Trading guns for books
2003-12-08 10:31
Monrovia - Peering out from under a drooping fisherman's hat tattered from years of use, 13-year-old Malinda Lakome's eyes shine when he talks of his future.
"When I grow up I want to be a driver," said the former soldier in the Armed Forces of Liberia, who now idles at military barracks outside the capital Monrovia awaiting promised rewards for surrendering his weapon.
Malinda is one of an estimated 15 000 child soldiers conscripted to join the three warring factions in the second of two ruinous civil wars to pulverise the west African state of 3.3 million since 1989.
Drugged, beaten and armed to the teeth with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, the armies of young people killed some 200 000 during a 14-year campaign of rape and violence that also displaced one in five of their countrymen either within Liberia or beyond its borders.
But since a fragile peace took hold in the Atlantic coastal state in mid-August following the flight into exile of former warlord president Charles Taylor and the signing of a peace pact including the warring parties, the young soldiers say they are eager to begin life as civilians.
Back to school
"I want to go to school, to learn, and to see my family," said Olmed Molbah, who became a government soldier in 1998 after his brother and sister were killed.
"I was fighting since I was 14 and now I want to do something for me."
Such a return to normalcy will be difficult, however, in the war-ravaged country with no infrastructure, few schools and the barest of public utilities.
It is not uncommon to see even those children able to avoid taking up arms and staying in school sitting late at night or early in the morning under lights shining on the compounds of the international aid groups or embassies - the only places with regular power - trying to finish their homework.
"Back to School" kits provided by the UN Children's Fund have appeared at market stalls around the capital Monrovia, the only area the UN Mission to Liberia (Unmil) has managed to secure since it was created in October.
The rest of the country remains too unstable to deploy the 5 000 peacekeepers currently on the ground, though a UN Security Council mandate has foreseen the deployment of 15 000 troops by early next year.
Stipend
Unmil's $50m disarmament campaign, to provide each disarmed soldier with a $300 stipend, psychological counseling and vocational training or schooling, aims to be a building block for the rehabilitated youngsters to rejoin society.
But for some 300 government soldiers who voluntarily surrendered their arms prior to the tentative December 7 start date of the process, the promised incentives remain locked in containers and buried under mountains of bureaucracy.
The UN's World Food Programme had begun as of last week distributing food rations to 51 disarmed soldiers at Scheffling barracks, citing inter-agency processing problems as the reasons for delay.
Ahunna Eziakonwa of the UN's humanitarian arm OCHA admitted the United Nations had a "ways to go" in preparing the camps for the hoped-for influx of disarmed combatants.
"I was an Armed Forces of Liberia soldier, I was working for the country," said 20-year-old Aposo Maxwell, as he stood in front of the empty room at Scheffling that he shared with nine other former soldiers.
'Piece of paper'
"I came in and gave them my weapons, and Unmil gave me a paper," he said. "And I have the piece of paper, but that is all I have."
Whether Liberia's civil society, hammered already by an 85% unemployment rate, will welcome the children who terrorized them also remains in doubt. Hundreds of thousands of Liberians still shelter in displacement camps, too afraid to return to their home villages and what might await them.
"I was raped. My daughter was raped. I have lost two of my children," said Sarah Monwell, 36, who has moved out of a displacement camp into Osiwa village, a Women's Aid Inc facility providing skills training to 65 women widowed by war.
"The fighters may lose their arms (weapons) but I have lost everything."
Reports of civilian harassment continue to filter into Monrovia, as do stories of clashes between the former militias and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model) in the east or Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd) in the north.
All brothers and sisters
In the Lurd headquarters town of Tubmanburg, some 40km north of Monrovia, peacekeepers have yet to deploy and the soldiers remain committed to carrying weapons until a political dispute with the transitional government of interim chairman Gyude Bryant is resolved.
Momo Vigay Jallah, known as "Good Finish" when he shouldered his weapon for Lurd, whose 1999 rebellion sparked the second civil war, believes that peace will take root and provide him the chance to become a doctor.
"I will take care of anybody," he said when asked whether he would treat only his comrades at the medical clinic he dreams of opening.
"There is peace in Liberia now. We are all brothers and sisters."