A version of this article was originally published at Canada’s Toronto Star on April 25, 2012.

It was mid-day in downtown Monrovia and Mohammed Kromah and his friends were mobbing a busy intersection, jumping up and down and shouting at passing cars.

Down the street where it was quieter, Kromah explained that the boys – all in their mid-twenties and all former combatants from Liberia’s 14 years of civil wars – were trying to attract customers for a car wash.

Kromah fought with former Liberian president – and warlord – Charles Taylor’s NPFL and later, an opposition faction, ULIMO-K. He recounted that after the conflict ended, he went through the United Nation’s disarmament and reintegration programs. But those projects were short-lived and inadequate, the young men complained.

“We are so frustrated,” said Maxwell “Target” Sackor, a friend of Kromah’s and a former combatant for LURD, a faction notorious for its recruitment of child soldiers. “We’ve tried armed robbery, but we felt that was not good for us. So we left armed robbery and we went to the street and tried stealing, but that wasn’t good for us. So we brought ourselves to wash cars.”

Kromah admitted that he’s addicted to heroin, a habit he said he picked up during the conflict. “Most of us are involved in drugs,” he lamented. “It’s like the war is still punishing people.”

During Liberia’s 14 years of civil unrest that lasted from 1989 to 2003, Kromah and Sackor were never more than low-level fighters. The man widely regarded as the conflict’s biggest player, Charles Taylor, is currently on trial at The Hague with a verdict scheduled for April 26.

Taylor faces 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But those charges pertain to neighboring Sierra Leone, where Taylor allegedly armed rebel groups during that country’s civil war. And so a guilty verdict will mean little in the way of justice for Liberians, observers note.

Liberia’s civil wars were characterized by anarchic brutality. According to a 2009 report published by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 250,000 were killed in violence that included widespread forced conscription, looting, torture, rape, and cannibalism.

Yet the only individual ever charged for crimes related to the conflict is Taylor’s son, Chuckie, who was arrested and tried by U.S. authorities for violations of U.S. law.

Ex-combatants like Kromah and Sackor argue that the wars still inflict punishments on them every day. In stark contrast, the men and women who filled the highest ranks of the conflict’s many factions have moved into business or politics, and enjoy comfortable lives free from fears of prosecution.

Prince Johnson, Senior Senator for Nimba County, will forever be known best for the video tapes you can still buy in Monrovia’s markets that show the former leader of the INPFL ordering president Samuel Doe’s ears cut off. As Doe bleeds profusely, Johnson raises one ear to the camera and places it inside the begging man’s mouth.

When I caught up with Johnson, he was standing before a life-size painting of the Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. The backdrop was part of a school Johnson was building for secondary students.

“Which country has ever had a most-notorious war criminal ever get third place in a democratic electoral process?” he asked, referring to Liberia’s recent president election. “Is that a notorious criminal?…Not in the eyes of the Liberian people.”

Touring the construction site, Johnson paused before a statue of Moses presenting the Ten Commandments. “We’re promoting peace,” he argued. “We are working with our government, with our foreign counterparts, to ensure peace by helping the government move forward.”

Alhaji Kromah, a professor at the University of Liberia, lauded Johnson for his contributions to post-war reconciliation.

“You’ve had people, since the war, who have continually corrected or improved their ways,” Kromah said in his office in Monrovia. “Prince Johnson became an Evangelist. He didn’t pick up arms again; he went and taught the democratic process to his people.”

Like Johnson, Kromah, a cofounder of the rebel group ULIMO and later the breakaway ULIMO-K, argued that it’s the country’s so-called ‘warlords’ that have maintained peace in Liberia.

“All the former warring faction leaders have run for political positions, at one time or another,” Kromah noted. “And nobody has gone back to the bush. Why can’t we praise this as an achievement for the whole country?”

Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ellen Johnson Sirleaf seems to agree. On April 9, she appointed Kromah ambassador at large for Liberia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The following day, Sirleaf made Roland Doe, a former general with Taylor’s NPFL, Coordinator of Special Projects for the Office of the National Security Advisor. And one week earlier, on March 31, George Boley, the former head of another faction allegedly responsible for gross human rights violations, walked free in Monrovia after he was deported from the United States under the Child Soldiers Accountability Act.

In her office in downtown Monrovia, Francis Greaves recalled the time she spent with the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. The group’s sit-ins throughout 2003 are credited with playing a central role in bringing an end to the conflict. Greaves, now chief executive officer for Voices of the Voiceless, a faith-based women’s group, questioned what message Liberia’s “culture of impunity” sends to future generations. “Do we want to say that wrongs are right?” she asked.

Greaves said that she supports the trial of Charles Taylor, noting that he was the first to bring a warring faction into Liberia in 1989. But she expressed concern for the fact that nobody else is facing punishment for their actions. “What happened to the other warlords?” she asked. “What are the circumstances under which they are going to answer questions?”

“A lot of Liberians are against this culture of impunity,” Greaves continued. “Many people fear that because of this, we will continue to have civil wars.”

Aaron Weah, program associate at the International Centre for Transitional Justice, said that he believes that those responsible for the worst of the wars’ atrocities will one day be brought to justice.

“The issue of prosecution in Liberia is all about timing,” he maintained. “It is about what is possible now and what could be possible in the near future. Right now, there is a climate of impunity prevailing, and the warlords are appreciating that because they feel protected under that climate. But for how long will they be shielded?”

Weah argued that this situation is especially troubling because long-term symptoms of the conflict continue to affect the lives of so many other Liberians.

“Young people used during the war continue to be victimized,” he said. “This is why criminal accountability is very key, even if it takes the next 25 years. Future generations will only learn if these people stand up to a full judicial inquiry and pay for what they did.”

As for the trial of Charles Taylor, his people have long maintained that the entire affair is illegitimate.

Sando Johnson, Senator for Bomi County and the self-described Taylor-family spokesperson, derided the trial as “purely politics” and “a kangaroo court set up by the white people.”

“It has no legal basis,” he maintained. “It is about somebody in American having an expressed-interest in the resources of Liberia and those of Sierra Leone.”

Johnson vowed that Taylor will appeal any guilty verdict he is handed and, if returned to Liberia, never spend a day in jail.

Today, many men and women involved in Liberia’s civil wars do find themselves behind bars. However, these people are not former generals or rebel leaders.

During a recent visit to Gbarnga Central Prison in Bong Country – a former Taylor stronghold – an official estimated that 75 percent of inmates there were ex-combatants, and that nearly all of them were only held for petty crimes such as the theft of a few chickens.

“Life was confusing after the war,” said Stevie Fanga, a 25-year-old man who fought for Taylor’s Anti-Terrorist Unit.

Joseph Dewy, 33, also fought for Taylor. “I lost my mother, I lost my father in the war,” he recounted. “And after the war, no education, no training.”

Asked about their former leader’s trial at The Hague, the men only shrugged.

With files from Massa Kenneh and Al-Varney Rogers.

A version of this article was originally published at Canada’s Toronto Star on April 25, 2012.