You can tell you’re flying into Liberia because the world goes dark. An hour’s flying out of Banjul, lights on the ground disappear, and they only appear again as red runway landing lights up so close, you know you’re about to crash into Robertsfield airport. 18 months into its first proper peace since 1989, after 14 years of spectacularly brutal civil wars, Liberia still doesn’t have electricity or running water. It hasn’t had any since February 1990, when former president Charles Taylor – also warlord and fiend, now exiled in Nigeria – sent his militia to take out the electricity plant for havoc-causing reasons. Even during Taylor’s presidency, which he won with the distinctive campaign slogan “You killed my ma, you killed my pa, I’ll vote for you,” and the promise that if he wasn’t elected, he’d go back to war, he didn’t bother to fix the light or the water. Either because he was spending it on cocaine, guns and women, or because he was preoccupied with failing to rebel the rebels who finally got him to stand down in the summer of 2003, after attacks on Monrovia so fierce, Liberians still call them World Wars 1, 2 and 3.
It’s no surprise that Liberia has fallen off the UNDP’s Human Development Index, because there’s nothing left to measure. But this used to be West Africa’s success story. The first African republic, founded by freed American slaves in 1847, with a constitution written in Harvard and a flag with a lone star and 12 stripes, Liberia had the US dollar for currency, called itself “America’s Stepchild” and happily hosted the Omega listening station for the US government, as well as the largest CIA station in sub-Saharan Africa. During the affluent 1970s, when Firestone rubber and timber exports made money, Liberians commuted from Monrovia to Washington DC. Now, it’s a failed state. It has few schools, hardly any hospitals, bad roads and no money. UN sanctions are still in place. The only thing it does have, for now, is peace, because the only thing that works is the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), Liberia’s biggest employer and its well-met and well-loved salvation, in the shape of 15,000 peacekeepers.
In January 2004, I came to Monrovia to research a book on Liberia’s refugees and IDPS (internally displaced people). The book was commissioned for Refugee Week, and I had two months to research and write it. The research was easy enough, because three quarters of Liberians are or have been refugees or IDPS, from the Archbishop of Monrovia down, and everyone has a story. Nor was it problematic that most of the country was out of bounds, because most of the country had moved into the formerly graceful buildings of Monrovia, the capital city built for 300,000 and now housing a million.
I have come back a year later to launch my book, on a whim and a grant from Somerville College Oxford, which kindly and puzzlingly funds long-gone graduates for things such as book launches in a country with no bookstores and half the population illiterate. The launch has been booked into Monrovia’s City Hall, one of the few buildings not much the worse for war. The rest of the city is still blackened and packed, there are still hardly any dogs (they were eaten) and the Atlantic beaches are still spectacular, though anyone who knows Monrovia’s sewage system is wrecked isn’t fooled by those apparently blue waters. But other things have changed: Last year I came on a tiny plane from Abidjan with a missionary, the ubiquitous Lebanese businessman – Lebanese run most of Liberia’s supermarkets, bars and hotels – and some dour Russian crew. This year, transport is provided by an Airbus, because SN Brussels’ newish “direct flight” to Monrovia stops at Banjul and Dakar to make money. I arrive in what the Economist in 2003 called “the world’s worst country” with a couple of hundred German holidaymakers with shorts, tans and loudly expressed confusion about where the hell Liberia is and who switched all the lights off.
My host, again, is the International Rescue Committee, a large NGO founded by Einstein which provides education and healthcare for IDPs and refugees, and me with a comfortable house in a safe compound with guards and gates. These are nice things to have even if the country is less precarious now, because only last October a riot between Muslims and Christians saw IRC staff stuck in their offices down the road, watching with horror as rioters set the petrol station opposite alight. It didn’t blow, and is still there along with dozens more that have appeared since Liberia’s new rulers opened up the gas market. The transitional government was set in place with the 2003 Arusha peace accords, which also persuaded Charles Taylor to leave his fiefdom without much fight, amazingly. So far, though most of its ministers are from the fighting factions, the government hasn’t murdered anyone, making it the best for years. It’s done popular things, like free up cellphone licences and allow more car imports (Liberia’s cars were mostly either looted or dismantled to make them “looter-proof.”) Less popular is the rice price. A new roadside sign says, “Rice is life. But all is not well in the world of rice”, because it’s now an outrageous $35 a sack.
It’s also hard to rebuild a country when cement now costs $30 a bag, putting it out of reach of most. As is a lot in Liberia, where the UN has had its usual economic and cultural knock-on effects, good and bad; high hotel and restaurant prices; a Thai restaurant run by a Thai family who follow UN missions (they have successful establishments in East Timor and Afghanistan), and a “Yugoslav” night in the Royal Hotel’s swanky new extension. Here, a Civpol (Civilian police) officer from Banja Luka, known to have a murky anti-Muslim past, hangs out with Bosnian Muslims. They all followed Jacques Paul Klein from Slavonia and Croatia, where he ran the UN missions, to Monrovia, where he is the Special Representative of the Secretary General, and arguably the most powerful man in the country.
