Liberia
UHNCR has decided to send 97 refugees back to Liberia and we've decided to go with them. After much inter-JHR turmoil involving who would go, we finally got the arrangements made, the visas side and got out to the camp to do interviews with the people who were slated to go.
The flight from Accra hugs the coastline, and travels so high that most passengers can see only clouds. But after about 40 minutes, we descended enough that we could see an ocean of green. Liberia is mostly rainforest – it rains there every day, often several times a day and regardless of whether the sun is also shining – and we could see only a few red roads carving up the greenery. People were craning their necks to get a glimpse of the country they left behind. After an hour flight, which was uneventful, the pilot came on and announced our descent into Liberia. People cheered and whooped. When we finally bounced onto the runway, a cheer went up and people spontaneously burst into song, praising “Oh God! You are so wonderful! Jehovah! You are so wonderful!” It went on for about 10 minutes, with people laughing and hugging and singing. No tears, though, which was interesting.
The media hopped off the flight first, followed closely by the refugees, who didn’t really look like refugees. Liberians are rather vain people, with close ties to the US, which aren’t really reciprocated. Liberia was an experiment in democracy for the US. They sent a ship full of freed slaves to the port of Monrovia after the abolition of slavery as part of a repatriation program designed to return people to their rightful continent. The slaves settled in Monrovia, which is surrounded by dense bush. They knew only their American ways and entrenched them into Liberia’s culture, starting, surprisingly enough, with slavery. They looked down on the native Liberians, figuring their American heritage made them better. They enslaved them, kept them at economic and political disadvantage and essentially treated them as poor country bumpkin hicks. For a century, the elite Americo-Liberians, which represented about five per cent of Liberia’s population, ruled with little regard for their fellow countrymen. An uprising was bound to happen and it came on Dec. 24, 1989, when 20-year-old Samuel Doe, who hailed from the bush, and a bunch of his military comrades burst into the presidential mansion and hacked President Tolbert to death.
Doe, being the oldest in the room, assumed power, and spent the next 20 years decimating the country, mostly through sheer negligence and incompetence. Instead of empowering his bush-dwelling brethren, he mostly played to the US’s demands, raided the coffers, took care of his enemies with alarming brutality and ran the country into the ground.
As the country slipped further and further into decline, an upstart who had driven a taxi in Ghana and served time in Massachusettes (he managed a jail break that has never been explained) was quietly assembling an army to overthrow Doe. A third warlord would also emerge and they would fight for supremacy until 1997, when Charles Taylor finally won the presidency after ordering his forces to torture Doe to death. The election, presided over by the UN, was a farce. Most voted for Taylor because they knew he would take control no matter who won the office.
Taylor was even worse for Liberia than Doe. He was paranoid and tyrannical. He sidelined the Liberian army and built up his own gang of goons, known as the Government of Liberia forces. He gave them guns and drugs, but no food, and encouraged them to go and get whatever they could with the strength of their gun. They terrorized people, especially Doe’s perceived allies, shot anyone they thought was hiding money or food. A rebel group known as LURD, was soon organized to overthrow Taylor, with funding and support from Liberia’s neighbours, including Guinea and Sierra Leone. Funding arrangements have also been tracked back to the US. For seven years, the GOL, LURD and a third group known as MODEL, traded gun fire, taking over villages only to have them taken by the opposition. People fled on foot, in cars, through any means possible. The farms were ransacked and burned. The houses were stripped – from the roof to the windows to the pots and pans, anything that would fetch a price -- and set alight.
By the time ECOMOG peacekeepers got involved, there wasn’t one person in the country who hadn’t been touched by the war. Everyone, I mean everyone, had been forced to flee at one point or another, they had seen a friend or family member killed by one of the forces and had lost their job, their dignity, their house to one force or another. Even Monrovia came under attack, in the last phase of fighting, and people were forced to hide in basements. Rocket-propelled grenades would drop silently from the sky, obliterating people standing on the street. People waiting for taxis or buses would suddenly drop, dead from a sniper’s bullet. There was no safe place, no where left to run.
