African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on June 16, 2008
African Affairs 2008 107(428):455-465; doi:10.1093/afraf/adn038
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Truth and Justice on Trial in Liberia
Lansana Gberie (lagberie{at}yahoo.com) is an academic and writer, and is the author of A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the destruction of Sierra Leone (London: Hurst, 2005).
ON 8 JANUARY, ALMOST WITHOUT NOTICE ELSEWHERE, PUBLIC HEARINGS of Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began at the Centennial Pavilion, a large mock-Roman structure flanked by the country's national museum and an imposing Baptist Church in downtown Monrovia. The TRC had been established by an Act of the Legislature in 2005, and prior to the public hearings had collected 16,000 statements from victims as well as alleged perpetrators of the country's nearly fifteen years of brutal civil war, 1989–2003. The timing of the hearings appeared propitious, for they coincided with the opening of the trial, for crimes against humanity and related offences, of Liberia's former President Charles Ghankay Taylor, several thousand miles away at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. In contrast to the TRC hearings, the opening of the trial attracted significant international media coverage. It appeared that at long last accountability – and ‘closure’ – was being sought for the terrors and depredations of Liberia's recent past.
The only problem is that the trial focuses not on crimes Taylor committed in Liberia – where before becoming president he was head of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) rebels – but on Taylor's alleged role in the war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, in Liberia itself, the TRC process has been wobbly and controversial, and its many critics say that it will neither create ‘a clear picture of the past’ nor ‘facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation’ (its core mandate). What the TRC process has done beyond dispute, however, is neatly complement, at least to Liberians following the two processes, the prosecution's case against Taylor: the picture that has emerged of the former Liberian leader from the public hearings is roughly what the Special Court prosecutors have sketched – that of a monster and warlord beyond politics, who not only caused untold suffering to his own people, but also, with criminal deliberation, sent his fighters to support the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and loot Sierra Leone. This picture is likely to endure, whatever the outcome of the Hague trial.
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The TRC was launched on 20 February 2006 (nine Commissioners had already been appointed to staff it on 22 October 2005), as provided for by Liberia's Comprehensive Peace Accord, 2003 (CPA). Article XIII of the CPA stated that a
Truth and Reconciliation Commission shall be established to provide a forum that will address issues of impunity, as well as an opportunity for both the victims and perpetrators of human rights violations to share their experiences, in order to get a clear picture of the past to facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation.
The Commission was to ‘deal with the root causes of the crises in Liberia, including human rights violations’, and it was ultimately to ‘recommend measures to be taken for the rehabilitation of victims’.1 The Commission is mandated to investigate ‘gross human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law’, as well as other serious abuses, including massacres, rape, murder and extra-judicial killings. It is also to investigate ‘economic crimes, such as the exploitation of natural or public resources to perpetuate armed conflict’.2 The Commission was to end its work in September 2009, but it may request the National Legislature to extend its tenure for an additional period of three months; this request cannot be repeated more than four times.
The Commission's inquiry was to start as far back as January 1979 – the final year of Americo-Liberian rule, and ten years before the war began – to 14 October 2003, the day of the inauguration of the National Transitional Government of Liberia. This timing was a compromise reflecting a fundamental division in Liberian society, a problem that has continued to cast a shadow on the entire process. The tiny but still-powerful Americo-Liberian elite tend to view the crisis of state collapse and violence as beginning with the coup of 1980,3 which overthrew William Tolbert (whose father was actually US-born). On the other hand, the vast majority of Liberians, the so-called ‘natives’, tend to think that the coup resulted from the inherent deformity of the Americo-Liberian state, and see the entire period of Americo-Liberian rule as disenfranchising, a period which laid the foundation for the war that began in 1989. In fact, Article IV of the TRC Act states that the Commission could look at ‘any other period preceding 1979’. With little insight into the politics behind it, Amnesty International welcomed this broad timeframe since ‘narrow limits in the period of time under a truth commission's investigation can hamper the effectiveness of its work’.4
Liberian law makes it mandatory that officials of statutory national bodies must be Liberian citizens, and all nine Commissioners are Liberian (unlike Sierra Leone's TRC, which had Commissioners from Canada, South Africa, and The Gambia). The result is that none of the Commissioners have had previous experience with truth commissions or related institutions. The Chair, Jerome Verdier, is a young activist lawyer with little political and – even less – moral clout, both necessary for leadership of an institution of huge potential national and international importance. Funding was an immediate problem, causing significant delays. Once this was partially overcome, the Commission began work in earnest. Predictably, it has been further beset by institutional and other problems that have seriously undermined respect for the entire process.
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The Commission initially decided it would collect statements from 34,000 Liberians, or approximately 1 percent of the country's population. In view of the serious capacity constraint of the Commission, this was a purely theatrical gesture, and was quickly abandoned. In the event, by end of 2007, the Commission had collected 16,000 statements, and was anticipating a further 2,000 to be collected from the important Liberian diaspora in the US (an innovation: the Liberian TRC is the first to take statements from citizens living abroad). Then in early January 2008 public hearings, intended to take place in all of Liberia's 15 counties, and to feature 600 witnesses who would testify openly or in camera, began.