But it’s the power of money. Four times that of the transitional government, Klein’s cash allows him to exert pressure. But that’s all, as one disenchanted UN staffer told me. “The UN mandate in Liberia is so weak, we can do nothing about corruption and impunity.” I knew about the impunity – Charles Taylor is the only Liberian warlord to have been indicted, and that’s for his involvement with Sierra Leone’s RUF, not for the unspeakable things he did in Liberia. This hideousness emerges suddenly in conversation and disappears, like foul bubbles. So, driving past Taylor’s old house, which still bears Season’s Greetings on its façade, my Liberian companion says, “I saw rebels betting what sex a woman’s foetus was. Then they opened her up with bayonets to see who’d won.” Or K., as we drive past the official Executive Mansion downtown, in the middle of a conversation about nothing in particular. “That man CharTaylor” – this is what Charles Taylor becomes, in the lovely Southern slave cadences of Liberian English – “he put us through haaard times! He imprisoned me twice because I was a student leader. They made me drink urine and you know bamboo? Inside it has a very sharp bit and they were sticking it in my appendix.” Appendix? “No! Penis! I was bleeding and they were laughing. Such people!” Another man in the car shakes his head. “That man,” he says, with fury. “He put people in pits and shot them. He has to pay. He has to pay.” That’s the impunity. K. doesn’t like the corruption much better, telling me that the transitional chairman Gyude Bryant, who was installed because he was politically relatively neutral, had never fought, and was thought to be rich enough to resist corruption, has in fact bought himself a $350,000 armoured jeep though he has UNMIL bodyguards. “He daren’t drive it on the streets because people will do something to it, they are so angry. The corruption is so visible!”
Corruption also enrages Jacques Paul Klein, who doesn’t hold back on his opinions. So does the Liberian National Election Commission’s crazy decision that for the upcoming elections in October, everyone has to vote in their home district. When three-quarters of the population is displaced, this is either malicious or stupid. Klein calls it worse. “They say I’m a colonialist, an authoritarian,” he says, like he doesn’t care. “And I say, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re violating every human right I know of.”
This is clear in the IDP camps again near Monrovia. I’d asked the IRC’s helpful information officer to track down IDP women I’d met a year ago, thinking they wouldn’t be there. I hoped they’d gone home. But they haven’t. True, there are empty spaces where some huts have been demolished. But returnees are a minority, and most of these women are from the farthest counties which have yet to qualify for the UN’s returnee programmes, whereby people get a lift home, some luggage space and some tools. Nonetheless, women who have husbands have been sending them on “look-see” missions up north, to see what’s left of their homes, schools and clinics. Usually, it’s nothing. “We don’t even have sticks to make houses,” one woman says. “We have to build with mud, like our forefathers. Thank goodness we paid attention!” It costs $500 Liberian to get home, and they don’t have the money. Yet they are, like all refugees glued to their radios, politically curious. They want their vote, because it might mean peace. “The only president I want,” says one woman, “is one who makes it free for women to move, who provides medical care and books for children.”
I’m pleased to see them and their good humour again, and they’re pleased to get a book, but they’ve got more important things to think about. Thankfully, that doesn’t include security. Last year, people were still scared and the fighters were still armed. Women told me they recognised their rapists when the former child soldiers came to visit their parents. But a mostly successful DDRR programme – Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration – has disarmed 100,000 people. The peacekeepers have soothed fears and opened up the country. I hear of a Liberian aid worker who was driving up north and met some young former combatants. The combatants charged the vehicle with machetes, but the driver didn’t flinch. “I’m not scared,” he said. “I’ve got the power now, not you.”
That’s optimistic. Most of the politicians now in power are “the same warlords and murderers,” as Archbishop Michael Francis told me last year, before he had a massive stroke, “always coming to redeem us. And who asked them to?” According to the Arusha guidelines, sitting politicians are not allowed to stand for election, but there have already been shameless manoeuvrings. “People come here and shake my hand,” says Klein, “and they say they want to be president, and I say what for? They say, blatantly, “power!”” Not because they want to fix things, like 2 million traumatised people in a country with a handful of psychiatrists, like the lack of roads or health clinics, or the light and water. Schools are supposed to have afternoon sessions but don’t, because the teachers are moonlighting as taxi drivers.
I learn such things from R., a Liberian journalist who works for an international news service, and who decides to launch me and my book on the Liberian media scene. It’s a lively one, with 30 newspaper titles and dozens of radio stations. There’s certainly more press freedom now when Charles Taylor threw Channel 4 filmmaker Sorious Samura into detention – though Samura was filming with permission – where he was threatened with “being raped until you bleed.”
