An Especially Cruel War Makes Reconciling Tough

MONROVIA, Liberia —  When Miatta Pasaweh hears talk about reconciliation, she matter-of-factly explains what happened to her three brothers, and what happened to her, and why forgiving is as impossible as forgetting.

First, she describes how the rebels in this country’s brutal civil war cut her brothers’ throats and mutilated their bodies. Then, in the calm voice of someone who has spoken the unspeakable many times before, she describes how the rebels forced her to eat her brothers’ flesh, and then raped her.

“I suffer because when they gave me that blood and I drank it, I was sick. I was sick for nine months,” said Pasaweh, 31, who lives in a repatriation camp with her three children. Her father was also killed in the conflict; the fate of her mother and husband are unknown.

Now the Liberian government has set up a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission, which would allow victims of the 14 years of fighting to recount their suffering and the majority of killers to get amnesty in return for admitting their crimes and expressing their remorse. But to Pasaweh, no remorse could ever be enough.

“It makes me sad and it makes me angry because they killed my three brothers and I had no father to help me,” she said. “I’m not satisfied. I want to cry tears.”

After rebels kidnapped Quayquay Bonah when he was 9, the first thing they told him was “don’t cry.” The next lesson, just an hour long, was how to fire an AK-47. It was difficult for the boy to handle such a large gun. But the next day, he was sent into battle. When bullets were fired around his feet, he finally started to fight.

Attacking villages as a rebel fighter in the four years that followed, he fired indiscriminately. “As soon as the gunpowder gets into your nose, you’ll be firing away,” he said. “When you go into a town, you shoot everyone, you shoot everywhere. You don’t know whether it’s civilians or not.”

At first, the endless battles were terrifying. He survived with little to eat, not much sleep and many prayers. After a year it was “like playing football,” he said.

Bridging the rift between victims and combatants is key to Liberia’s process of reconciliation, which is just beginning two years after the conflict ended. But it’s a delicate balance: Pursuing too many former combatants deprives them of a stake in the peace. Pursuing too few of those responsible for the killings and atrocities fails to address the culture of impunity.

“If Liberia wants to make a break with the past, it has to re-establish the rule of law, and one of the ways to do that is to address the crimes of the past,” said Corinne Dufka, who is with the West Africa office of Human Rights Watch.

“In Liberia, you had very serious and systematic war crimes that were committed. But we can’t say that we think that every person who committed a war crime in Liberia should be prosecuted. It’s just not realistic.”

Recent presidential and parliamentary elections in Liberia are the most encouraging step toward peace since a 2003 pact saw former President Charles Taylor exiled to Nigeria. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a former World Bank official, appears to have won the presidential election, defeating former soccer star George Weah in the second round of voting. Weah is claiming fraud but appealing to supporters for calm and peace.

Angry about the ballot results, a crowd of Weah’s young backers, including many ex-fighters, clashed with U.N. peacekeepers Friday. Yet the elections have brought optimism and hope to Liberia. Expectations of change are high. Still, the country faces massive tasks in rebuilding ruined infrastructure, rooting out corruption, establishing a credible government and providing jobs for former combatants and others.

Bonah, now 15, shares a tiny room in Monrovia’s crowded Red Light neighborhood -- named for the first traffic light in one of Monrovia’s suburbs -- with two close friends who were kidnapped at the same time that he was. Sam Bonah, 18, and Junior Bonah, 19, share his last name and they call themselves brothers, but they are not related.

The Red Light is a neighborhood crammed with former fighters, many from opposing groups. Although they say they have no problem living alongside combatants from rival forces, some fighters are afraid to return to their own communities, where people know them and remember what they did.

The initial international focus in Liberia has been on 100,000 former fighters, who were seen as the key to peace and were paid $300 by the U.N. peacekeeping mission to give up their arms. That policy created resentment among many victims of the fighting who were unhappy to see the perpetrators of violence rewarded.

“It is not fair,” said Andrew Johnson, 43, a resident of the Jatondo camp for internally displaced people outside Monrovia. He is waiting for the $5 promised by the government to repatriate him.

“The U.N. is paying the ex-combatants who killed our people, so that we came to be here,” he said. “People feel angry about that. Most of the people in this camp are angry.”

Augustin Peterson fled his home four years ago after rebels, dressed bizarrely in wigs and women’s clothing, invaded his town in Bomi county, north of Monrovia.

“I saw killing, raping. There was plenty,” he said. “You come into town and you see all the young girls raped, but you can’t do anything.”

Peterson, 41, said the most frightening fighters were the children.

“The youngest ones were the scariest,” he said, “because they don’t have thinking.”

Dufka is critical of the low priority accorded to the rule of law and accountability by the global community.

“This issue of accountability for war crimes is almost absent from the national and international debate,” she said.

During the election campaign, Johnson-Sirleaf seemed wary about promising to pursue past crimes in a country where thousands of people committed heinous acts in war.

“There are many people who say, ‘Oh, the old lady, when she comes to office, she’ll put people in jail,’ ” Johnson-Sirleaf told a political rally last month.

“I don’t have time to look at what people did in the past,” she said. “If you want to be a good citizen, you can be what you want to be -- as long as you are willing to work for it, as long as you are willing to be peaceful.”

In an interview, she said thousands of children, drunk or drugged, had committed serious crimes during the conflict. Healing must come not through prosecution, she said, but through the truth and reconciliation commission.

“Thousands and thousands of people have done wrong in this country, whether it’s financial mismanagement or whether it’s atrocities against the population,” she said. “If we start a program of retribution, there will be no end to it.”

About 1,500 of Taylor’s former soldiers live -- many of them in fear of retribution -- in a monolithic concrete apartment block in Monrovia nicknamed the Titanic.

“Let’s let bygones be bygones,” said Anthony Duwnah, who fought from 1996 to 2003, using girls and boys as slaves and porters. “What you did to me, even if I remember you did it, we all forgive.”

Another soldier with Taylor’s forces, George Bull, 26, who denied any wrongdoing during his eight years of fighting, said that despite the talk of reconciliation, people in the community shunned former soldiers.

“Reconciliation is not working. The Liberian people don’t care for us. All over Liberia, they don’t like us. They say we are criminals and conditioned to war. They say we are bad people.”

Quayquay Bonah and his “brothers” are seeking absolution from a higher power. During the fighting, they shared a Bible, which they saw as a lucky charm against bullets. They would read the 23rd Psalm, praying to survive. Now they pray for something else.

“We pray to God to forgive us. We say, ‘Please forgive us for our wrongdoing,’ ” Sam Bonah said. “It was not my will to do it.”