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Years of war leave liberia hollow { September 9 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45476-2003Sep8.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45476-2003Sep8.html
Years of War Leave Liberia Hollow
Failed State Has Little to Work With as It Tries to Climb From Chaos
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; Page A01
MONROVIA, Liberia -- The welcome mat for this country -- the airport -- is a tornado of aggression. The visa and health offices, not to mention the baggage claim, are all operated by bands of roaming men who compete for the right to welcome travelers getting off the plane in the Republic of Liberia.
"You," demanded a man with three identification cards swinging from his neck, and a bottle of beer in his hand, accosting an arriving passenger recently. "I'm the visa office and law requires you give me your passport."
Then he leaned in close and whispered: "I'm suffering. No food. Help me out."
"You don't have a real visa, you have to get one from me," commanded another man, who nodded and raised his eyebrows. "Whoever gave you this visa is a liar."
"No, he's lying. Don't listen to him," cajoled yet another, who swooped in with his own crew of nine friends and promised to retrieve precious luggage. "We'll take care of you. That's the law, for true, true, true."
The truth is that there is no law in Liberia. In fact, there is no government, only rough-hewn fiefdoms jostling to control a depleted nation. From the chaos of the airport to the destruction of government services, 14 years of war have turned this West African country into one of the world's most stark examples of a failed state.
Decades of dysfunctional and corrupt leadership climaxed last month with the exile of President Charles Taylor to Nigeria. A transitional leader, Gyude Bryant, has not set foot in the country since being picked three weeks ago at peace talks to direct the rebuilding of Liberia. He has no place to live because government buildings and most private homes have been looted. He is waiting in Ghana until a home is repaired.
Joseph Saye Guannu, the country's most prominent historian, a former ambassador to the United States and an outspoken critic of Taylor, emerged this past week from nearly three months of hiding in his home to survey the ruin of Monrovia. What he saw was destroyed buildings, bombed-out cars and looted schools with no roofs.
"It's like nuclear war on Earth," said Guannu, wearing a trench coat over his tattered suit as he drove around town in his old white Nissan. "To rebuild Liberia, everyone -- the United Nations, the U.S. and Liberians -- will have to remind themselves of what a state does: food, shelter, sanitation, an army, health, education and justice. Liberia is such a failed state that it is no longer really a nation. How do you react in such a place?"
When someone becomes sick in Liberia today, wheelbarrows serve as ambulances. Without rule of law, businessmen with guns and connections to the presidential office make millions of dollars by offering basic services once run by the state -- drinking water, electricity and telephones. The public school system does not function; about 80 percent of the population is illiterate. A master's degree, however, can be purchased with bribes. Some government ministers say they have three or four degrees in a dazzling variety of subjects.
"It wasn't always this way," said Guannu, as he swerved his car around checkpoints manned by West African peacekeepers leaning against armored personnel carriers and clutching assault weapons. Liberia, founded for freed American slaves in 1847, was once the bedrock of democracy in Africa, he said.
"And now this is the bitter pill we must swallow as Africa's oldest republic," he said.
A Firehouse With No Water
In a big, red, friendly looking building on a busy street in downtown Monrovia, one firetruck without tires or headlights sat collapsed of all energy, wires snaking from the engine. A group of firefighters milled around, trying to clean up.
Their uniforms, water hoses and trucks were stolen in 1989 when Taylor's rebels began their war to topple President Samuel K. Doe. The men said government troops took the trucks to transport weapons.
Without running water, which also stopped that year, they must jog or hitchhike to a creek three miles away before attempting to put out a fire.
"We haven't been fortunate enough to fight a fire successfully," said Jacob Baryogar, 32, who added that the last time he tried was in 1999, when he failed to save two young children. They died before the men arrived with their buckets. "It's pathetic, isn't it?"
A few firefighters in their fifties gathered to tell stories of how they were trained in the United States or Britain and how they once fought blazes around Monrovia. They showed a photograph of proud firefighters in 1967, lined up in front of shiny new equipment donated by fire stations in the United States.
"To be very honest, for the past 14 years we haven't been able to protect our citizens, and it breaks us," said Moses Gelear Sayon Jr., 53, director of the National Firefighters of Liberia. "We used to have 14 firetrucks. We used to have land-line phones -- yes, phones. Imagine! Everything was spoiled and stolen. It's a disgrace to national service."
The firefighters said they would reactivate the station and displayed a letter they had written to a firefighters association in the United States. They were joining the other fire stations around the capital, all looted and wrecked, in appealing to U.N. special envoy for funds to start a new fire department for Liberia.
The men talked about reviving a fire prevention program. Since they had no equipment, they said, they could teach fire prevention with a few matches and some paper.
"Drop and roll, at least we can teach that," said Baryogar, who was in exile in Ghana when he watched televised scenes of U.S. firefighters helping save lives on Sept. 11, 2001. He said he just started weeping right there in the bar, over his beer.
"I kept thinking about Liberia," he said, looking choked up, "and all those people we could have saved over the years."
Falling Into Darkness
Down a muddy footpath and through a vast corridor of sticky green bushes is a once grand hydroelectric plant. It towers like a castle over Mount Coffee, a suburb in a lush valley 40 miles east of Monrovia.
Destroyed by fighters, the plant today is a twisted wreckage of rusted pipes and metal parts, all resting on a carpet of broken glass, bullet casings and machine parts.
When it was built in 1960, it was a steel and brass symbol of progress. Forty-eight workers in spiffy yellow, blue and white overalls labored to provide power to 40 percent of Liberia.
