Liberians trade guns for money

Liberians trade guns for money; But slow funding hinders plan to retrain ex-rebels Pastor helps teach gunmen who killed mother and sister
Karen Palmer
TORONTO STAR
1678 words
17 October 2004

Kakata, LIBERIA -- Albert Walker begged for mercy as rebels shot his mother and sister.

He watched helplessly as they sprayed bullets at a group of shrieking children, their little bodies falling one by one.

With an assault rifle trained on him, his family dying nearby, the diminutive, bespectacled man pleaded for his life, turning his pockets inside out to show he had nothing - nothing of value, nothing to hide, nothing left.

He was spared, probably because of the stiff cleric's collar around his neck.

The Methodist pastor, who is vice-principal of the country's only vocational school, figures a divine power kept him alive so he could play a central role in rebuilding his decimated West African homeland.

A year after Liberia's three warring factions finally agreed to end a brutal 14-year civil war, Walker finds himself in the curious position of helping the very rebels who killed his family, pillaged his home and ransacked his school, clearing it of computers, textbooks, even the window panes and corrugated roofs of the residence buildings.

The sprawling Booker Washington Institute, once the alma mater of politicians and businessmen, is now the training ground for hundreds of ex-combatants who laid down their guns in exchange for the opportunity to turn their lives around.

Walker reveals no bitterness for his new trainees, who will spend eight months living in his community as they learn carpentry, masonry or other trades at his Kakata school, a 90-minute drive southwest of the capital Monrovia, past lush, green jungle along a paved road rutted by rocket-propelled grenades.

"Unless they're trained to get out of the street, we're going to have further problems," he says simply, shrugging in a blue pinstriped suit too big for his small frame.

"They're used to grabbing. Grabbing people, grabbing people's property. They took whatever they needed with their guns."

Since the peace accord was signed last year, Liberia has been run by a U.N.-appointed transitional government and patrolled by the largest-ever peacekeeping mission.

More than 83,000 ex-combatants have turned over their arms or ammunition to peacekeepers, but only 30,000 have been paid the promised $300 (all figures U.S.) in return, a serious funding shortfall that is threatening the country's fragile peace.

The soldiers are also supposed to receive school-based education and training in skilled trades, but as school begins this month, there's only enough money to pay the tuition fees for 2,500 people, one-fifth the number who are registered.

The ex-soldiers responded with demonstrations that devolved into rioting and looting

"Every day in Liberia, there is rioting because the combatants want to get into school, but we don't have the money," says Molley Paasewe, spokesperson for the National Commission on Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration.

"The tension is there. There is real apprehension that, if the funding is not there, we could slide right back to ground zero."

Money promised by the United States, the European Union and two international aid organizations has slowed to a trickle.

At a meeting in February, $520 million was pledged to the United Nations to help rebuild the country, including $200 million in aid relief from the United States.

Last month, transitional government chair Gyude Bryant pleaded with international donors to fill a $44 million shortfall in the disarmament program. About $38 million has been received, but Paasewe says only about $10 million has actually reached Liberia and it has already been spent.

"The tendency for people to regroup is very high and the country is still going through a transitional phase," Paasewe said, noting that donors are balking at the idea of paying soldiers while non-combatants get nothing.

"We tell people, don't feel bad because these combatants are getting a new lease on life, because if these guys weren't given a second chance, they would harass you and you won't have time to build schools. What they know best is holding guns."

For more than a decade, the business end of an assault rifle fed and clothed the ragged, starving and sometimes drug-addled fighting forces that terrorized the country.

A Christmas Eve coup in 1989 turned the country into a bloody arena for three factions fighting for power.

Although the conflict initially broke out along Liberia's northern borders, warring militias carried their deadly assaults to every corner of the country.

Liberians experienced a short-lived peace when warlord Charles Taylor took the presidency in 1997, but old conflicts were soon renewed.

Over the next seven years, three separate forces fought for supremacy using fearsome armies mostly made up of young men and women who were kidnapped or blackmailed into fighting.

By the time a truce was declared and Taylor was forced into exile in August 2003, nearly 400,000 of Liberia's 3 million people were dead and another 350,000 had fled to neighbouring countries.

Another 100,000 men and women are estimated to have fought for one side or another.

The youngest to disarm so far was a 7-year-old boy; the oldest an 85-year-old grandmother.

During the war, Taylor's fighting forces commandeered Walker's school and used it as a training camp for the hundreds of boys and girls forcibly conscripted into his army.

Mohamed Wayee was walking home in Monserrat County when he was grabbed, thrown into a car and forced to join the president's band of personal thugs.

Ask him about the glass studs he wears in both ears and he grins and laughs like any other 24-year-old. But ask him about what happened during the war and he stutters almost incomprehensibly.

What emerges is that he fought for Taylor for four years, even here in Kakata, where he is now learning to make cabinets. He has no idea what happened to his family and he won't attempt to find them until he has wrestled with his war demons.

He gave up his gun in April. Now, he goes to school in a community he once helped destroy, at a school his fellow combatants looted.

"For me, because the army spoiled the country, this is a second chance," he says, struggling over every word.

"Maybe after this program , I can work for UNMIL (the U.N. Mission in Liberia) or the government and get a job to rebuild the country."

Liberia was left in such miserable shape that it isn't included on the U.N.'s human development index. Literacy rates are only 53 per cent and about 80 per cent of Liberia's residents live on less than $1 a day.

Outside Monrovia, where buildings are pocked with bullet holes and streaked with the signs of neglect, there is almost nothing left. Entire rural villages were picked clean by soldiers, then burned to the ground.

"The farther you drive, the more you will see that the country is destroyed," Walker says.

Squalid "internally displaced persons" camps dot the landscape, filled with families from the farthest reaches of Liberia's forests. They fled toward the relative safety of the city and now find themselves crammed into one-room mud huts.

In the space of 12 city blocks, more than 7,000 people have been squeezed together without running water at a camp near the airport. The camp's children are crowned with white spots on their scalps, a sign of malnutrition.

And there is a sense, mostly among Liberians desperate for peace, that things are not moving fast enough. So far, the U.N. has secured only four of the country's 15 counties and recovered about 25,000 weapons, mostly AK-47 assault rifles.

The heavy artillery, like missiles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, has yet to be uncovered and the disarmament process is scheduled to end by Oct. 31. In November, Paasewe says, peacekeepers will sweep communities, forcibly removing weapons as they find them.

Today, the peace process is at a crucial but delicate stage.

This month, almost 200 refugees returned to Liberia from Ghana and Sierra Leone, the first phase of a three-year repatriation process that will see more than 300,000 people go back home.

It is the third time refugees have returned to Liberia after being forced to leave by renewed fighting.

"This is our last opportunity and if we miss this opportunity, we're doomed," says Wesley Johnson, vice-chair of the transitional government.

"This day is extremely important because it symbolizes peace, that real peace has come to our country."

The refugees who came back to Monrovia face an uphill battle in a city without running water, where the electrical grid is only partially repaired and the unemployment rate hovers at a staggering 85 per cent.

The U.N. High Commission on Refugees, which organized the return, will provide household items like tarpaulins, blankets, pots and jerrycans - but not money.

That worries Alvin Kpoto, who has to feed his wife and their two children, ages 12 and 5.

The Kpotos fled Liberia in 1990, after rebels torched their home. They returned in 1997, only to flee again when the fighting became too intense.

Kpoto ran a foreign-exchange bureau and sold rice here before the war. As a refugee, he sold fish and fresh water at a camp in Ghana. Now, he's not sure what he'll do. But he is determined.

"If they give me a loan," he vows, "I'll be able to pay back the loan."