Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
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Mindful of the criticism that UN peacekeeping interventions had focused too much on elections as a benchmark of peacekeeping success, and had left too early, the UN regarded the success of the Liberian reconstruction as a critical test of the Right to Protect doctrine and as a moral test of the international community.
The temporality of the postconflict moment also contributed to the sense that this period was a “state of exception,” or alternately, a liminal moment of “anti-structure” in a ritual of Liberian transformation from a communitas of war to a society of peace (Turner 1969). Following Paul Collier’s theory that the first five years of postconflict economic recovery would strongly determine the likelihood of “reversion to conflict,” humanitarians and policy experts on postwar recovery stressed the importance of intensive intervention during the first five years following the cessation of hostilities. (Some scholars, taking into account the destabilizing impact of economic and political fragility, believed the middle five years of Liberia’s postconflict decade to be the most important [Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Bigombe, Collier, and Sambanis 2000].) In word and deed, UNMIL officials exhorted the population to “Forget the past! The war is over! Now is the time for peace!” NGO workers and peacekeepers alike berated civilian and armed Liberians that “This is your only chance! When we leave, we will not come again! You must change, you must help to rebuild your country, or it will all be finished for all of you!” The massive influx of expatriates, white Land Rovers, helicopters, and money materially changed the landscape of Liberia and seemed to affirm the general sense that change was afoot. Therefore, the first five years after Liberia’s civil war, 2003–2008, were cordoned off in time and space from its social and historical connectedness to a known and reviled Liberian past and an unknown and unstable Liberian future.
The adoption of Collier’s five-year (or ten-year) time frame into humanitarian policy created certain temporally bounded political economies of its own. Five-year and ten-year time horizons were used as benchmarks for humanitarian aid projections, and the retraining of the Liberian National Police, the Liberian army, and civilian government officials was timed against projected peacekeeper drawdowns and departures. The UNMIL peacekeeping mission was tasked with providing military security and governance for extremely limited periods of time, and budget and duration were subject to annual or biannual renewal. The Liberian Department of Defense underwent training from Dyncorp to learn how to manage a civilian-led defense force. Police forces were nonexistent after the 2003 negotiations over UNMIL’s presence denied the international peacekeeping force the right to act as local police on the grounds that this constituted an incursion against Liberia’s sovereignty. Plans to return responsibility to relevant government agencies were calculated in three-, five-, and ten-year time frames. At the same time, big business negotiations with international investors like the Chinese government, mining companies like BHP Billiton and Arcelor Mittal, and agribusinesses like Firestone Corporation were left to Liberian government officials to sort out.
Furthermore, substantial social change was being advocated. Peacekeepers from Norway trained new Liberian police recruits to respect human rights, interview victims of rape or domestic violence appropriately, gather evidence, and go on patrols. Liberian politicians like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf urged expatriate Liberians to return to Liberia to invest in the economic redevelopment of the nation, to assume new leadership positions in government and politics, and to reshape core Liberian institutions. And humanitarian organizations stepped in to act as a shadow of the nonfunctioning state: providing education, potable water, food relief, trash collection, health care, and repatriation assistance, distributing home construction and farming materials, and reconstructing roads and bridges. And finally, as I discuss in Chapter 6, a massive demobilization process disarmed more than 120,000 ex-combatants within the first three years postconflict; five years postconflict, most ex-combatant rehabilitation initiatives could be declared completed.
Postconflict Experience
Although there is a growing tendency in the postconflict literature to emphasize social, cultural, and psychological resilience, the facts from Liberia show that, prior to 2010, biological resilience often lost out to the postwar context. Most Liberians were not “getting by”; in fact, population data indicated that Liberians were dying at the beginning and in the middle of their lives relative to the rest of the world’s populations. Amid the smog, humidity, and periodic cholera outbreaks, people were, in fact, failing to thrive. Liberian men, women, and children were getting too sick, dying too young, suffering too much injury and violence, and experiencing too much hunger and exhaustion, and few elderly people were left alive. Global health statistics show that in 2003, the average life expectancy at birth in Liberia hovered at 47 years (UNDP 2006) (but rose to 57 years by 2011 [UNDATA 2013]). In 2003, the child mortality rate was 194–198 per 1,000 children (UNDP 2006), with nearly twenty percent of all children dying of malaria, typhoid, water-borne diseases, from the physical traumas of accidents or abuse, or from neglected infections. Anecdotally, MSF representatives informed me that on a single visit to a private school for poor Liberian youth in Monrovia, they found a child victim of rape, three children suffering from severe ear infections; a child who had endured a bloody beating; and a student with an aggressive skin infection that had eroded most of the fingertips on one hand. The median age of the population was (and continues to be) about eighteen years of age, and only 3.6 percent of the Liberian population could look forward to living beyond the age of sixty (UNDP 2006). Random and unexplained death was an ever-present part of postwar life among Liberians, and it was always a tragedy.
Many writers have illustrated the social disorder wrought by the Liberian Civil War to great effect. John Gay (2004), a scholar, teacher, and missionary in Liberia for nearly four decades, documented the social consequences of violence, modernization, endemic corruption, and social instability in his series of fictional novels. Rose George’s (2004) and William Powers’s (2005) personal memoirs and journalistic narratives brought to light the crisis of humanitarianism during the Liberian Civil War, as well as the impossible compromises shouldered by the international community in the face of unlivable circumstances within Liberia, for Liberians. Anthropologist Mats Utas (2003, 2005) and Danny Hoffman (2011) documented how Liberians built and rebuilt their lives while shuttling between camps, NGO jobs, cities, and armies and negotiated the possibilities of war-bounded worlds.
This is not to say that postwar Liberian life was unlivable, everywhere, all the time. People found opportunities for political, military, and social success. As Chris Coulter (2009) documented among ex-combatant women in Sierra Leone, after the war people reunited with families; some of those reunions were joyous, while some were painful. People learned who had lived and who had died, who had left for America and who had decided to stay behind in Guinea or Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire. Women and men found love and protection and created new families and communities. Mary Moran’s (2012) ongoing work on Liberian men who did not become combatants reveals how families remained strong and intact throughout the war, with family members often using any means necessary to keep their children from becoming fighters. Men and women found success in business, education, and NGOs, and many were promoted to national and international prominence through government, business, and NGO circuits. Schools operated, albeit intermittently, and people bought land and rebuilt homes.
But it would be accurate to say that the onset of peace did not begin at the end of the Liberian Civil War. Tendrils of violence and destabilization protruded into postconflict realities for years after 2003, and Liberians today recall the years of 2004, 2005, and 2006 as particularly terrifying and insecure. In the war’s aftermath, 50 percent of the Liberian population temporarily resettled in Monrovia, and most of the remainder moved into a few large towns and cities in the interior. People were dispossessed from their lives and at a loss as to how to move forward. Many had passed through the various institutions of the war—refugee camps, IDP camps, militias, and the various incarnations of the Liberian government—and had come through with new identities: Pentecostal, psychosocial worker, ex-combatant, politician. Though some had reaped huge benefits from the wartime economies, most people ended the war poorer than before, and their personal connections to prewar communities, ethnicities, and identities were more abstract than many liked to admit. There was rampant banditry, armed robbery, and homelessness, and family units often could not keep up with the constant need for care, realignment,