Liberia: Learning from a foretold disaster
Five years after Africa's oldest republic held the first elections in its 150-year history, Liberia's return to war has created a devastating humanitarian and human rights crisis that remains largely hidden from the outside world.
Liberia enjoyed two years of tenuous peace before fighting re-erupted at the end of 1999 after the shadowy rebel movement, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), struck from bases in neighbouring Guinea. Lacking defined leadership, the LURD's sole objective is to topple the government of President Charles Taylor. The conflict pivots around control of gold and diamond-rich areas in the region where the borders of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea meet and has embroiled all three countries. Military claims on all sides are often hard to verify. The situation is complicated by reports of in-fighting between various pro-government militias.
In 2002 fighting has spread and intensified, at times coming close to the capital, Monrovia. More than 180,000 displaced Liberians are living in camps around the country. Tens of thousands of others are seeking assistance from relatives and friends. Conditions are miserable: increasing numbers have taken shelter in public buildings and warehouses or are living in the open air. As many as 300,000 Liberians have fled to neighbouring countries. The number of civilians trapped inside conflict zones in the north and west of Liberia is unknown.
Fleeing civilians report flagrant and systematic human rights abuses by all parties. An October 2002 Amnesty International report detailed forced recruitment, summary executions, arbitrary killings, torture, rape, abductions and detention. Attacks often entail massive looting sprees. What has been documented may be just the tip of the iceberg; insecurity and a climate of terror ensure that much of what happens in Liberia goes unreported.
Humanitarian agencies warn that an alarming number of IDPs are dying - principally of malaria and diarrhoea - as conditions worsen. "Compared with Liberian refugees, their situation is much worse", noted the International Rescue Committee in a recent health assessment. Funding for humanitarian programmes in Liberia has been extremely poor, forcing agencies to reduce their services to the displaced.
How was this nightmare allowed to recur? The warning signs of renewed crisis seemed clear enough. The main cause for concern should have been Charles Taylor, the megalomaniac warlord who in 1989 plunged Liberia into West Africa's bloodiest civil war since Biafra's attempt to secede from Nigeria. In 1997 the demagogic Taylor won the legitimacy he craved through the ballot box. Held in fear and awe by an impoverished and largely illiterate population, he had no need to rig the elections.
Taylor was subsequently embraced not only by the majority of the Liberian people but also by his erstwhile foes, Nigeria and the United States. Both had posited elections as a magic remedy for Liberia's ills and had an interest in being seen as a champion of democracy in Liberia - Nigeria to maintain its status as regional superpower after leading a peacekeeping force in the 1990s and the US out of a desire to rid itself of moral responsibility to its former colony. Taylor has seen off UN and Nigerian diplomatic and military initiatives to contain him. Donor antipathy is acute and humanitarian operations thus severely constrained. Once again the cost is borne by innocent civilians.
As a result, Liberia has a 'legitimate' government that does not tolerate challenge or dissent and a president with regional aspirations who has backed and continues to harbour armed dissidents bent on destabilising neighbouring countries. Massive refugee flows have resulted from the cycle of violence that ebbs and flows between Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and now Côte d'Ivoire.
Liberia is not the first country to demonstrate the potentially disastrous consequences of engineering sham elections without addressing the causes of conflict. Unless the international community learns that there can be no quick-fix solution to a complex crisis which has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people and destabilised an entire region, it will not be the last. Without long-term engagement to find a durable political solution, further displacement, disease and death mortality will again be the sad and predictable outcome.
Claudia McGoldrick is an Information Officer at the Global IDP Project, Geneva. Email: claudia.mcgoldrick@nrc.ch. GIDPP's Liberia report is at www.db.idpproject.org/Sites/idpSurvey.nsf/wCountries/Liberia.