Agriculture Key to Liberia’s Youth Unemployment Challenge

June 11, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Travis Lupick

MONROVIA, Jun 11, 2012 (IPS) – 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 and 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.

According to a 2010 report by the United Nations Development Programme, 30 percent of Liberia’s land is arable and close to 90 percent of crop areas receive adequate rain. Yet according to the Liberia Food Security Outlook report for 2012, 60 percent of the population is classified as "food insecure".

Liberia’s agricultural sector was devastated by decades of mismanagement and war. In 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe seized power in a coup and his rule, which ended 10 years later, was characterised by incompetent policies that hindered development.

In 1989, the country broke out in a civil war that continued sporadically until 2003. Those years saw warlord – and later, president – Charles Taylor plunder the country’s resources and fuel violence that killed 250,000 people. Even greater numbers fled Liberia or were repeatedly displaced.

According to a 2009 assessment by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), between 1987 and 2005 the production of the country’s staple food, rice, fell by 76 percent.

"Agricultural production has increased in recent years as the sector slowly recovers, but yields are still well below the regional average and food insecurity is high," the document states, adding that Liberia still only produces roughly 40 percent of the rice it needs to feed its almost four million people.

Also affected by the conflict were Liberia’s youth, tens of thousands of whom were coerced into joining rebel factions when they were just boys and girls. Rehabilitation projects run by the U.N. attempted to reintegrate ex-combatants and victims of the war, but those programmes are now widely criticised as failures.

"I went through the disarmament process, through the one week of training," Toe says, chuckling.

"But many people really never took advantage of that….The men were traumatised; they were used to the gun, used to money, and used to getting what they wanted fast."

Toe says that after seeing the shortcomings of the rehabilitation programmes, he set out to launch his own, one that would be better suited to Liberia. He reasoned that with fertile soil and a warm and wet climate, agriculture was the way to go. So he founded the CYNP in 2007.

The organisation now has a training centre in Bensonville, Montserrado County (roughly an hour’s drive northeast of Monrovia). In the county, land is divided into eight farms where former trainees and partners manage plots on either their own property or on community land. The Young Farmers Forum keeps participants connected and works to create awareness and attract new recruits.

Crucial to CYNP’s success, and what sets it apart from the U.N.’s past work with ex-combatants, is an emphasis on ownership. "We work with you to develop your own project in your community where you manage it," Toe says.

According to Toe, there are currently around 100 youths enrolled in six-month long programmes at the Bensonville facility, and as many as 500 graduates are now farming in communities around Montserrado.

A number of those graduates can be found working a plot of unused government land in the Fiamah neighbourhood of Monrovia. Alfred Kapehe says that CYNP helped him progress from subsistence agriculture to smallholder commercial farming. Likewise, James Paylay says the small farm he keeps brings in enough money for him to rent a home, feed his family, and pay his children’s school fees.

"Everything comes from the garden," Paylay says.

Liberian Deputy Minister for Youth Development Sam Hare acknowledged an often-cited USAID (the U.S. government agency providing economic and humanitarian assistance) statistic indicating that just three percent of Liberian youths are interested in farming. But, in an interview with IPS, he maintains that the situation is changing.

"Agriculture has been identified as the key to breaking the youth unemployment challenge," he says.

"We have been working with the Ministry of Agriculture and other stakeholders to make people see that agriculture, viewed in the right perspective, is a tool for wealth."

Hare says that the challenge is to convince young people that they can take farming beyond a subsistence level and make a commercial enterprise of it.

"Our vocational training priorities now need to be redefined and restructured to meet the real needs of Liberia. And youth and agriculture should be the focus," he adds.

Joseph Boiwu, a FAO programme officer for Liberia, says that another impediment slowing youths’ entry into agriculture is the labour-intensive nature of the work. To address this problem the FAO and partners distributed 24 power tillers to small groups of farmers in Bong, Lofa, and Nimba counties in 2010.

"We’re going to now reassess the interest of the youth," Boiwu says. If the initiative is deemed a success, it could grow to include heavy machinery such as tractors.

Prince Sampson, head of Youth for Development and Progressive Action in Bong County in north- central Liberia, describes a programme his organisation runs that is similar to the CYNP’s. Like Toe, he says that he learned from the mistakes of post-war workshops that failed to make long-term investments in people.