Last August, peacekeepers finally forced Taylor out of the country and began the long process of negotiating peace with the remaining factions. The entire country is under UN control, as part of the largest-ever UN peacekeeping mission known as UNMIL (United Nationals Mission in Liberia) and the government was appointed by the UN. Monrovia is overrun with UN vehicles. There are UN helicopters, UN planes, UN buses, UN forklifts even. (However, when I spent the day out on Saturday arranging interviews, I noticed a lot of the vehicles were being used to ferry things other than UN personnel. One military police car was loaded with cases of Heineken. Another was carting patio furniture.)
So, we left the airport Friday night just as the sun was setting, in a convoy of minibuses, SUVs and giant tarp-covered trucks carrying people’s luggage. The airport is an hour’s drive from Monrovia and it passes a few little collections of mudhuts and other shabby looking homes. As we approached the suburbs, we came across an IDP camp, for internally displaced persons. In a space the size of 12-city blocks, 7,000 people were crammed into tiny one-room mudhuts, A-line in structure and measuring about 10x8 feet. There is no running water, and outhouses line the outside of the camps. World Food Program drops off flour, oil and a few other essentials every month, but vegetables and meat are the IDP’s responsibility. The kids who greeted us at the camp had wispy white dots on their heads, a sure sign they were malnourished.
At the main intersection leading into Monrovia, things started to really pick up. The streets were absolutely jammed with people. I thought that people would be at home at night after dark, locked up in their dark houses, fearing guns and disturbances. But no, there was music playing, markets lit by kerosene lantern, so many people, in fact, that I thought we might hit someone. The streets are so dark, since there are no street lights or traffic lights and little electricity coming from buildings unless they’re equipped with generators.
I rode into the city on a minibus with a couple refugees, who were talking mostly about their worries of how to make ends meet now that they were home in a city without water, electricity or jobs. Most asked for money, although not in the same way that a Ghanaian would do it, making demands as though it’s expected white people have a lot of money and can spare it to meet their needs.
We dropped off the other journalists at a couple hotels right downtown, then drove to the Catholic guesthouse where we were staying. For $20 a night, we were given sparse room with double rooms. The bathrooms and showers were at the end of the hall, next to a blaring television. It was clean, though, and the price was right.
The flight from Accra hugs the coastline, and travels so high that most passengers can see only clouds. But after about 40 minutes, we descended enough that we could see an ocean of green. Liberia is mostly rainforest – it rains there every day, often several times a day and regardless of whether the sun is also shining – and we could see only a few red roads carving up the greenery. People were craning their necks to get a glimpse of the country they left behind. After an hour flight, which was uneventful, the pilot came on and announced our descent into Liberia. People cheered and whooped. When we finally bounced onto the runway, a cheer went up and people spontaneously burst into song, praising “Oh God! You are so wonderful! Jehovah! You are so wonderful!” It went on for about 10 minutes, with people laughing and hugging and singing. No tears, though, which was interesting.
The media hopped off the flight first, followed closely by the refugees, who didn’t really look like refugees. Liberians are rather vain people, with close ties to the US, which aren’t really reciprocated. Liberia was an experiment in democracy for the US. They sent a ship full of freed slaves to the port of Monrovia after the abolition of slavery as part of a repatriation program designed to return people to their rightful continent. The slaves settled in Monrovia, which is surrounded by dense bush. They knew only their American ways and entrenched them into Liberia’s culture, starting, surprisingly enough, with slavery. They looked down on the native Liberians, figuring their American heritage made them better. They enslaved them, kept them at economic and political disadvantage and essentially treated them as poor country bumpkin hicks. For a century, the elite Americo-Liberians, which represented about five per cent of Liberia’s population, ruled with little regard for their fellow countrymen. An uprising was bound to happen and it came on Dec. 24, 1989, when 20-year-old Samuel Doe, who hailed from the bush, and a bunch of his military comrades burst into the presidential mansion and hacked President Tolbert to death.
Doe, being the oldest in the room, assumed power, and spent the next 20 years decimating the country, mostly through sheer negligence and incompetence. Instead of empowering his bush-dwelling brethren, he mostly played to the US’s demands, raided the coffers, took care of his enemies with alarming brutality and ran the country into the ground.
