Category Archives: liberia

In Liberia, agriculture key to youth employment, young people vital for food security

A version of this article was originally published at Inter Press Service on June 11, 2012.

With his gold chain, baseball cap, and baggy denim shorts, Junior Toe wears the uniform of Liberia’s urban youth. Spend just a few minutes with the young man and it is evident that he possesses the street smarts to match the look.

However, Toe’s area of expertise lies outside the city, on the farm.

“Look at the pepper seed there,” he says while touring a community farm not far from downtown Monrovia. “Put it in the ground, water it a few times, and you will make some money.”

Toe is the founder and executive director of the Community Youth Network Program (CYNP), which trains young people in agriculture and livestock farming.

“Over there, we have a nursery for cabbages,” he continues. “If you try and grow cabbage in the ground now, the rains will give it a hard time. This is the kind of knowledge we share.”

Food security and meaningful employment for Liberia’s youth have long been major challenges for this West African nation. Now, a number of community-based programmes and government initiatives are working to address both. Officials say they are hopeful that this is the start of a major shift in how young Liberians participate in the agricultural sector.

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Africa’s two female presidents join forces for women

A version of this article was originally published at Inter Press Service on May 9, 2012.

The only two female heads of state in Africa, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Malawian President Joyce Banda, have committed to using their positions to improve the lives of women across the continent.

Both Sirleaf and Banda have long championed women’s rights. And on April 29 in Monrovia, two years into what the African Union (AU) has declared the “Women’s Decade“, they pledged to work together to accelerate those efforts.

“This is an historic day,” Banda declared to a crowd that interrupted her speech with cheers and songs of celebration.

“Today is a day African women must rejoice,” she continued as Sirleaf stood by her side. “This is our day. And this is our year. And this is our decade!”

Sirleaf affirmed her – and Liberia’s – commitment to empower women.

“The two of us have great strength,” she said. “Together, we can do more to empower women and to ensure that women’s role in society is enhanced.” Sirleaf added that her country would work with the new Malawian government to advance women’s empowerment.

To be sure, the challenges before them are great. Using the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as a barometer, Liberia and Malawi generally score low in the areas of gender equality and women’s empowerment, education for girls, and maternal health.

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In Monrovia, Taylor supporters angry with a guilty verdict for a former Liberian president

Today (April 26), the UN-backed international Special Court for Sierra Leone found former Liberian president Charles Taylor guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It was the first time since the Nuremberg trials that a former head of state has ever been convicted by an international court.

Taylor was accused of supporting and directing members of a rebel movement in neighbouring Sierra Leone during an 11-year civil war that left 50,000 dead.

A summary of the court’s judgement. And from the Guardian:

Between 1996 and 2002, the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which Taylor supported, was found by the court to have committed crimes involving terrorising civilian populations, murder, rape, sexual slavery and enforced amputations in Sierra Leone.

Judge Richard Lussick of Samoa said more than 1,000 children had the letters “RUF” carved into their backs to prevent them escaping. Children were used to amputate limbs, guard diamond mines and hunt for food. Some were involved in fighting.

….

Taylor continued privately fuelling the conflict by providing arms and ammunition to the RUF in Sierra Leone, the judge said. His clandestine dealing helped undermine the peace process even when there was a regional arms embargo in force.

I spent my morning in Monrovia waiting for the verdict at an impromptu rally of pro-Taylor supporters that formed nearby a BBC News camp.

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Ahead of Charles Taylor verdict, Liberia’s former child soldiers still struggle

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.”

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Uprooting Liberia: Clearing Monrovia’s slums

A version of this article was originally published at Think Africa Press on April 11, 2012.

Julius Davies recounted watching bulldozers destroy his family’s small home on 24th Street in Liberia’s capital Monrovia.

“People came from the government and said this place was government property,” he said, looking over the empty concrete expanse where his neighbourhood stood just two days earlier. “Right away, they started beating people. They beat someone for asking why they had to leave this way.”

According to Davies, the demolitions happened so fast that many people were forced to go without their belongings. “There was no time,” he emphasised.

A mechanic, Davies lost all of his tools and spare parts. One of his neighbours, Anthony Sunday, said that he was able to pack some things, but had to leave behind his family’s only mattress. Nancy King, a mother of five, said that during the commotion she was focussing on by her children and lost everything in the rush.

“All of my things – all of my life – was in that place,” she lamented.

All the while, the Mayor of Monrovia watched from the sidelines. For Mary Broh, it was another successful day in her campaign to clean up Liberia’s capital city.

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Journalists intimidated for reporting on female genital mutilation in Liberia

A version of this article was originally published at the Georgia Straight on March 31, 2012.