"The ex-combatants had training in carpentry, masonry, and other skills," Sampson says.

"And then after that, there wasn’t anything substantial for them to do. You had them trained, and then they didn’t have a source of income. So they went back to square one."

Sampson, who has worked with war-affected youth since 1992, maintains that agriculture is different because there is an element of immediate responsibility.

"The guys…They eat the very rice they grow. The vegetables are sold, the proceeds are divided among them, and they have some cash for their pockets."

Sampson describes the importance of involving the country’s former combatants in agriculture as a matter of food security.

"We make them understand the usefulness of the years still ahead, in spite of the years that were wasted during the war," he says.

"We let them understand that the strength they had – their youthful exuberance – can still be harnessed."

*Additional reporting from Al-Varney Rogers in Monrovia.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Agriculture, Development, Featured, Poverty Tagged With: ,

India’s Female Peacekeepers Inspire Liberian Girls

October 24, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Tamasin Ford and Sonnie Morris*

MONROVIA, Oct 24, 2010 (IPS) – It is break time at the Victory Chapel School in Congo Town. Children dressed in their royal blue uniforms with bright yellow and white trim fight to get under the shade of the only mango tree in the yard. It is the start of the dry season and the scorching sun will soon be almost unbearable to stand in.

This small school, on the outskirts of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, is much like any other in the city until you see what stands beside it. More than a hundred female peacekeepers patrol the grounds of a big white fenced compound, the first all-female unit of UN police in history.

The women are an arresting sight: dressed in their blue army combat uniform, black boots, the signature United Nations blue cap and each carrying an AK-47. But the school children are so used to their presence they barely give them a second glance.

"It surprised me at the beginning because it is my first time to see different people come around me," says Wokie Sarchie, a fifth grade student at the school.

The Indian peacekeepers arrived in Liberia in 2007. Their main role is guarding the president’s office on Capitol Hill on the other side of the city. When they are not protecting the president, they are often here helping the teachers at the school.

According to Jickson Sargeor, the principal of Victory Chapel School, the Indian peacekeeping contingent provides the children with medication, lessons on using computers and Indian dance and self defense. In addition, the principal believes the Indian women have brought a much more important message to the children.

"It has made the girls to believe that they are not just people to sit at home, they are people to get out there," he says.

Sandra Weah, an eighth grade student, toyed with the idea of following her peacekeeper role models into the security field, but her new love for dancing and music made her change her mind. "For me I wanted to be an army woman but then when I saw my friends doing music, I decided to leave the army to go and be a musician."

The female contingent of peacekeepers came to Liberia in response to the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. Liberia is the first African country to complete a National Action Plan to implement the resolution.

Fourteen years of civil war in the West African state saw some of the worst atrocities women and children have ever experienced on the African continent. More than 60 percent of women say they were raped, according to the U.N. Mission in Liberia, UNMIL.

When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female president, took office in Liberia in 2005, increasing the number of women in the country’s security services was one of her top priorities.

The numbers speak for themselves. Five years ago, one in 20 police personnel was a woman. Now, nearly one in five is female. According to UNMIL, applications from women to join the police force tripled the year after the female Indian peacekeepers arrived.

There is still some way to go with the armed forces, where women make up less than one in ten. But Carole Doucet, the U.N. Gender Advisor in Liberia believes this is still an achievement.

"It is still an improvement from the one in one hundred figures from 2005," she says.

There are still many challenges facing the full implementation of Resolution 1325 in Liberia, especially in the rural areas. Poverty, access to education and the lack of economic power put women in a difficult position. A recent article in one of the capital’s newspapers found children as young as ten were having sex with men for as little as three U.S. cents.

But in Congo Town, at the Victory Chapel School, there is a feeling that the next generation of Liberians are growing up with the view that women can do anything and everything men can do.

Schoolteacher Gloria Adjer, a young women herself, believes the peacekeepers are giving women the strength and inspiration to stand shoulder to shoulder with the men.

"The Indian people have come and taught us that we women too are necessary to do the work they are doing," she says. "We believed that not only men do these [kinds of] work but women too are capable of doing it."

