Liberia launches SA-style TRC

2006-02-21 09:30

Monrovia - Liberia's president inaugurated a South African-style truth commission on Monday to investigate crimes and gross human rights abuses committed in the war-battered country for the last quarter century.

The seven-member truth and reconciliation commission had a mandate to investigate crimes committed from 1979 until 2003, when years of civil war came to an end.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took over last month from a post-war transitional government, said: "I have come to believe that when the truth is told, humanity is redeemed from the cowardice claws of violence."

Power to try cases

She said: "We must therefore be courageous sufficiently as a nation to face up to the past and revile as an affront to all civilised people the despicable acts our people endured during the past 14 years of our civil conflict."

The commission would not have the power to try cases and was modelled on South Africa's truth commission, which was established in 1995 and investigated political crimes committed by all sides during decades of white-minority rule.

A similar commission was set up in Sierra Leone, which was struggling to recover from its own decade-long civil war that began in 1991.

Liberia's parliament passed legislature to create the commission last year, but it had not began its work until Monday.

Gross human rights violations

According to the act, the commission's mandate was to "investigate gross human rights violations and violations of international laws, as well as abuses that took place during the war, including massacres, sexual violations, murders, extra-judicial killings and economic crimes".

In 1979, the government increased the price of rice - a staple food crop in a deeply impoverished nation - sparking massive riots in which dozens of people were killed by security forces.

The following year, President William Tolbert was ousted in a 1980 coup by illiterate master sergeant Samuel Doe, who ordered the country's cabinet members tied to polls on a Monrovia beach and executed.

Sirleaf, who was finance minister at the time was jailed, but escaped death.

Doe captured, tortured, killed

The 1980 coup marked the start of nearly 25 years of instability from which the country founded by freed American slaves in 1847 was struggling to recover.

Rebels led by warlord Charles Taylor invaded in 1989, plunging the country into civil war. A year later, Doe was captured, tortured and killed by troops loyal to Taylor rival Prince Johnson, who was now a senator in the new government.

Sirleaf said: "This commission is our hope - to define the past on our behalf in terms that are seen and believed to be fair and balanced, and bring forth a unifying narrative on which our nation's rebuilding and renewal processes can be more securely anchored."

The Liberian government had committed $350 000 to the commission along with $500 000 pledged by the United Nations.

- AP