millions displaced in a tangled regional conflict characterised by extreme violence.
In Sierra Leone rebels apparently armed by Taylor hacked off thousands of civilians’ limbs. In Liberia his fighters assumed dual personalities, wearing wigs and women’s dresses to confuse the enemy’s bullets.
But Taylor finds himself caught in his own pernicious web. On June 4 the international tribunal investigating war crimes during Sierra Leone’s recently ended war charged him with ”bearing the greatest responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law”.
The next day, the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd), a group allegedly backed by Sierra Leone, Guinea and the US, attacked Monrovia. As the rebels surged into its northern suburbs, Western diplomats and aid workers fled. More than 400 people were killed and 60 000 Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees scattered when the fighting overwhelmed their camps.
The rebels withdrew last week, but only after Taylor pulled almost his entire army back to the capital. Now, he is under siege.
Lurd controls the northern third of the country, and another rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model), allegedly backed by Côte d’Ivoire, controls the southern third. Taylor has no cash to fight them off, because of United Nations sanctions on diamonds, and soon on timber and rubber.
Taylor protested last week with characteristic eloquence. He said the war crimes indictment ”was a zealous attempt to high-noon hang Charles Taylor”. The tribunal’s American chief investigator was ”some little zealous prosecutor somewhere who comes running with his racist redneck behaviour”.
Last Tuesday he agreed to a ceasefire with the rebels, which was supposed to lead to a transitional government within 30 days, and an end to his rule. Last week that undertaking was put in doubt when the president said he would continue in office to the end of his term in January 2004.
The road from Clay Junction to Monrovia provided snapshots of Taylor’s Liberia. The bodies of young men and boys lay spreadeagled on the asphalt: face-down, face-up, their eyes pecked out by birds. Casually, a soldier sprayed a stinking corpse with bullets. But he ignored the next one, perhaps because it was wearing a wig.
Halfway to Monrovia was the Clay Rehabilitation Centre, a half-charred, looted school — its desks and inkwells smashed outside.
The Lurd rebels stopped there on their way to Monrovia, or so the sooty graffiti on its walls suggested: ”General Teeboy, special forces for LURD; Remeber [sic] Junior Rambo in action; Special forces Captain Value, rebel movement; Tay go Morovia [sic] no stop!”
The poor spelling was unsurprising. After 14 years of on-off war in Liberia with a pause following Taylor’s election in 1997, the country is in humanitarian meltdown.
The European Union says more than a third of its three million people are displaced, mostly living in camps with no power, no clean water and almost no Western food aid.
More than 10 000 child soldiers were never demobilised after the first stage of the war, and thousands have been recruited since. The UN’s statistics suggest Liberia has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world.
On the edge of Monrovia, Anthony Washington (30) turned off the road into a displacement camp, carrying a bundle of palm sap and cassava roots, scavenged from the bush. ”You gotta advocate for us, man, cause we’re dying here, people dying here every day,” he said. ”We got no food, no medication, we got no food, man.”
The rebels launched their attack at the camp, looting its market, then fighting a gun battle with the army over the prostrate bodies of thousands of terrified refugees.
”Bullets hitting arms, bullets hitting legs, we were crawling around screaming,” said Vanday Ibrahima (37), who was there at the time. ”God help us, we need some peace.”
Even peace may not be enough for Gadi Kamara, a skinny 30-year-old, with seven much skinnier children. She fled northern Liberia’s Cape Mount region two years ago after the rebels killed her husband. Now, in a dark, greasy hut, her children were dying.
Two-year-old Naomi screamed with hunger but Kamara had only a thin, woody, manioc soup to give her. Not that Kamara was neglectful. Naomi’s hair was bright orange, a sign of chronic malnutrition, but carefully plaited.
”We need the war over right now, so we can stop running,” said Kamara.
”So we can sustain ourselves.”
Comfort Iro of the International Crisis Group, a thinktank, said that despite the ceasefire, Liberia would not see peace without Western attention. Neither Lurd nor Model have a clear leader, nor any policy beyond that of expelling Taylor.
With Taylor cornered by his war crimes charge and the rebels accused of similar atrocities, Monrovia could become a bloodbath.
”For two months, we’ve been telling the international community that Taylor would be indicted, and that Lurd would attack when he was. There has been no response,” said Iro, by phone from Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. ”Somebody has to support this agreement. Somebody has to intervene in Liberia.”
The UN Security Council has not debated sending peacekeepers to Liberia, and they would take months to deploy. So too would any force sent by the Economic Community of West African States, which brokered last week’s ceasefire. It would be better if the US intervened in its former territory, suggested Iro.
Britain and France have set precedents for this, with Britain’s successful intervention in its former colony Sierra Leone, and France in Côte d’Ivoire. ”America is the only country Liberians listen to. It’s the only country Taylor fears,” Iro said.
That is not welcome news to Washington. It sent about 100 navy Seals to protect its embassy in Monrovia two weeks ago, and last week evacuated all remaining non-essential embassy staff to a battleship sent from the Gulf.
But the US ambassador in Monrovia refused to comment on the misery outside his walls. — Â