"It makes the boys to feel that women are also part of society. It also makes boys think women can do what men do," says Principal Sargeor.

*Sonnie Morrie is a Fellow of New Narratives, a project supporting female journalists in Liberia

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Gender, Peace, Report Tagged With: , , ,

Liberian Woman in the Centre Circle

July 11, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Tamasin Ford

MONROVIA, Jul 11, 2010 (IPS) – Vivian Howard is a single mother who cooks and cleans like just about any other woman in Liberia – but in her work life she’s in charge of 22 strong, athletic men. The first and only centre female referee in Liberia with a FIFA badge, Howard is standing shoulder to shoulder with the men of Liberia.

There’s a perception – especially in the international community – that in a country led by Africa’s first elected female president, women in Liberia are taking the lead in all walks of life.

It’s true there are more female ministers in Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s government ever before, new legislation has been passed to protect and promote women’s rights and some women are being given chances in life that they had never experienced.

However, women still remain firmly on the bottom rung of society. They’re the most vulnerable members of the community in terms of access to education, access to health and access to justice.

Which makes the sight of Vivian Howard taking charge of a friendly match involving some of Liberia’s overseas-based stars in Monrovia’s Antoinette Tubman Stadium all the more impressive.

"I feel so happy when I’m in the centre," Howard says. "I feel I’m a man even though I’m a woman. But there’s the challenge" what men can do, I can do it.  So I’m there to encourage other female referees to do what I can do."

What men can do, women can do – this is something you hear in Liberia quite a lot. After 14 years of civil war, Liberians voted in Johnson-Sirleaf and women all over are finding the strength to push themselves forward too.

Howard lives a 40-minute drive from Monrovia’s Antoinette Tubman Stadium, down a long dusty track in a small concrete building shaded by a huge mango tree.

Life a a single mother is not easy for her. She gets no support from her daughter Blessing’s father, relying entirely on her income as a referee. The Liberian Football Association pays her around 90 U.S. dollars a month.

"In Liberia we call it hand to mouth," she says, "because once you have it… you just go to the market and buy food to it and take care of your family."

Howard lets none of this inhibit her as she controls a match featuring football players who star in various leagues. Many of the players taking part in the game are on a rare visit home, reacquainting themselves with a country working hard to complete the transition to peace after 14 years of civil war.

David Gbemie, who plays for Bolton Wanderers in the English Premier League, is home for only the second time since he signed for the English club eight years ago at the age of 13.

"It’s quite scary, I thought the war was still the same and it was quite crazy.  But it’s normal, it’s like living in Manchester!"

Liberians are delighted to see their best players with their own eyes. Gbemie is a major celebrity in Yekepa, his hometown in Nimba county.

"I can’t sleep because people sleep around my house waiting for me to come out.  It’s quite amazing like.  Things that don’t happen in England happen here, it’s quite crazy."

Liberia’s best-known player, the now-retired George Weah, was arguably Africa’s most outstanding player in the early 1990s, winning the African Player of the Year three times and recognised as FIFA’s World Player of the Year in 1995.

The national team, known as the Lone Star, has never reached the same high levels, but many have high hopes following the appointment of former Hungary coach Bertalan Bicskei as national coach.

Anthony Laffor, a striker at South Africa’s Premier League champions Super Sport United, thinks it’s time for Liberia to establish itself on football’s world map.

"[The fans] really want something to happen in this country.  You know since George Weah and the other guys left, fans say we haven’t done anything.  I think it’s about time for us to give something back to them. They’re there cheering under the rain and the sun and I think this time around we can qualify for 2012 Africa Cup of Nations."

For Vivian Howard, international recognition not only means more money for the men’s team, but more money for the referees and the women’s game too.

"I just want to urge the other female referees what I can do they can do also.  And some can even do better than what I can do so I urge them to come to the game because I’m not only here as Vivian, I’m here as Liberia."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Culture, Gender, Politics, Report Tagged With: , ,

Universal Education an Empty Promise for Liberia’s Girls

May 26, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Bonnie Allen

MONROVIA, May 26  (IPS)  – In a small office tucked behind the stairwell in Liberia’s Ministry of Education, the once-proud staff of the Girls’ Education Unit appear defeated.

