First Woman Elected President of An African Country

Feminist Daily News Wire

Friday 11 November 2005

With 97 percent of votes counted, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has been elected president of Liberia, the first woman elected to head any African nation. Although Johnson-Sirleaf won 59 percent of the vote in a runoff election on Tuesday, she is holding off declaring victory based on fraud allegations by her competitor, soccer star George Weah. According to the New York Times, several hundred supporters of Weah, who won only 41 percent of the vote, marched the streets of Liberia in protest, throwing rocks at police officers and attempting to storm the United States Embassy.

Johnson-Sirleaf said she hoped her win would "raise the participation of women not just in Liberia but also [throughout] Africa," according to United Press International.



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War's Children
By Christine Spolar
The Chicago Tribune

Monday 14 November 2005

A generation is left wanting years after battles have ended.

Monrovia, Liberia - Faraway wars are easy to forget. Liberia's 14-year plunge into bloodlust lingers, in images and memory, for its stain on a generation in West Africa. Among its 3.5 million people, thousands were particularly vulnerable. They were children.

It is difficult to know how many youths could have resisted joining some side at some time in the on-and-off-again civil war that began in 1989, ended in 2003 and left at least 150,000 people dead. Thousands of boys were kidnapped by gangs from three warring factions; others, infected by feverish times, chose to fight. Girls were grabbed, forced into the ranks and repeatedly raped.

Photographer Kuni Takahashi recorded the chaos that swept the country before international intervention stopped the slaughter in August 2003. Takahashi then stayed on to follow dozens of children - victims and survivors as well as former soldiers - as they sought some kind of peace in a devastated world.

Three of those children, first seen in 2003 and found by Takahashi again in 2004 and 2005, are profiled in the Tribune today and Tuesday as reminders of what happens after war. Their names are simple: Momo, Gift and Musu. Momo was a soldier, one of thousands of boys turned into killers. Gift and Musu are girls who were caught in the war's crossfire.

Momo put down his guns and for months found little else to fill his days but memories of battle. He still struggles to find work. Illiterate, Momo has scant opportunity for school or training even in peace. Musu and Gift cope with scars from combat. Musu lost her hand to a rocket attack. Gift saw her family wiped out in a mortar blast. She exists as a living casualty, a teenage girl left on her own.

Conventional wisdom held that Liberia could be revived by massive amounts of money and goodwill. Within months of the cease-fire, that hope dimmed. Warlords still wield power. Exiled President Charles Taylor, accused of war crimes, remains unencumbered by justice in nearby Nigeria. Amid the disorientation, there is a worry that terrorist groups can hide or operate and that former young soldiers, without work or school, can be drawn into other conflicts in the region.

This month, Liberia elected its first president since the war, and the exercise boosted hopes. The vote was deemed fair and proved historic. The winner appears to be Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist who would be Liberia's first woman president. Still, there are no quick fixes. Corruption and carelessness - from within Liberia and even from those who came to help - continue to sap the country's prospects.

The United Nations devised a guns-for-money program, just after the war, aimed at keeping the peace. It promised that every soldier who gave up a gun would be rewarded with cash and a free education. Those plans were upended when three times as many people as expected showed up with arms. Money earmarked for education was exhausted to pay for the guns. At one point, for as long as a year, 43,000 ex-soldiers drifted without school or training.

Frustrations grew for thousands of Liberians in the first year of peace. Their prospects paled next to what their parents and grandparents once dreamed. The UN came up with more money for schooling, but the delay deeply damaged the recovery.

Liberia faded from public consciousness when the worst of the fighting stopped. The truth is, after two years of what passes for peace, the perimeters of pain have only shifted. Liberia can offer its next generation only the barest of necessities.

Liberia's children must be strong enough or callous enough to get by on their own.



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Skilled at Killing, Confused by Post-War Life
By Christine Spolar
The Chicago Tribune

Monday 14 November 2005

Momo Fala Dukoe says he hated war, but when the 16-year-old is asked about his proudest moments of childhood, he speaks of bloodletting.

"I was good at taking orders. And I was smart at the front line. Killing was bad, but ... I dream of war. I still do. Sometimes I feel like I'm in the bush and I can feel the enemy closing in. Bullets are flying over my head. I'm OK when I'm shooting. Shooting always makes me feel brave."

War consumed Momo's adolescence. He said he was kidnapped from northern Liberia by government troops during a battle that killed most of his family. The next day, Momo, then 11, was handed a gun, shown the trigger and sent to the front line. Momo said he killed that day - and every day after that for the next few years.

The child said he smoked marijuana to prepare for the killing. He drank liquor. He said he saw some soldiers resort to eating flesh of the dead, in a ritual exercise, to stoke their fighting ardor. He said he was always paid and fed well for his work. Once, Momo said, he was ordered to shoot two men bound by rope. He was handed hundreds of dollars for the assassinations. Asked to describe that day, words nearly fail him.

"I was very disappointed," he said. He silent. "I took some marijuana to relax. I took drugs. The next day, I went to the front line. The commander gave me a lot to drink before that too."

Momo didn't know what to think of peace. When the cease-fire came, he did what he was told. He gave up his gun and went to a month-long retraining camp run by the United Nations. Counselors there told him never to speak again about his days as a killer. He figured out why. "People say we're bad guys," he said.

Momo was sent from the UN camp to live with a cousin, but his home, months later, seemed to be the streets. He rarely came home, his days slipping by without consequence. He wandered about Monrovia with boys he once knew in the battlefield. At night, he scavenged for beer, sweet cakes and a place to bunk. Momo, who has never learned the alphabet, said he attended school for a few weeks, but he drifted away after a teacher complained that his tuition bill - which was to be covered by the UN - was never paid.

It turns out the teacher was right. Circumstance and poor planning sapped the international community's efforts in Liberia. The UN mission was eager to disarm fighters in 2003 and 2004, and it focused on what was essentially a guns-for-money swap. Every man, woman or child who handed in a weapon was promised $150. Formal education was promised to follow if the weapons were turned in.

The initial week of the payout erupted into riots because of poor crowd control. When payouts resumed months later, the UN stumbled again. It had planned to disarm - and pay - 38,000 soldiers. But in 2004, 103,000 Liberians turned up with guns. The UN scrambled to keep the peace and decided to pay everyone.

To pay for the flood of guns, the UN shifted money from its much-publicized education program for soldiers. That left about 43,000 ex-soldiers, for more than a year after disarmament, with no money for school. There were other embarrassments. One UN peacekeeper soldier tried to use some of the reclaimed guns to pay prostitutes. He was caught, but the UN mission was tarnished again by accounts of lax management.

Momo, like other former soldiers interviewed, said the UN never realized how it was exploited. Momo said he grabbed a stack of weapons at the end of the war but gave up only one. He passed out others - three AK-47s and five rocket launchers - to friends. Every time a friend turned in a weapon, Momo took another cut of UN money.

"Everybody was doing it," he said. "We saw our commanders do it and they encouraged us.... It was time to make money." Still, Momo was crushed last year when he found out the UN wouldn't or couldn't pay for his schooling. By then, he had spent every dollar he had on clothes and food. He didn't know how to save. The only work he could find was digging ditches for a dollar a day. Momo said he knows other boys face trouble too. Some said they were willing to fight again to make money. This year, Human Rights Watch found evidence of the same despair: Young Liberians were among fighters tracked to skirmishes breaking out in nearby Ivory Coast, which is simmering with unrest.

"People promised us money for school, money for bicycles. But they didn't do any of it," Momo said. "I don't want to shoot again but ... during the war, I could buy anything I wanted."