When we walked into the makeshift office that a friend had set up on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia, it felt like we were entering war room.

The apartment was big and open, and buzzing with activity. On one side, a group of women sat around a table covered in papers, laptops, half-eaten snacks, and bottles of juice. Across the room, a second group had positioned themselves on a number of sofas. They also had laptops open and headphones plugged in.

It was Wednesday, March 28, and these journalists were working on a story about female circumcision in Liberia (the practice is also known as female genital cutting, or female genital mutilation). They had a scoop and were cooperating to see the news break simultaneously across a number of Liberian outlets on the morning of March 30.

What they already knew was that the Minister of Gender and Development, Julia Duncan-Cassell, had, in an exclusive interview for select members from the group, outlined the clearest position on FGC taken to date by the government of Liberia.

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Liberia’s government looking for a way to end FGM

A version of this article was originally published at Inter Press Service on March 30, 2012.

“There were three people. One person was holding me down; one person was holding my hand; and the other person was doing the job. They lay me down, and…” Fatu said of the female genital mutilation she underwent as an eight- year-old in Liberia.

According to the World Health Organization, Fatu endured what is classified as a type II female circumcision (on a scale of one to three), where her clitoris and labia minora were cut away.

Now 23 and a student at the University of Liberia, Fatu’s circumcision was part of her initiation into the secretive Sande Society, a pseudo-religious association to which most Liberian women – depending on which tribe and part of the country they are from – are members.

The Sande and its male counterpart, the Poro, shape many aspects of culture, tradition, and society as a whole in this West African nation. The Sande “bush” schools are where young Liberian women – some as young as two years old – are supposed to receive instruction on the traditions of respect, how to run a household, and how to prepare for marriage.

It is also where their circumcisions happen.

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“This Needs to Stop”: Tempers Flare over the Practice of Female Circumcision in Liberia

This article was originally published at Think Africa Press on March 30, 2012.

When Kulah Borbor’s daughter was 13 years old, she asked her mother if she could join Liberia’s secret Sande Society. Most Liberian women are members of the Sande, so her daughter’s request was nothing unusual. But Borbor, a gender-based violence officer with the West Point Women for Health and Development Organisation, immediately discouraged her daughter’s interest in the Sande.

“I told her, ‘What? You want to go join?’” Borbor recounted. “I took her in a room and I showed her.”

What Borbor shared with her daughter was one of the Sande’s open, but almost never spoken, secrets – that the society’s initiation includes female circumcision, otherwise known as female genital cutting (FGC), or female genital mutilation (FGM).

“I said, ‘That’s where they cut mine,” Borbor continued. “From that time, she hasn’t talked about it.”

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Press conference in Liberia: Sirleaf and Blair duck questions and leave

On March 7, 2012, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former British prime minister Tony Blair held a joint press conference in the nation’s capital of Monrovia. Blair was in town for his work with the Africa Governance Initiative.

After reporters had waited more than an hour, the politicians made their opening remarks, pledged their support for the efforts of the other, and then took four questions from a mix of Liberian and international reporters.

The first question was about gay rights in Liberia and was put to Sirleaf. She responded: “We have been trying to focus our work on the substantive things that drive our development agenda. Liberia will continue to preserve its traditional values.”

The second question was about gay rights in Liberia and was put to Blair. He said a lot of things, but nothing about gay rights.

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Monrovia’s quiet scars

A lot of the scars on Monrovia have healed. Nearly a decade has passed since the end of the war. The city remains dotted by buildings reduced to hollowed-out shells. But smaller cuts such as bullet holes and wartime graffiti are no longer such common sights.

As a journalist new to Liberia, I’m trying get away from painting every event and issue I cover against a backdrop of civil war. I imagine Liberians must be sick of it; seeing every article about their country interrupted about a third of the way down by an editorially-obligatory paragraph explaining that civil wars engulfed the country from 1989 to 2003. But a lot of the literature on Liberia is of course shockingly-violent. And so on the flight over, reading up on the country to which I was moving, my head was filled with a some of the worst accounts of urban warfare I’ve ever come across. Consequently, walking around Monrovia, those stories are sometimes all I see.

Taller buildings are high ground. Bridges are choke points. Just a few blocks from where I’m staying, on Camp Johnson Road, Taylor’s men chased a rival warlord to the U.S. embassy in a massacre that killed dozens. A friend of mine lives on 12th Street; several times, the fighting there tortured residents for months on end. It’s down Randall Street where a bunch of former child soldiers still hang out. And so on. It’s all just part of the city.

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