The workers in this fourth floor office, entrusted with charting a new course for the education of the country’s girls and women, have no salaries, no budget, and few projects under way.

”We attend meetings. We attend workshops. But when we put a project proposal together, it is not supported,”ásighs the Unit’s director, Lorpu G. Mannah.

Despite the 2006 election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first female president, and the introduction of free and compulsory primary education, many young girls in this post-conflict West African nation continue to drop out of school to cook and clean for their family, or earn a meagre living selling food or fresh water on the streets.

They face discrimination, sexual violence, family pressures, early pregnancy, forced marriage, and harmful traditional practices. Three out of five Liberian women can’t read.

<b>Promises</b>

When Johnson-Sirleaf came to power four years ago, the Harvard-trained economist inspired dreams of a better future for the country’s women. With much fanfare, she launched a National Policy on Girls’ Education in April 2006, and hailed girls’ education as the ”cornerstone” of development in Liberia. The Girls’ Education Unit was opened shortly after to implement the policy.

Beyond universal primary education and rebuilding destroyed schools, the national policy promises to cut girls’ secondary school fees in half, train more female teachers, punish teachers who sexually exploit students, and provide counseling.

Other measures aimed directly at the retention of girls include providing health services to girls in school to boost self-esteem, paying out small scholarships for their tuition, uniform, and copybooks, and conducting a nationwide awareness campaign for parents.

It also stipulates that ”a separate budget line should be established in the education budget specifically for this purpose…”

Four years later, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has still not earmarked a budget to implement the policy.

<b>Reality</b>

Liberian families continue to struggle with rising secondary school fees. Only one out of 10 grade school teachers are women. Counseling, life skills and health services are almost non-existent. Girls are forced to trade sex for grades with teachers, or barter sex on the streets for financial support.

Statistically, the gender gap in Liberia’s elementary schools has narrowed. The most recent school census revealed that girls accounted for 47 percent of students registered at Liberia’s public primary schools, but only 31 percent at public high schools in 2007-2008.

Mannah credits free tuition, feeding programs by the World Food Program, and piecemeal scholarships by international donors for uniforms and writing materials.

Those numbers are misleading though. The census only measures enrolment at the beginning of the school year and does not consider the high drop out among girls several months later due to family obligations, teenage pregnancy, or poverty.

UNICEF maintains that statistics reveal lower enrolment and retention of girls after Grade Three. UNICEF Education Specialist, John Sumo, blames the Liberian Government for abandoning its girls’áeducation policy.

”As far as we know, there has not been any commitment from the Ministry to Education to see what can be done in the implementation of the national policy,” said Sumo.

This prompted UNICEF to stop financing girls’áeducation projects through the Liberian Government in January 2009, instead choosing to funnel money to international NGOs. UNICEF also decided to revoke its funding of the Girls’ Education Unit’s salaries and operational costs as of January 2010.

”We have a work plan but it has not been sponsored by donors or government,” insists Mannah, who confesses deep frustration that the education ministry is ignoring the Girls’ Unit.

”You born a child, you need to nurture the child. But if you born a child and you don’t do nothing, the child is starving.”

<b>New minister, new dawn?</b>

There has been little accountability for the past four years at the Education Ministry. The Minister during that time, Joseph Korto, was removed from his post in May 2010, shortly after he was named in an audit for alleged misappropriation of huge sums of money.

Audits to track development loans and aid, as part of the requirements for debt forgiveness, revealed dubious scholarship schemes and false claims for new schools that were abandoned or left incomplete.

At his swearing-in ceremony, the new education minister, Othello Gongar, stated, ”I have not come to MOE to criticise the works of my predecessors, but to rather start from where they stopped in order to make the system viable.”

Gongar pledged to lobby the national legislature to increase Education’s overall budget from roughly 8 percent to 25 percent of the $347 million dollar national budget.

In the budgetary cash contest, Liberian girls and women are competing with war-destroyed roads, electricity grid, limited running water and sewage systems, a dysfunctional justice system, and other institutional and infrastructural problems.