As the country slipped further and further into decline, an upstart who had driven a taxi in Ghana and served time in Massachusettes (he managed a jail break that has never been explained) was quietly assembling an army to overthrow Doe. A third warlord would also emerge and they would fight for supremacy until 1997, when Charles Taylor finally won the presidency after ordering his forces to torture Doe to death. The election, presided over by the UN, was a farce. Most voted for Taylor because they knew he would take control no matter who won the office.
Taylor was even worse for Liberia than Doe. He was paranoid and tyrannical. He sidelined the Liberian army and built up his own gang of goons, known as the Government of Liberia forces. He gave them guns and drugs, but no food, and encouraged them to go and get whatever they could with the strength of their gun. They terrorized people, especially Doe’s perceived allies, shot anyone they thought was hiding money or food. A rebel group known as LURD, was soon organized to overthrow Taylor, with funding and support from Liberia’s neighbours, including Guinea and Sierra Leone. Funding arrangements have also been tracked back to the US. For seven years, the GOL, LURD and a third group known as MODEL, traded gun fire, taking over villages only to have them taken by the opposition. People fled on foot, in cars, through any means possible. The farms were ransacked and burned. The houses were stripped – from the roof to the windows to the pots and pans, anything that would fetch a price -- and set alight.
By the time ECOMOG peacekeepers got involved, there wasn’t one person in the country who hadn’t been touched by the war. Everyone, I mean everyone, had been forced to flee at one point or another, they had seen a friend or family member killed by one of the forces and had lost their job, their dignity, their house to one force or another. Even Monrovia came under attack, in the last phase of fighting, and people were forced to hide in basements. Rocket-propelled grenades would drop silently from the sky, obliterating people standing on the street. People waiting for taxis or buses would suddenly drop, dead from a sniper’s bullet. There was no safe place, no where left to run.
Last August, peacekeepers finally forced Taylor out of the country and began the long process of negotiating peace with the remaining factions. The entire country is under UN control, as part of the largest-ever UN peacekeeping mission known as UNMIL (United Nationals Mission in Liberia) and the government was appointed by the UN. Monrovia is overrun with UN vehicles. There are UN helicopters, UN planes, UN buses, UN forklifts even. (However, when I spent the day out on Saturday arranging interviews, I noticed a lot of the vehicles were being used to ferry things other than UN personnel. One military police car was loaded with cases of Heineken. Another was carting patio furniture.)
So, we left the airport Friday night just as the sun was setting, in a convoy of minibuses, SUVs and giant tarp-covered trucks carrying people’s luggage. The airport is an hour’s drive from Monrovia and it passes a few little collections of mudhuts and other shabby looking homes. As we approached the suburbs, we came across an IDP camp, for internally displaced persons. In a space the size of 12-city blocks, 7,000 people were crammed into tiny one-room mudhuts, A-line in structure and measuring about 10x8 feet. There is no running water, and outhouses line the outside of the camps. World Food Program drops off flour, oil and a few other essentials every month, but vegetables and meat are the IDP’s responsibility. The kids who greeted us at the camp had wispy white dots on their heads, a sure sign they were malnourished.
At the main intersection leading into Monrovia, things started to really pick up. The streets were absolutely jammed with people. I thought that people would be at home at night after dark, locked up in their dark houses, fearing guns and disturbances. But no, there was music playing, markets lit by kerosene lantern, so many people, in fact, that I thought we might hit someone. The streets are so dark, since there are no street lights or traffic lights and little electricity coming from buildings unless they’re equipped with generators.
I rode into the city on a minibus with a couple refugees, who were talking mostly about their worries of how to make ends meet now that they were home in a city without water, electricity or jobs. Most asked for money, although not in the same way that a Ghanaian would do it, making demands as though it’s expected white people have a lot of money and can spare it to meet their needs.
We dropped off the other journalists at a couple hotels right downtown, then drove to the Catholic guesthouse where we were staying. For $20 a night, we were given sparse room with double rooms. The bathrooms and showers were at the end of the hall, next to a blaring television. It was clean, though, and the price was right.
posted by Palmer in Africa at 9:11 AM
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