Liberia’s journalists are mostly eager and curious, not least to know why any westerner would publish a book about a country which they see – quite rightly – as having been abandoned by the west to its fate. (The US considered and rejected two chances to intervene, though they could have stopped the fighting in a few days.) I tell them my book is asking a simple question – what is it like to be a refugee – that is hardly ever asked where I come from. I tell them that there are places where refugees are automatically assumed to be liars, and where “asylum seeker” is a playground insult. They are surprised by this, like Barnett, a young lone Liberian who I met last year, and who, when I told him about the Daily Mail and its ilk, said, “but why would anyone think I’d want to be on the run for 13 years?”
These answers end up as front page news – Refugee Life is Dehumanizing, British Author Alarms, Launches Book in Monrovia – though the dehumanizing effects of displacement are not news to any Liberian. Still, attendance at the book launch is mostly white and NGO/UN – the kitsch tableware at the Iranian trade fair downstairs is taking its toll – but the Liberian Minister for Gender is there, and the waiters take an interest. “I’m displaced,” says one, “can I have a book?” He can’t, because I could only bring 50 (no thanks to SN Brussels’ draconian luggage allowance) and they’ve all been taken. There are no bookstores yet, and Liberians still buy a meagre selection from stalls in front of the Ministry of Education. Often, they’re buying things back: One professor saw his encyclopaedia collection for sale on a stall, after it was looted. He bought it back. “We call it Buy Your Own Thing,” someone tells me, with laughter.
Jacques Paul Klein arrives with his motorcade and close protection force. He gives a powerful speech about impunity and malaria, because he’s losing peacekeepers to disease. (A UN gossip tells me that the US refused to stay in Liberia after all the Marines got malaria at Camp Schiefflin. “We’ve just come from Iraq,” a colonel said. “And this is worse. We’re leaving!”) This scoop is the reason I’m front-page news again the next day, as is the presence of a young man called J. He was 14 when he and his mother and sister took refuge in a church which was later attacked. 600 people were hacked to death. J’s legs were shot to bits, and now he doesn’t have any. He took the microphone, and said, “Mr. Klein, I have been trying to speak to you but I can’t get near you. What I want to know is, who is going to help the victims?”
This rankles, and not just with J. Ex-combatants have been paid US$300 to give up their guns. Their victims get nothing. “In practice,” the disenchanted UN worker says, “everyone who wasn’t mean doesn’t get anything.” This is the way reconciliation is, of course, and it tastes nasty. But it tastes worse when things like checkpoints made of intestines or J’s legs have not been apologised or paid for. Both Taylor and Prince Johnson, famous for chopping former president Samuel Doe to death on video, have become pastors, and are now fond of saying, arrogantly, that they’ve been “arrested by God” so no-one else need bother. One notorious thug, General Peanut Butter, recently declared his intention to be senator in Nimba County. He didn’t mention being elected, because he didn’t need to. “With our mandate,” says the gloomy UNMIL man, “we can’t do anything about it. If he says he’ll be senator, he will be.”
The favourite to win the presidency is the footballing superstar George Weah, whose record of doing good in Liberia contrasts with his lack of presidential qualifications (he’s never held a job, and he’s barely literate). His candidacy is alarming for some and hopeful for others, including Liberians disillusioned with everyone else. “Book or no book,” they say, referring to the educated elites who failed them in the past. “We will vote for King George.” George is the front-runner, but the other 40 presidential candidates haven’t given up. “There are more child sacrifices now because of the elections,” says K one day, casually. I make a flippant remark about there being plenty of abandoned children to kill, but he stops me, quite seriously. “No, they have to be loved. The more they’re loved, the better the magic. I heard a new marketplace has had a child’s limb buried under each of its corners.” This isn’t far fetched here, where Charles Taylor sued an academic who said Taylor had been seen eating a human heart, and lost.
I worry for Liberia. Klein searched for months for $59 million – a day’s “burn rate” in Iraq – to finish the reconciliation programme for former fighters. The UK government responded they would only provide money if it could be proved “that Liberia impacts upon Sierra Leone.” This is stupid thinking, when Liberia has already destabilised most of West Africa and can easily do it again. Without the reintegration money, thousands of disgruntled ex-fighters will soon be thousands of disgruntled unemployable students and mechanics. Already, a Human Rights Watch report has recorded the “insurgent diaspora” – have gun, will fight – being recruited in Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire. “If they don’t pay now,” says a UN staffer, “they’ll be paying two or three years down the road.”
Later, when I return to England, I get an email from J. He says since the book launch, he’s been getting “unexplained visits” to his house at night. He says I shouldn’t worry if I hear he’s been killed, because “that is one of the things that makes life unique. We are here today and tomorrow we are gone.” He asks for help with paying his tuition fees, so I send him the last of my Somerville grant. I don’t know if he’s duped me, or if he’s really in danger – the church massacre is as well-known as the people who did the massacring – but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Everyone in Liberia needs something. Besides, he asks with that Liberian charm. “I hate to beg,” he writes in a final email. “But such a country, such a situation – what can you do?”
Published in the London Review of Books