Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
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the punchings, stabbings, and fistfights that transpired around day-to-day acts of hailing a taxi, buying a snack, or waiting in line for a phone card, and they remember how difficult it was to find work, food, and housing. Human life, for a time, was cheap, and rumor had it that young men could be hired to assassinate an enemy or nemesis for as little as $60.
Without an effective police or justice system, fear and insecurity were widespread. The Asakaba gang, rumored to be a group of armed ex-combatants, continuously engaged in break-ins, carjackings, and rapes. Newspapers, radio, and gossip reported witchcraft ordeals, sacrificial child murders, and sorcery-driven dismemberment and cannibalism, in which police were sometimes implicated. Adult children directed gangs to rob their parents’ property, while family members stole from each other.
Unpredictable and uncertain conditions were pervasive. One young social worker, Michael, was completing his associate’s degree in social work while working full-time. On the eve of his final tuition installment, he found that a family member had stolen his entire tuition and savings, leaving him penniless. It was impossible to demand compensation, as both formal and traditional justice systems were broken. Another young man, Sebastian, an ex-combatant, had started a small chicken coop of twenty chickens, which were stolen one night by local robbers. He had nothing left after three years of saved wages from the DDRR process. In DDRR he had studied carpentry, but the six-month skills training had been intermittent and incomplete, and all he could do was work as a manual laborer or gather firewood in the bush. Doing this work was excruciatingly painful; he had a war wound from his years as a National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fighter that ran directly through his right buttock and groin, and he had lost a testicle and the full mobility of his hip joint.
Travel at night was especially unsafe. Taxis are a crucial part of work life in Monrovia, and sharing taxis over long distances is often the only way to get from affordable homes in the urban periphery to low-salaried jobs in Monrovia’s downtown. Fatuma, an NGO worker, was kneecapped by a bandit while waiting for a taxi and then robbed. She also knew of another woman who had been pulled into a cab late at night, then kidnaped, raped, and robbed. Both women had thought there were other passengers in the taxi, but the other passengers were accomplices.
Daniel’s meditation on the denaturing influence of violence speaks to Liberian experiences of the postconflict period:
Where the present dominates, the future and the past, because they have to pass through the present, are shaken even as they partake of the present’s impermanence. Friends whom one considers to be unshakably like-minded change their opinions on vital matters. Today’s good cause turns out to be tomorrow’s evil. Yesterday’s liberators become today’s torturers. Last months’ confidants become next month’s informers. This week’s promise becomes next week’s betrayal. There are shifts in the other direction as well: from worse to better. Bigots turn into ardent nondiscriminators, murderers into penitent helpers, avengers into satyagrahis (nonviolent activists), hatemongers into compassionate human beings, raving extremists into rational mediators, chauvinists into humanists…. When the present looms large in this matter, both memory and hope become either emaciated or bloated. In either case, it is the present that dominates the past, making the past a mere simulacrum of the present. (1996, 107–108)
The country became a time out of time, a time-bounded zone of social, political, and legal experimentation. Activists were able to advance unpopular legislation that supported women’s rights, democratic elections, and state governance. Numerous issues that were heretofore unacceptable for public debate, like Poro and Sande societies, Leopard societies, female genital cutting, and witchcraft ordeals, were being openly discussed. However, the newfound flexibility around the law challenged Liberians’ sense that the law was certain, that it had the legitimacy and the moral conviction that customary and formal legal systems required. In cafés, in newspapers, and on call-in radio shows, Liberians discussed the problems of the recent social, moral, and political order and questioned the legal, moral, and normative foundations of the new postwar society and government.
The Structure of the Book
This book is divided into eight chapters, written with the intention that, “taken as a whole, they are juxtaposed in mutual discordance so as to echo the discordance of the phenomenon being studied—violence and its effects—albeit in a different register” (Daniel 1996, 6). The first chapter has framed the topic of trauma, psychosocial rehabilitation, the project of postconflict reconstruction, and the problem of humanitarian scale. The ethnographic core of the book begins in Chapter 2, which offers a “history of the present” (Moore 1987) of international health policy, Liberian national politics, and NGO coordination of psychosocial and mental health services in Liberia during the time period under investigation; much has changed in the last several years, and this is addressed at the conclusion of the chapter. Chapter 3 conveys the meaning of normality and trauma in postwar Liberia. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 address major sites of mental health and psychosocial interventions: individual and group counseling, gender-based violence, and ex-combatant rehabilitation and DDRR. Chapter 8 focuses on the life stories of Liberian psychosocial workers and examines how they understand the nature of their own labor in the postconflict period.
A note on privacy, pseudonyms, and sensitivity: My use of pseudonyms is inconsistently applied throughout. When referring to public leaders (such as prominent Liberians who appear widely in global media), I do not use pseudonyms unless I have been explicitly requested to do so by interviewees. In the case of private Liberian citizens or Liberian NGO workers carrying out their routine functions under my participant-observer gaze, pseudonyms are applied and identifying information has been changed to protect individuals’ privacy. I have chosen not to change the name of certain international NGOs, like the Carter Center, or Liberian institutions like the Mother Patern College of Nursing and Social Work, because the domain of mental health in Liberia is sufficiently narrow that it would constitute an awkward deception to try to mask institutional identities. However, at the request of several NGOs, I have changed the names of their organizations to reflect concerns regarding their global reputations.
Lastly, I want to preemptively disclose to readers that much of the ethnography involves accounts of highly sensitive topics like forced displacement, rape, child abandonment, and murder. Those who may find this material too difficult to read may want to consider reading my other publications in lieu of this book.
Chapter 2
Clusters, Coordination, and Health Sector Transitions
Orientations
In September 2006, I climbed up and down the back staircases of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Monrovia after receiving a referral from UNHCR. I was looking for the authorities responsible for managing the implementation of trauma-healing and mental health services in Liberia, but at the senior levels of the WHO’s country offices, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW), and the few professional offices of psychiatry and psychology, no one wanted to talk to me. I was lost, embarrassed, and worried that someone was going to notice me and kick me out of the building. After hundreds of efforts to request audience with the various leaders reported to be involved in Liberia’s mental health coordination, I was at an impasse.
Soon, two Indian GIS experts who worked for UNMIL helped me find my way to the appropriate office, and I noted the striking difference between the UNHCR’s offices and the WHO’s offices. During my interviews with UNHCR officers, I was seated in a spacious, clean, blue-carpeted and white-walled office with intense air-conditioning; while at the WHO, the office of the Liberian staffer responsible for mental health was dim, narrow, and covered with papers and news clippings, and it was stiflingly dank and humid. The spatial metaphor was