”What about the human resource?” demands Miatta Fahnbulleh, a leading advocate for girls’ education in Liberia. ”Yes, I want roads. Yes, I want 24-hour electricity. But I also want to live in a country where 9 out of 10 people aren’t ignorant… We need to develop minds,” she emphasises, pointing her finger to her temple.

Back at the Ministry of Education, Lorpu Mannah shows up each morning at the Girls’ Education Unit. Though she’s no longer paid, she still writes proposals to international NGOs requesting money to sponsor night schools for teenage mothers, counseling centres in high schools, or scholarships for women who want to become teachers.

”To be frank, I do it out of sympathy for the young girls.”

SIDEBAR: Political lip-service

At Miatta Fahnbulleh’s privately-run Obaa’s Girls Foundation in downtown Monrovia, girls in tie-dyed purple skirts squish together on short wooden benches and dutifully recite the alphabet for the teacher.

Fahnbulleh, 62, pays out $300 U.S. scholarships to more than 100 girls every year to cover all of their expenses and keep them in school.

”These girls are under a lot of pressure at home,” she said. ”Six brothers and sisters. A mother and grandmother. All of them looking at her, saying, ‘What are you doing for us?’ A 17-year old girl is the breadwinner of the family. So if you want her to stay in school, you need to ease the financial burden.”

The feisty woman, with a bright pink headscarf, vocally criticises the Johnson-Sirleaf government for receiving international acclaim for its Girls’áEducation Policy and ”talking big”ábut then failing to budget money to make schools safe for girls, cut fees, or pay for uniforms, copy books, toiletries, and transportation for girls.

”It’s political lip-service,” she said.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Education, Gender, Inequality, Report Tagged With: ,

RIGHTS-AFRICA: The fight against rape a brutal wait

September 14, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Rebecca Murray

MONROVIA, Liberia, Sep 14  (IPS)  – Monrovia’s highest hill, the long sliver of Atlantic Ocean shoreline at the mouth of the Mesurado River, with its aqua blue waves, golden sand and wooden fishing boats, looks like paradise.

But this is West Point; one of Monrovia’s most impoverished and polluted slums, and it is not paradise.

It is a world where justice is slow to react to the rapes and abuse of women and children. And it is here that women have been left with no choice but to come together and fight for their most basic of human rights û their safety.

”We decided to organise the women, because the men were beating on the women too much, they were raping the children plenty.”

These are the words of Diana Mah, an organiser with the West Point Women’s Action Group. ”So we were going to march out there and minimise what was going on.”

Here in Liberia the human cost of the war, which ended in 2003, is grim. The International Crises Group estimates 250,000 Liberians lost their lives and in a disturbing survey of six counties by the World Health Organisation, almost 75 percent of the female respondents claimed to have been raped.

West Point is a microcosm of this.

Ghettoized into a warren of narrow dirt roads and dilapidated tin shacks, the misery of the estimated 65,000 residents is compounded by torrential rains, extreme lack of clean water and sanitation, outbreaks of cholera, malaria, typhoid and tuberculosis, and the ever-present threat of violence, especially rape.

West Point Women’s Action Group was founded in 2005 after the cases of child and adult rape become too much to ignore.

”People said women had no rights, and men had rights because they were the head of the household, so they could do anything.” But after a girl was raped one day, Mah says, ”the parents decided to talk about it. The women started saying, our children are being used and abused and we have to do something!”

So the women marched to the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia and the Gender Ministry seeking justice for them and their children.
”That’s how it started. Now, when something happens to women, we take up the case. When they (criminals) hurt someone, rape someone, we take (the survivors) to hospital and then we go to court,” Mah says.

Nelly Cooper, director of the West Point Women’s Action Group, describes a few challenges when they are tipped off about rape victims. ”Some people don’t report (rape) because of the shame, and take the child to the side to keep silent. So when we go in, and they say: ‘Oh no, nothing happened here’.”

”We get little kids like that. If the parent is not willing to take a kid, you cannot take a kid. Sometimes they will even take the child away to a new destination. So that makes our life difficult.”

Even more difficult is when a rapist pays the family of the victim not to report him.
”Some of the (rapists), when they rape the children, they give the parents money for their child. So the family will take the money, and cover the perpetrator. Most of the time, we have to chase the perpetrator, find them and jail them.”

