Soccer star gets kids on side
2004-01-22 11:46
Monrovia - Liberia's star footballer George Oppong Weah began a four-day mission on Wednesday to support a UN campaign to disarm children who had fought in the country's civil wars and to get them back to school.
Weah, who is also goodwill ambassador for the UN children's agency (Unicef), returned to his home country on Tuesday and a day later visited the Monrovia Demonstration School with a message about the futility of war, which has devastated the west African state for most of the past 14 years.
During a press briefing at the UN mission's military base on Bushrod Island, in the capital Monrovia, Weah stressed the need for Liberians to spare their children the ravages of war.
An estimated 21 000 of Liberia's fighting forces - over half of the total - are under the age 18.
The football star advised adults against putting youths in "situations where they can't control themselves", in an apparent reference to warlords.
"We have to create awareness in this country for the parents to understand the value of life," Weah added.
He said it was improper for parents to send their five-year-olds into the street to sell, noting: "If you have value for your kid, you have to go out there to struggle for the kid, and not the kid for you".
Weah spoke of his own childhood one of Monrovia's harsh ghettos: "I was also a kid living in the ghetto. It's not good to suffer because I went through it. There were days I never had food to eat. There were days I went home thinking that I would see food only to find out that I had nothing to eat."
He pledged to use his influence to lobby Liberia's interim government to put children's interest first, and to solicit funds abroad for child-focussed humanitarian programmes.
The former European and Africa "best player" was associated with one ill-fated children's village project, in association with the Italian opera star Luciano Pavarotti.
More than one million dollars raised at the Pavarotti concert was misapplied by former senator Myrtle Gibson, apparently with the complicity of exiled former president Charles Taylor.
Liberia endured 14 years of nearly continuous civil war until August 2003, when Taylor fled into exile.
Internal Affairs Minister Dan Morais said the Liberian civil wars, which killed about 300 000 people and made refugees of one in five of the population, had damaged an entire generation of children.
Unicef's massive child disarmament and Back to School campaigns kicked off on Saturday.
On Thursday Weah is due to visit interim care centres focussed on reintegrating children who have been traumatised by their war experiences.
He is expected to visit camps for internally displaced persons on Friday and to organise a football tournament for children from various camps around Monrovia.