Dateline ACT

Liberia 0603

Liberia's 'unofficial war' by rebel forces continues to paralyse parts of the country

By Callie Long, ACT International

Tubmanburg, Liberia, August 27, 2003 - Sixty-seven kilometres from the relative calm of Monrovia, the Liberian war continues unofficially. In Tubmanburg, the stronghold of the rebel force Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), the fragile truce signed just over a week ago means nothing. It is a war that continues to drag on, claiming and destroying the lives of everyone engaged or caught up in it and cutting people off from desperately needed humanitarian assistance.

The Po River marks the boundary where the recently deployed ECOMIL soldiers have their last checkpoint outside Monrovia. A scant 50 meters away is the first LURD checkpoint, followed by many more along the route to Tubmanburg. Young men, little boys and a few young girls man the checkpoints. Many of them have war paint on their faces. All of them are armed with rifles or rocket launchers. The world is suddenly a different place – unpredictable, filled with anger and unspent violence, a place where not too long ago, few humanitarian aid workers dared venture. Reconciliation seems a far-off dream here.

Today, with the blessing of the LURD chief of staff, the aid community is again allowed to travel in convoy to Tubmanburg to assess the needs of people there. And the needs are, as in much of this war-torn country, vast. People live under appalling conditions. Everything is soaked and mud-caked as the rain seldom lets up during the rainy season. There are no working toilets and clean safe drinking water is scarce. All this in spite of many of the residents’ recently acquired ‘wealth’. In Tubmanburg, the spoils of war are on show for all to see: Trucks, cars and four-wheel drive vehicles, still with the manufacturers’ grease mark pencil signs displayed on their windows, are everywhere.

The harsh reality for the majority of people in this area is that they have been co-opted into a war not of their own making. Most of them will never have the money to even afford the most basic of necessities.

ACT member Lutheran World Federation is part of the UN convoy. Their task today is to see how they and the rest of the ACT network in Liberia can respond to a desperate situation. Local Lutheran pastor, Reverend J. Amos Kollie sums the situation up. "We start from here, inside our church. Once people don’t feel threatened, they will come." The reality is that Rev. Kollie along with his deacon, J. Lewis McCay will have to start from scratch themselves – the Lutheran church of Tubmanburg was stripped completely bare by looters. This is a war that deems nothing sacred.

Top priorities for LWF are water and sanitation, assessments of needs in terms of non-food items and trauma counselling.

"Apocalyptic" is how Ola Forsmark, one of a team of water and sanitation specialists seconded by ACT member Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) describes what he sees. Forsmark and LWF’s Kai Jelly’s task is to locate existing wells and check the local streams to assess what the water purification needs are. In an emergency, the creeks can be used if the ecoli count allows for it, but ideally, the wells should be cleaned and hand pumps installed. If all else fails, water can be trucked in or a water purification unit installed – a machine that produces enough water if it runs for ten hours a day, to give 15 litres of water to some 18,500 people each a day.

But whereas water can be purified and trucked in and latrines can be dug, how to even begin to deal with the children of this brutal and savage war that has stolen their childhood and given them nothing in return but a Kalachnikov rifle or a rocket launcher and a sense of power.

Red Hat is fifteen, but looks no older than eleven. He says that he has been fighting this war for five years now. Unlike another young soldier, After the War, who struts around, brandishing his rifle and asking to have his photo taken, Red Hat does not boast. There is no bravado, in spite of the rifle slung from his shoulder. His speaks so softly that one has to strain to hear him. He is tired he says and when asked about the possibility of peace, nods and then whispers, yes, he would like that.

LWF’s Charles Pitchford says that for his organisation to respond, they have to build the confidence of the people in Bomi county by getting them used to seeing the ACT-LWF trucks on the road and in the towns. As for the young child soldiers, LWF and the Lutheran Church in Liberia, another ACT member, will put a trauma counselling and peace building program in place that will also provide some skills training as well as one meal a day – something many of these youngsters probably don’t have right now.




"These youngsters are there now, we need to be there now," says Pitchford. "But much of this can only happen when the peace keeping forces have been fully deployed," he says, "until then, we’ll have problems."

Problems don’t take long to show up in Tubmanburg. A group of older soldiers pile out of small trucks and cars and angrily put a stop to the photo session. People are saying that the rebel force is getting ready to launch an attack on another town.

Suddenly, fighter aircraft streak low over Tubmanburg – the US flexing its military muscle over the Liberian bush. The young soldiers in their looted vehicles point and laugh. This is still their war.