Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
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After more than twenty-five years of political turmoil and thirteen years of civil war and external military and humanitarian intervention, Taylor’s “help yourself” ethos had resulted in the stripping and sale for scrap of almost every piece of wire, metal, carved timber, and porcelain tile in the country for sale. Houses, schools, clinics, and factories had been shot up, bombed, looted, polluted, and defiled, and village after village had been burned to the ground or abandoned. Many farming communities had lain fallow for years, and a generation of peasant’s children lost the inheritance of their parents’ agricultural skills to military instability, resource degradation, and repeated displacements and raids. Though farmers returned periodically to check on their homes and holdings and maintained their fields, thousands of small-scale farms and fisheries had grown into tiny rain forests and swamps, and the mass agricultural production of commodities like rubber and palm oil had been substantially destroyed or derailed. What was left in their place were sophisticated wartime trade networks, nonsustainable systems for agricultural and mineral extraction, and an exploitative system of labor that revolved around wartime needs, powers, and opportunities. What was lost were the informal and formal educational mechanisms that generationally reproduced rural and urban economic, political, and social life.
The total destruction of Liberia’s social, economic, political, and bureaucratic infrastructures resulted in the temporary abrogation of Liberia’s right to sovereignty. Under the Right to Protect (R2P) doctrine articulated by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan at the beginning of the decade, and concerns about further destabilization across the region, the international community had claimed the right to intercede through UN Security Council Resolution 1497, which established a peacekeeping mission, and UN Security Council Resolution 1509, which established the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). Liberia was a fitting case for the application of the Right to Protect doctrine. The war had left behind a legacy of crisis, indeterminacy, and mistrust, a bankrupt treasury, and few leaders with the legitimate authority to rebuild a state. There was no possibility that the country would be able to emerge from the war without the substantial investment and protection of the international community.
The imperative for success in postconflict reconstruction was felt by UN officials as well. After major missteps with peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN was uncertain about its own ability to effectively facilitate a postconflict transition. As one UNMIL official said during an interview with me, “We have to make this work in Liberia. After the last few years, and in such a small country—if we can’t prove that we can rebuild Liberia, then maybe we can’t do this anywhere.”
In Liberia, as in other countries contemporaneously involved in postwar reconstruction, the postconflict moment had distinctive attributes that must be highlighted—specifically, the militaristic character of the peacekeeping intervention, the institutional distribution of the peacekeeping intervention, and the postconflict period’s temporality. In the beginning of the transition, the international community imposed new military, legal, and political forms of rule.5 UN Resolution 1509 authorized up to 15,000 military personnel, 1,115 police officers, civilian support staff, and humanitarian aid, while UNMIL and USAID worked directly with the NTGL to resurrect the state. Humanitarian intervention in Liberia was, therefore, first and foremost a militarized peacekeeping mission that was supported by ancillary administrative bodies coordinating population movements and population needs. An ambiguous mechanism of administration called the UN Cluster System was put into place to coordinate humanitarian aid in matters such as shelter, nutrition, health, and telecommunications. Simultaneously, UNHCR worked through the details of coordinating a massive repatriation effort of several hundred thousand Liberians from refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) camps across the region. Nearly one-third of the country’s 2.5 million citizens—particularly those with professional training and skills—lived outside its borders in Guinea, Sierra Leone, the United States, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria; and one million displaced persons and refugees (approximately one-third of the entire population of Liberia) were scheduled to return to overcrowded cities and to the burned, looted, and overgrown rural areas in the coming three years.
Scholars like Giorgio Agamben (2005) have argued that the space of humanitarian intervention constitutes a “state of exception” in which, during a state of emergency, the rule of law is abrogated and the arbitrary rule of the sovereign is imposed, revealing the liminal character of the right to live and the right to let die. Without a doubt, Liberia’s sovereignty was abrogated and international authority was imposed in a state of emergency. Violent armed gangs resisted “peace” by installing roadblocks, turning plantations into fortresses, and engaging in violence, banditry, and theft across the cities and rural areas. While armed UNMIL peacekeeping forces from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Ghana worked their way into Liberia’s interior, after the ceasefire, the international community attempted to pacify the population through threat, intimidation, containment, and moral force and persuasion. This was challenging; UNMIL peacekeepers were working with very little ethnographic or statistical information about the Liberian population. There were no Human Development Report Scores, economic indicators, governance indicators, or census data for Liberia because epidemiological monitoring mechanisms and all modes of governance had ceased to operate. Moreover, nearly all government records, but especially property ownership records, had been destroyed. No one was quite sure which iteration of the Liberian constitution still held legal force. As many people bemoaned, “It was all ruined. Everything was just to the ground. They took away everything.”
Money flowed from international donors for peacekeeping support and humanitarian assistance, and hundreds of agencies flocked to the scene. Among the international agencies involved in Liberia’s postwar reconstruction were hundreds of globally recognized humanitarian charities like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and Save the Children, faith-based organizations like Action for Churches Together, autonomous institutions like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and multilateral donor groups like the World Bank and ECHO (the European Commission Humanitarian Office). To bridge service gaps between military peacekeeping and humanitarian aid services, private corporations (such as Dyncorp) were contracted by governments to provide security services to humanitarian personnel, undertake engineering projects, and retrain Liberian private and public sector leaders. Moreover, in 2005 alone, more than a thousand national Liberian NGOs were registered with the United Nations Humanitarian Information Center.
The priority for all of these agencies, from the outset, was to tread a quick and stabilizing path from humanitarianism to development. Humanitarian agencies were not allowed to linger, and most were subject to project reviews on three-month, six-month, and twelve-month cycles, during which projects were frequently initiated and terminated. Most NGOs operating in Liberia’s postconflict period were mandated to leave, or to shift to a development orientation, as soon as there was any indication that Liberia had the capacity for legitimate self-governance. NGOs that seemed intent to idle were confronted with externally imposed funding cuts or redirections of their institutional missions. Therefore, the battery of expatriate experts, technicians, and consultants traveling the roads in Land Rovers were in a race against the clock to get Liberia into “good-enough” shape to resume self-management, assume empirical sovereignty, and vin-dicate the efficacy of humanitarian operatives.
As noted earlier, from the perspective of the international community, failure was not an option. The UN, the United States Government, and key NGOs like the Carter Center had been criticized for mishandling the protracted Liberian crisis, for having accepted Taylor’s 1997 election as “free and fair”, and for “abandoning” the country to endemic internecine warfare that threatened to engulf surrounding countries. The International Crisis Group (ICG) wrote, “Expectations are high at UN headquarters in New York. As an UNMIL official said, “Everybody is talking about UNMIL as the start of a new style in UN peace missions, primarily because of its rapid civilian deployment and success in drawing existing UN personnel from UNAMSIL (Sierra Leone) to start up. Liberia is not large and has no more than 3.3 million people. There will be over 1,500 UN civilian personnel working on the peace process, and 1,115 civilian police to establish law and order, so how can it fail? (ICG 2004, 6).” After a long series of gaffes in Liberia and around the world, the UN was motivated to restore the