At the group’s small centre, local female residents strategise ways to raise awareness of gender-based violence in the whitewashed room downstairs, other women painstakingly hand weave brightly coloured ‘Lapa’ cloth to sell. This money, along with weekly member donations, just covers their shoestring budget for basic costs like transport.

When Liberia’s civil war broke out in 1989, Mah and Cooper, like many of West Point’s women, were caught in the crossfire of shelling between rebel-held Bushrod Island, and government forces in the city. The civilians trapped in the beachside slum were starving, and women risked their lives running across the bridge under fire to bring food home.

Liberia’s communities have been traumatised by war and the remaining violent mindset fosters an environment where gender-based violence continues at alarming rates. Particularly disturbing is the prevalence of sex crimes against children.

”Most of the cases we receive are children,” says Oretha Brooks, a counsellor at Duport Road’s Sexual and Gender-based Violence (SGBV) clinic across town in Paynesville. The majority of victims visit just after being raped, for pregnancy and STI advice, including HIV, and treatment, trauma counselling, and the paperwork necessary to make a police complaint.

In the clinic’s cosy waiting room, young teenage girls sit silently on patterned couches strewn with stuffed animals and books, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they wait their turn for counselling. ”Most of these girls are very, very traumatised,” Brooks says.

The Duport Road SGVB clinic’s rape statistics are shocking. Results from the first six months of the year show nearly 700 women and children were admitted as victims of sexual assault. The majority (about 40 percent) were girls between 13 and 18 years old, followed closely by girls aged between 5 and 12. A staggering seventy-seven were under the age of five.

”I can’t tell you the exact number of babies we received last month – about three or four babies. Sometimes the parents set their babies down and come back and they are bleeding,” says Brooks, referring to the baby rape cases.

The clinic recorded over 100 gang rapes during the six-month period, but single perpetrators committed the vast majority of rapes, and most of them knew their victims.

”If the victim is raped by a family member, neighbour, or someone they know, and if they always see that person, they are always traumatised,” she says.

”We had a patient who was raped by her auntie’s husband. And they lived in the same houseà The child was eight years old and I think he (the rapist) was about 45 to 50 years old… He was arrested and we took the child to a safe house, because when she was at home, the alleged perpetrator’s relatives always came by and threatened her.”

But while the scale of sexual crime in Liberia is tremendous, navigating the country’s slow moving and under resourced judicial system, buckling under a heavy caseload and enormous pre-trial prison population, is a major obstacle to bringing sexual predators to trial.

Kulah Borabor, a gender-based violence counsellor in West Point, sighs. ”The lawyers will say a case is scheduled for that day, but when you go it’s not. So you keep going, keep going, or the judge will postpone it and you will find the case going into the next year.” Borabor adds, ”When we carry the rape victim to court, they go through a lot and see the perpetrator. Sometimes they get tired by the delay of justice.”

Although a revised, broadened rape law was signed on the heels of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s inauguration in January 2006, prosecution of sex crimes commonly takes a back seat to murder trials, and lawyers and judges are found to be unfamiliar with the new legislation.

Sirleaf has listened closely to advocates of fast-track courts that deal exclusively with crimes of sexual violence. Earlier this year, the government established a special prosecutor’s SGVB Unit, as well as an exclusive judicial court to hear the backlog of sex crime cases in the capitol’s Montserrado County. The goal is to replicate the pilot project after an 18-month trial period, in Liberia’s other counties.

Based on the South African model, the court and SGBV Unit are fully acquainted with the new rape legislation and have the infrastructure, equipment and trained staff to handle sensitive cases. The trials are held on-camera, so the victim does not have to see the perpetrator.

The court’s second session opened last week with two cases on the docket; the gang rape of a five-year-old, and rape of a teenager. The court’s prosecution during the first session succeeded in sentencing the rapist to the heaviest penalty possible for a sex crime, life imprisonment.

Syed Sadiq, the UN Population Fund’s gender-based violence Advisor, admits the court has gotten off to a slow start. ”The court was recently established, and all the courts in the jurisdiction had to transfer the files to the court… Now the process has been streamlined and the system is in place so hopefully things can move on. It also takes time to get public defenders on board.”