Back then, Liberia was booming, and employees who started out slashing grass to clear land for the plant were trained and promoted. Eventually they earned enough money to build homes, send their children to school and even start savings.
Still living near the plant is George Hunder, who used to work there reading meters and had a modern seven-bedroom house with power and running water. Now he is a farmer in a cramped mud hut, with candles and buckets to collect water from the nearby waterfall. He used to dream of becoming an engineer and had savings of $3,000. Now he can barely afford food. He grows coffee and cassava, trying to send money for his children's schooling in Ghana, where they fled several years ago.
He has never forgotten the day the war broke out in 1989.
A rebel leader stormed the plant and told the engineers to stop the water flow to the turbines so they could deny Doe's presidential mansion electricity, recalled Hunder, sitting on a log stump in his hut.
"We begged them not to. We told them to just shut off a switch or two and explained that that would work," he said. "But they dismantled our radios. They ignored the engineers, threatened their lives, even shot bullets into several engineers' brains."
"Oh, I remember that day well," he said. "The day the whole country fell into darkness."
The lights have not come back on to this day.
Expensive generators are the only way to get power. People who have them say that they are bought from businessmen who pay bribes -- gratuities, as they are known here -- to government officials.
Inside the Liberia Electricity Corp. office, in a bombed-out building in downtown Monrovia, Joseph Mayah, the director, said he needs to bring light and power back to Liberia.
Last year, the Taiwanese government donated $2 million for a postwar recovery program -- to rebuild the capital's only hospital and to restore electricity. But that money vanished, Mayah said. "The failure is a mirror of the government," he said.
Still, he laughed it off. He hasn't been paid by the government in years, he said, but gets by with help from the generator businesses in town. "Yes, gratuities," he added.
"Besides, all the capitals in Africa that start with 'M' don't have electricity: Monrovia and Mogadishu," he said with a shrug. Then he turned on the generator in his office so he could shine some light on his desk.
A Society Without Books
At the leafy campus of the University of Liberia, on a main road leading to downtown, groups of professors sat in small circles recently discussing how to reclaim their most important tools of learning. It wasn't the looted computers they were worried about or the chairs or even the archives with student records. It was the books.
The libraries of Liberia are home to vacant shelves. Students vie for time with the few remaining textbooks, most of which date to the 1980s, the last time the education budget was spent on education. Some students transcribe entire books.
The professors said they were going to look in the markets for the university's library books. Or if any of the instructors had texts at home, they could teach from one shared book.
Through the years of fighting, the University of Liberia, a state school with ties to many elected officials, managed to hold classes. Taylor, who became president in 1997, offered 11,000 scholarships to friends but did not pay their tuition bills, according to university administrators.
His government did not pay public school teachers either, and most public elementary and secondary schools that had not closed in the early years of the fighting all shut down. For the past five years there has been little public education.
Today most children scrawl illiterate graffiti to express themselves. "We one 2 Peecee," meaning, "We want to have Peace," is a common message on the walls here.
"How can we expect people to vote when they can't read?" said Liberian Archbishop Michael K. Francis, who stood up to Taylor. "It's a dangerous kind of psychological war when people don't have the right to an education."
Churches ran a handful of schools, but even those have shut down because of fighting. With no school, children seem to be everywhere all the time. The United Nations says that 60 percent of Liberia's population of 3 million is under the age of 15.
An Empty Prison
Dirty water dripped from the ceiling at Monrovia's central prison. The cells' rusted bars were wide open. No one was there.
During this summer's fighting, several rockets exploded on the prison grounds and everyone escaped -- the convicted murderers and rapists along with some who were thrown in prison because just they were enemies of Taylor.
The guards ran away, too.
"We weren't sticking around to have the fighting kill us," said Edwin Volawuo, director of prisons, who was wearing rubber boots and wandering around the grounds recently looking listless. "We just left. We haven't done much lately anyway. The president took care of criminals."
Taylor named friends who could not read or write to be judges and attorneys, and sentences were handed down on his orders, according to the Justice and Peace Commission of Liberia, a human rights group run by the National Catholic Secretariat, which produced a report this year on the state of the judicial system.
Street justice is still the rule. On a recent day, a gang of men who said they were part of Taylor's police force slapped a half-naked man and dragged him down the street, pulling on his shorts and pistol-whipping him. It's a painfully typical scene in downtown Monrovia.
Another afternoon, a government minister with a troop of armed bodyguards strolled into a supermarket, collected a case of beer and appeared set to walk out without paying until he spotted a foreign journalist. He took out a wad of money, but the terrified cashier slipped nearly the entire amount back into the minister's pocket minutes later.
Many academics, lawyers and others say that without justice, there can never be peace in Liberia. They say that part of the problem stems from Liberia's history. The freed slaves who settled the country treated the indigenous Africans as second-class citizens. Until 1980, political power was confined to an elite clique of the descendants of settlers.
Doe, who was an indigenous Liberian, wrested power from them but also ushered in years of assassinations. He was infamous for tying 13 government ministers to posts on the beach in Monrovia and having them shot.
His turn came soon after. Doe was tortured to death by rebel leader Prince Johnson, and the brutality was filmed. The videotape is still sold in Monrovia's markets.
"We took the Ten Commandments and reversed them," said Francis, the archbishop. "Thou shall not kill and we are murderers. Thou shall not steal and we are pathological thieves. Our failed state has become failed because of failed people. We need to rebuild the very fabric of this state."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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