Wedged tightly together, about 2 000 young Liberian fighters wait in front of a crumbling building, their every move watched closely by a wary band of Bangladeshi and Jordanian peacekeepers.
Dressed in gleaming bullet-proof vests, the peacekeepers, their wooden truncheons drawn, keep the winding queue of newly-disarmed combatants under control as they wait for a $75 payment for surrendering their weapons to the UN Mission in Liberia (Unmil).
Some of the ex-fighters have been waiting for four days, their throats parched and stomachs rumbling for fear of breaking ranks and losing a coveted place in line in front of the lone registration counter. The counter is bogged down, unable to process more than 400 former combatants per day.
The peacekeepers stand by nervously, unsure they will be able to maintain order let alone ensure lasting peace in the west African state riven by back-to-back civil wars since 1989 that killed more than 200 000 and made refugees of one in five Liberians.
At times the peacekeepers barrel in among the restive young fighters, many of whom took up arms before they reached adolescence, to soothe the inevitable tensions arising from the long, hot wait.
”They just say that we have to wait here, that’s all. We are here, we sleep in the sand, in the dust, because we don’t want to lose our turn in the queue. And it’s not moving,” said George Blah, who fought in the Armed Forces of Liberia of former president Charles Taylor before deciding to give up his weapon.
”They should have at least four or five offices but the organisation is so bad.”
Prepared to house 1 000 former fighters, the Schieffelin barracks, 25km outside of Monrovia, are crammed with 3 000 young men awaiting food rations, psychological
counseling and vocational training they were promised if they dropped their weapons.
Those who have managed to squeeze into the barracks spend their days loitering around, scrounging cigarettes or queuing again — this time for their daily allotment of rice and beans.
”We are just here, we do nothing, they tell us nothing about what to do, the disarmament is not well organised at all,” complains 23-year-old Rufus Forkpa.
Gesturing angrily with a tattered plastic bag that had contained his daily meal he added: ”You know, I volunteered for disarmament, but they treat us really like animals… Look, we don’t have even a spoon, look at what we are eating!”
Last week, disgruntled former fighters from Liberia’s wars ran riot in the capital, complaining at the conditions of disarmament. Demoralised, penniless and without a leader since Taylor bowed to international pressure in August and fled into exile in Nigeria, the rioting fighters blocked the sole road from Monrovia to the
airport, commandeered UN vehicles and strafed the skies of the capital with automatic weapons fire.
At least 12 people were killed in the unrest. Panicked aid agencies fled Schieffelin, leaving the peacekeepers with nothing, said an Unmil officer with a pained look on his face as he handed a young fighter a yellow coupon that would bring him
his $75 reward.
”It’s a tough situation because the fighters are so disappointed,” he said on condition of anonymity. ”They wait for hours for their money and then don’t know what else to do.”
Many former fighters return to Monrovia once they are registered to await the summons to return for the reintegration component of the disarmament campaign.
An estimated 40 000 combatants from three warring factions are due to be disarmed and given help to return to civilian life.
Since it began on December 7, the programme has achieved some measure of success, filling two containers with surrendered weapons and registering nearly 7 100 former combatants, mostly soldiers in Taylor’s army or the militias who fought alongside them in the rebel war that began in 1999.
But that success means little to 14-year-old Feather Kerkurah, who was conscripted into the notorious Small Boys Unit (SBU) of Taylor’s army more than four years ago.
”We are 27 SBU here. We are on our own, nobody takes care of us … We cannot go to catch food because of the big guys, they just smash us and they steal our yellow papers,” he said, his young comrades nodding in agreement as they clustered around their designated spokesperson.
”We were very happy to disarm because we want to go to school, but now we don’t know what to do and we have nothing.” – Sapa-AFP