There are currently 140 prisoners accused of rape awaiting trial at the Monrovia Central Prison.

”There needs to be a solution,” says Chief Prosecutor Felicia Coleman. ”There is a good number of cases on the docket, and a good number of people languishing in jail on a daily basis, and we are just looking at Montserrado County.”

The West Point Women’s Action Group have yet to have a case heard at the new court, but complain about the old system.  ”The court has been very slow, sighs Diana Mah. ”The lawyers will say a case is scheduled for that day, but when you go its not. So you keep going, or the judge will postpone it and you will find the case going into the next year…  That’s why we have been advocating for a fast track court.”

With the numbers of victims the women of West Point and Duport Clinic road face on a daily basis, the SGBV court’s biggest challenge is to catch up and earn up to its potential as a ‘fast track’ court.

But Brooks is optimistic: ”Before the war people were not really reporting rape, because of the stigma and they didn’t really know the side effects,” she says. ”Now they are becoming educated, and they know why they have to come to the hospital, to see a counsellor to reassure them and to help them. And they know that rape is a crime.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Gender, Human Rights, Politics, Report Tagged With: , ,

LIBERIA: When the Mob Prevails

September 4, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

By Rebecca Murray

MONROVIA, Sep 4 (IPS) – It was past midnight when Carroll Johnson was woken by angry shouting in his suburban neighbourhood of Fiamah. Around the corner a frenzied crowd with sticks had gathered in the darkness, and now stood menacingly over an armed robber called ‘Bush Cat’.

He had just been caught after burgling the nearby home of university student Mike Gibson, and attacking him with a machete.

"The group that comes to get the rogue are more than he, and the angry crowd cannot be controlled; they will do what they’ve got to do. Everyone else is afraid in their houses," says Johnson.

"The man they beat was about 40 or 45. They beat him for about an hour until he was dead."

Following the merciless slaying, Bush Cat’s body was dragged from the main road to a grassy path, where it remained for three days, bloating in the tropical heat.

Francis Broh, Fiamah’s community leader, says he informed the local police about the decaying body several times. Sitting in front of a small, whitewashed drug store in the district’s bustling marketplace, Broh adds, "After two days the homicide police came, bagged the body and left."

Running after the police, Broh asked how the body was going to be buried, and was told to go to his people to get some money. A community cash collection raised about USD $30 to bury it in a cemetery on the city outskirts.

Liberia’s decades-long conflict has devastated the country. The vast majority of its war-weary population of almost 3.5 million – with nearly one million in Monrovia alone – live without electricity or basic sewage systems; their homes, schools, hospitals, and government institutions are in ruins.

Liberia’s 2008 Poverty Reduction Strategy estimates almost two-thirds of its citizens live below the poverty line. The global financial crisis has badly retarded Liberia’s post-conflict reconstruction, and stalled the country’s mineral-rich road to economic recovery. It has stoked fears that chronic unemployment could push former fighters to violent crime.

At the conclusion of the national Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration campaign, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) June report to the Security Council stated: "Many [evaluators] are of the view that the reintegration programme was a "quick fix" that neither transformed the disposition of the former combatants nor provided them with sustainable livelihoods."

Bowing to heavy domestic pressure to be tough on crime, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf reaffirmed Liberia’s death penalty legislation for armed robbery last year, to loud international condemnation. Liberia is a signatory to the Second Optional Protocol, an international measure aiming to ban the death penalty worldwide.

But Gautam Sawang, the UN Police Deputy Commissioner charged with training the Liberian police, believes the crime statistics are far less gloomy.

"If you see the number of unemployed youths and incidents of crime, it’s not really alarming… though there were some spikes in crime. For example, soon after the jailbreak on December 1, you saw a huge spike in the number of robberies."

Public fears about violent crime are fuelled by a steady diet of sensational news headlines, and an abject lack of confidence in a corrupt, under-funded and poorly managed national police force (LNP). Ineffective corrections and judicial systems have only exacerbated public insecurities.

"You have armed robbers going around in the night, harassing peaceful citizens," explains Dixon Gblah, head of the Liberian human rights monitor, Prison Watch. "The communities themselves do not trust the police, because in some cases they accuse the police of arming the robbers. There are instances of the community even accusing the police of carrying out armed robbery in the night."

