Kindergartners struggling to write their ABCs at a Salvation Army elementary school here are composing, with every crooked scrawl, the next chapter in Liberia’s recovery from war and strife.
Among the 22 children perched on wooden benches, only a few are 4 or 5 years old, the expected age for the class. Many are 8, 10, even 11. About half can’t sit still through their lessons. A couple of them nod into sleep. Some come to class noticeably unkempt, their uniforms dirty. All are thin, some painfully bony.
Few bear physical scars from Liberia’s 14-year civil war but nearly all, it seems, absorbed its trauma. One child is burdened with a profound injury, the loss of her right hand in a rocket attack in 2003. Somehow Musu Gertee, now 8, has blossomed, even prospered, in these days of peace.
She, like so many Liberians, wants to defy the past and build on whatever hope remains.
Teachers watched Musu with some trepidation the first day that the maimed child walked into class. Other children shrieked and jeered. Musu fought off tears and soon fought back with a bit of street smarts.
The tiny child began entering the classroom each morning, swinging her shrunken arm and flashing an impish smile. At recess, she teased other children, thrusting her stump in their faces and giggling at their surprise.
The child turned her loss into a lesson that classmates couldn’t ignore. Teacher Helena Dagbe described the moment: “Musu made fun of fear.”
Such fearlessness will be crucial as Liberia wrestles with ruin and anxiety two years after civil war has ended. There is no electricity and no running water. Public schools are packed with as many as 50 students per class. Six of every 10 adults can’t read or write and much of the next generation, those younger than 18, never went to school. Unemployment remains unrelenting. About 85 percent of all adults are jobless in the country of 3.5 million people.
The kindergartners in Musu’s class have no idea about the odds they face or the troubles that cloud Liberia’s future. Their teacher knows, by their appearance and fidgeting, that life cannot be easy.
When Dagbe tries to explain the legacy of war, on her class and Liberia, she speaks of Musu, the most visibly wounded child and the one most healed. Musu benefits from two loving parents who refuse to define their daughter’s injury as a disability. They instead call it reality, Dagbe said.
Other students hang on the best they can, hoping for a fighting chance in these fragile times, she said. “Some of them don’t have parents who are interested–or maybe they don’t exist at all,” Dagbe said. “I see the war, still, in my class.”
A SPIRIT OF HOPE
For maimed child, parents hold key to her future
THE LAST DAYS OF BATTLE in Liberia nearly ravaged the Gertee family and its future.
The family had just finished daily prayers when a bolt of smoke and fire struck their small home in Monrovia. Albert and Fatu Gertee held tight to their infant son but could only hear the frantic screams of 6-year-old Musu. When the dust cleared, the young parents found their daughter.
Musu’s right hand was gone, sheared by a rocket attack.
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As blood flowed from Musu, God’s spirit must have entered, the deeply religious parents said. Photographer Kuni Takahashi wandered by as neighbors rushed Musu from the rubble. Takahashi drove them to the hospital; he recorded Musu’s agony in a few frames of film as she was carried into the emergency room.
“God is with her then and now,” Fatu Gertee said. “How else could she have survived?”
Musu missed a year of school because of her injury, but postwar Liberia has afforded the family some hope that times will get better. Her parents were able to place Musu, now 8, in kindergarten at a private religious school. Tuition is $60 a year, a formidable cost in a country where most people live on a dollar a day. It is a price the Gertees are willing to pay to give their daughter a good education and a better chance in life.
In classes and at home, Musu has learned to clench a pencil in her strong left hand and practices the alphabet daily. She writes neatly and giggles at praise. Musu also is starting to braid hair as other girls her age do. She plaits the blonde locks of her doll every day under her mother’s watchful eye. Fatu is determined that nothing should be beyond her daughter’s reach.
“I push her,” Fatu said. “When I see her writing, I am so happy. I have fears about her, the future and who will she marry. If she is educated … she can earn money.”
Money worries overwhelm the Gertees. Albert, Musu’s father, hasn’t been able to find steady work since the war ended. He said he never joined the fighting because he knew God wouldn’t accept such killing. He often wonders aloud what God has in mind for Liberia now.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the best new hope in Liberia’s tumultuous political landscape, also wonders. Johnson-Sirleaf is poised to clinch Liberia’s first presidential election since the war. A well-regarded Harvard-educated economist, Johnson-Sirleaf, like many Liberians, questioned international guidance since the war.
Common people were in need while those who ran the war–including former commanders and fighters–found their way into the government, she said in an interview at her office earlier this year.
The United Nations mission, meant to rebuild Liberia, followed a ready-made model for recovery that didn’t take into account the long nature of the war and how most people suffered, she said.
The UN “brought in a whole lot of cars, a whole lot of consultants and whole lot of assessments,” she said. “But by the time they did all that, there [wasn’t] a lot of money left for the people who suffered the war.”
The Gertees lives off the sales of potato greens grown behind their one-room home. Albert guesses he pockets $3 a day, a dollar for food and $2 to be saved for rent and Musu’s tuition. The family has been evicted twice this year for not paying rent, but it vows to keep Musu’s tuition safe.
“We’ll sell everything we have to keep Musu in school,” Fatu said. “But everything seems so hard, hard, hard.”
