Liberia: A voice for reconciliation
By Elma Shaw
Monrovia, Liberia, 19 Oct. 2007 - The Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Liberia’s civil war in 2003 called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to help deal with the aftermath of the 14-year conflict.
The TRC was inaugurated in 2006, and is now at the midpoint of its two-year operating time-frame. Statements from war survivors—both victims and perpetrators—are being collected in all 15 counties of Liberia, as well as from Liberians in the diaspora. The TRC is also open to receiving statements concerning events from as far back as 1979—the year of the infamous Rice Riot. All these statements will be used to help the TRC put together an accurate record of the nation’s past, investigate and deal with human rights violations, and make recommendations for moving Liberia forward.
May 2007 Photo: ©
Julia Crawford
War Survivor Janjay Wesseh was an eyewitness to some of the same types of human rights violations that are expected to be revealed in the upcoming TRC public hearings. The 54-year-old woman was displaced in Bong Mines, where she saw ethnic violence against the Mandingo and the Krahn, random killings by forces of both Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson, and even a mass murder.
Janjay welcomes the work of the TRC, and strongly believes reconciliation is the best way to heal the nation. “The Bible says we should learn to forgive,” she says. “Some of the fighters were forced to join and would not have done those terrible acts on their own.”
“The first person they killed in Bong Mines was one Krahn poppay,” Janjay recalls. “People were pointing out all the Mandingo and Krahn people. The old man and a little girl came to sell palm oil, and afterwards, instead of going home, he drank some Night Train [gin] and started dancing. He was singing that the war came for the rich people, not the poor. The rebels came and shot his brains out, and people came from all around to see his dead body.”
Janjay shakes her head at the memory, and talks about how she also suffered displacement and starvation, and once narrowly escaped a rocket-propelled grenade that damaged the shelter she and her blind mother shared with several other people. Later, she says, her brother died when he got sick and there was no medical care available.
Despite the atrocities she saw and the personal hardships she and her family faced, the fact that Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission also has the power to recommend prosecution does not sway Janjay’s view on reconciliation. “What has happened has happened,” she says, “and punishment won’t bring our people back. We won’t forget, but we can forgive.”
Janjay, like many others, is looking forward to the public hearings. “It’s good that the TRC wants to know what happened,” she says, “and when we talk, people everywhere will know that war is not good.”
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