"Also, the justice system itself is not accessible or affordable. People don’t know their rights; prosecutors, defenders, magistrates, and judges infringe on the right of people," Gblah adds. "Over 92 percent (of the prison population) are pre-trial detainees, and we don’t have enough public defenders and lawyers."

Monrovia’s outlying districts of Paynesville, Red Light and Somalia Drive are normally filled with the daily chaos of crowds, traffic jams and dilapidated market stalls. But by night isolation and the dark draw criminals. The deserted, broken streets are patrolled by the LNP’s new Emergency Response Unit (ERU), which devotes much of its energy to dismantling vigilante checkpoints.

While most LNP officers are unarmed, the elite ERU of several hundred policemen are weighed down with pistols, rifles, ammunition, teargas and grenades. Rigorously vetted and trained by the UN police and US private military contractors, the force is intended to counter terrorism and public disorder.

Increasingly it is being drawn into the fight against routine criminal activity, and particularly armed robbery. Their early deployment has led to controversy, including the killing of a suspected robber, shot six times in the back by ERU officers. Dismissing early setbacks, UN police mentors say the force is young and learning.

"The vigilante is one of the major problems facing us," explains Deputy Commander McDervin Smith, leader of the ERU’s Bravo Platoon. "They wear civilian clothes, and it’s difficult to distinguish who is who. We are trying to ask our bosses for community awareness, so the vigilante could have identification."

"We don’t really encourage them, but the ERU alone cannot cover Montserrado County, so we highly appreciate the community handling the situation professionally and turning (suspects) over to the police.

"But many a time we have come across mob justice. Like on the Old Road, a man kept on taking things from people, so people just got fed up and stoned him to death. And when we got there he was lying there dead."

Monrovia’s policing is run on a shoestring. The ERU officers – paid an average of only 78 U.S. dollars a month, without benefits – rely on police headquarters and popular Monrovia late-night radio show Crime Watch to advertise their personal cellphone numbers, so that members of the public can make direct emergency calls.

It is one of these 911 calls that has the ERU flying down Somalia Drive at four in the morning. In the pre-dawn a group of around 20 barefoot, half-dressed men stand at the side of the highway carrying cutlasses and sticks, adrenaline pumping in the dark.

One of the men, James Momo Jr, recounts the terrifying events that brought the neighbourhood’s men onto the street. "I heard the noise from within the community, so I was on the alert," he begins. "When (the robbers) entered the first doors, they began to bust them and enter the rooms. I locked the door to my room, and I called one of my neighbours, so he began the alarm."

Momo’s neighbour, Wolover Kseray, is indignant. "Tonight the police, when they got the call, said it wasn’t major. How can they say it’s not major?" he asks. "It’s major! Is he saying someone should die before it should become major? I’m urging attention to a call when a call is made."

Kaseray is busy registering his community-based security watch team with the Ministry of Justice. They will be given whistles and cellphones, but no authority above that of a citizen’s arrest. Kaseray is confident that his neighbours will be entitled to use sticks and cutlasses in self-defence.

"If we didn’t come out today, maybe the robbers would come back, just wait for another two days," Kaseray adds. "This is a clarion call – I can promise them, if they continue to come here, they will face the weight of the youth in this place. I can promise you that."

Inspector-General Marc Amblard, Monrovia’s new police chief, sighs: "We do welcome the crime-watch groups for information, as there are criminals living in the communities. And we understand citizen’s arrest. However, the only thing we are concerned about is that vigilante action is not good for any security.

"With mob violence participants are liable to be held responsible. We must reassure the communities that the LNP can handle these robbers, so they won’t feel frustrated."

Amblard adds: "We welcome them to curb crime by assisting the police. We want to let them help us, but not do our job."

Back in Fiamah, Carroll Johnson sits down on a chair in squalid surroundings and the spitting rain, to talk about the killing of Bush Cat.

"It’s hard to say if justice would have been served if he were alive, because the man was a rogue. But (the crime situation) is improving; it was rampant before, now it’s not. We had a vigilante group before, but we clamped down on it.

"But people are not coming into our neighbourhood anymore. Because of what happened they are afraid."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

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