–Christine Spolar
REBUILDING FROM CIVIL WAR
Decades of suffering in its past, years of work yet to come
Liberia offers an intense example of how a failed state needed more than money–more vigilance, more planning, more sharp-eyed justice–to recover from devastating civil war. Even in peace, it remains prey to corruption, deceptions, politicians seeking illicit gains, thugs looking for quick profit and terror operatives eager for any opportunity to wreak confusion and pain.
Its history is a lesson in how misplaced ambitions can ruin a nation. Its present-day conditions offer little evidence that such passions or ambitions have been tamed.
Liberia means “land of the free,” a name chosen by freed slaves from America who formed the republic in 1847. They sought a U.S.-style government and way of life in Africa. Monrovia, the capital, was named for U.S. President James Monroe. English was the new designated language. Tensions between the natives and the newcomers, called Americo-Liberians, were immediate.
The indigenous people were not considered citizens. (They didn’t even have the right to vote until 1960.) Whole swaths of society seethed as foreign investors began to arrive in the late 1950s, tapping into Liberia’s bounty of timber, rubber, iron ore and precious minerals. In the Cold War years, the U.S. government used Liberia’s location to its advantage and set up a large CIA listening post.
Change came violently in 1980 when army rebel Samuel Doe, a native son, took over in a coup. He remained in power for nearly a decade, plundering Liberia’s economy for personal gain, until he was caught off guard by a deadly challenge. On Christmas Eve 1989, Charles Taylor, a native Liberian and onetime ally, invaded from Ivory Coast with an army of rebels.
Doe was killed and fighting spread into the countryside. Eventually three factions of rebels, all eyeing Liberia’s natural resources for profit, were on the warpath.
Liberia erupted as the international community was beset with troubles. The Cold War ended. Iraq invaded Kuwait and a U.S.-coalition was dispatched to drive out the Iraqis in 1991. Liberia’s fighting was largely ignored. A jittery cease-fire was secured, giving just enough time to hold elections in 1997. Taylor promised stability and won. Fighting resumed within months. In conversations today, Liberians have chilling references for the blur of battles in the early 1990s, the late 1990s and into 2000: World War I, World War II and World War III.
The last spasm of death was in 2003. As Liberia’s capital bled into near-medieval slaughter, Taylor, now notorious in the region for forcing children to fight, was indicted by a tribunal in neighboring Sierra Leone for alleged war crimes.
Taylor was accused of provoking and profiting from the African wars. In Sierra Leone, he was charged with supporting rebels who torched civilians, raped women and hacked off the limbs of anyone who got in their way.
A cease-fire was negotiated in the summer of 2003 by African leaders and the international community. Somehow, factions responsible for the war benefited. Each was allotted ministries in a new peacetime government. Taylor was exiled, without penalty, to Nigeria. Negotiators maintained there was a logic to the leniency: Killers behind the misery had to be compelled, in tangible ways, to make peace.
There is a legacy to such dealmaking. Nigeria has yet to expel Taylor and there are reports, publicized by the non-profit Coalition for International Justice, that he meddles, by phone, fax and e-mail, with provocateurs across West Africa. Young men, former fighters in Liberia’s war, have been tracked by Human Rights Watch observers to battles in nearby Ivory Coast as they seek to make war for pay.
Equally troubling are reports about what hides in the shadows of Liberia. Liberia’s continued distress and Taylor’s influence create an easy atmosphere for terror groups to move around the region, some observers believe.
The United Nations mission in Liberia remains in charge of keeping the peace with 15,000 soldiers, one of the largest forces in Africa. Still, everyday life remains precarious. Civil society withered in the chaos. Courts, police, municipal services are in need of revival. Reports of corruption abound even as millions of international dollars pour in.
The plight of today’s Liberia raises tough questions about whether conventional methods to rescue war-torn African nations still work–if they ever did. Human Rights Watch, aware of the depth of the region’s problems, was critical of the UN’s administration of its most essential program, to disarm and rehabilitate soldiers. The UN mission also was rattled by reports that some soldiers abused Liberian women by bartering and paying for sex.
Amid these troubles, there are signs of progress. Liberia recently held its first election for president since the war and the vote, a general election and runoff, was deemed fair. Liberia is also in the throes of a radical anti-corruption effort, the first in West Africa, directed by the international community. Liberia’s maritime bureau chief has been charged with corruption, the first time since war any official has been held so accountable.
It is a flicker of something good in a country that has seen much evil.
–Christine Spolar
HOW TO HELP
– People interested in helping Liberia can donate to non-profit organizations that operate there.
Here are two:
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THE INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE
runs programs for children affected
by war. Specific donations to Liberia should be noted.
Web site: www.theirc.org
Address: 122 E. 42nd St., 12th Floor, New York, NY 10168
CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES
is the official humanitarian agency for U.S. Catholics and works in Liberia.
Web site: www.catholicrelief.org
Address: P.O. Box 17090,
Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
Kuni Takahashi is an award-winning photojournalist who has covered major domestic and international events, including South Africa’s multiracial election in 1994, unrest in Albania in 1996, the civil war in Liberia, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. A native of Japan, he was a staff photographer at the Boston Herald before joining the Tribune in 2004.
Christine Spolar is a foreign correspondent for the Tribune who over the past decade has covered conflicts including the Bosnian war, the Palestinian intifada and the war in Iraq. Her work has won an Investigative Reporters and Editors national reporting award and two Emmys.
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