I arrived in Liberia shortly after this. Already, by mid-January, the political impact was palpable. Two dramatic testimonies were made in the first week. At the opening of the hearings, attended by the President and cabinet ministers, the first witness, David Saweh, identified a prominent musician and close aide to the President, Marcus Davies, otherwise known as Sundaygar Dearboy, as a former NPFL fighter who caused the gang rape and killing of his sister. Saweh claimed that his father was also killed in the attack by Dearboy. It was an extraordinary moment. Dearboy is a national star, something of a role model, and he has an office at the Executive Mansion, the presidential palace. It was a huge embarrassment for President Johnson-Sirleaf, who appeared visibly flustered, and left the Centennial Pavilion unceremoniously.5 Thereafter, she took a markedly unfriendly attitude towards the Commission, which did not help its own cause by exhibiting sordid infighting, including an actual fist fight between two (female) Commissioners. Johnson-Sirleaf promptly described the TRC as a ‘charade’, and vowed never to appear before it. Instead, she said, she will reserve her testimony for her memoirs, which is her key retirement plan.6
The other sensational testimony was that of Joshua Blahyi, a former fighter for the Krahn-dominated ULIMO-J faction and later leader of the Butt Naked Brigade, a band of naked child fighters who believed that nudity protected them from bullets, and who allegedly participated in ritual cannibalism. This faction fought in the very destructive battles of Monrovia in April 1996, in which Blahyi was said to have played ‘a leading role’.7 Shortly after this, Blahyi became a born-again Christian, and established a popular church in Monrovia. In his testimony, Blahyi claimed that he was responsible for the deaths of 20,000 people during the war, and he made clear that his confession was a form of contrition, calling on other factional leaders to come forward and confess to the TRC.
In fact, the testimony looked suspiciously histrionic, and Blahyi – preening and evidently proud of himself – behaved less like a contrite sinner than a hero seeking a national platform. I met him a week after his testimony. As we walked to a nearby restaurant, he was embraced by passers-by, and the 37-year-old saluted everyone who recognized him in triumph. I was stumped. Blahyi has already self-published a book, Trading Priesthood for Priesthood: A testimonial account of a Liberian brutal war general and traditional priest that dramatically met Christ and is now a Christian ambassador,8 in which he writes that he and his 36 naked but armed children who constituted the Butt Naked Brigade would pluck out the hearts of ‘little girls’ and eat them before going to battle (the book is banned in Liberia). I asked him about his 20,000 victims. Why 20,000 and not, say, 19,999? Blahyi said that he did not want to understate his atrocities; that the 20,000 included those he killed when he was a Krahn ‘tribal priest’: he said he became a priest in 1982 (aged 11), and that ritual killings were an integral, weekly necessity. He said that none of his fighters was hurt or killed throughout their many battles, and that he was himself armed only with a machete. He seemed energised while explaining this part – it sounded like a boast. ‘In some encounters,’ he said, ‘I would kill seventeen people at a time. And there would be sometimes three or four such encounters a day. On some days, I would kill up to fifty.’ He was trying to explain the 20,000 figure. ‘But you don't appear convinced?’ he asked. I wasn’t, but all the same I admired as much as I was repelled by his determination to convince me that he is indeed a mass murderer.
I was to see this same attitude on display when I attended the hearings at the Centennial Pavilion that week. None of the alleged perpetrators who appeared asked for amnesty before they gave their testimonies, and all of them behaved as though what they did – gang-raping women, disembowelling people, participating in mass killings, or leading gangs of fighters (on the orders of Taylor, many said) to invade neighbouring countries where they exported their brand of cruelty – was unusual but not particularly despicable. Often even the Commissioners, looking un-shocked, would smile or laugh, the early solemnity of the proceedings abandoned. Worse, onlookers, including some Commissioners, would giggle when victims narrated unusual forms of atrocities, including particularly creative forms of rape.9 In fact, the Commissioners often tend to subject victims to more probing examination, as in actual trials, than they do alleged perpetrators (whom the lawyerly Chairman routinely refers to as ‘accused’). A witness protection scheme put in place by the Commission, costing $500,000, has tended to benefit alleged perpetrators more than it has victims; in March four alleged perpetrators were said to be ‘protected’, yet only one victim was benefiting from the scheme. Reflecting on this, a close observer who has worked with the TRC since it was set up regretted the shrill tone of the Commissioners when questioning victims, and noted that ‘the perpetrators have almost been treated on the same level as victims’.10
These regrettable but telling episodes can be read as something of a variation on the phenomenon observed by Frantz Fanon11 during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s: the congruent abasement of victim and victimisers, of oppressors and the society they oppress. It is as though, after over a decade of near-universal experience of distress and pain, the sense of a moral universe had been obliterated in the country; as though, because of a long history of injustice and casual violence, notions of justice are no longer contemplated or easily grasped; and as though ideas of truth and memory are simply meaningless. Cruelty, of course, had long ceased to have any meaning; it had been a part of life for so long.
The hearings, however, have been partially redeemed by a number of clarifying disclosures which have firmly put Charles Taylor at the centre of most of the murderous violations. Perhaps the most important so far has been the testimonies on the Harbel or Camp Carter massacres of 6 June 1993. On that day, 600 mostly displaced women and children at the camp, which was on the Firestone Plantation – an area which both the NPFL and the Liberian army, the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL), claimed to control at the same time – were massacred by armed fighters. It was a shocking display of terror, made more dramatic by the fact that negotiations to end the war, sponsored by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the United Nations (UN), were in progress at the time. The NPFL promptly accused the AFL of the killings, which the AFL denied, blaming the NPFL. The UN set up a Commission of Inquiry headed by a markedly incurious former Kenyan Attorney General, Amos Wako. In September 1993, Wako submitted his findings, blaming the AFL for the killings. Few were convinced. The historian Stephen Ellis, who was then an investigator for Amnesty International, later wrote that the ‘most plausible explanation ... is that [the massacre] was carried out by elements in the NPFL, as a means of gaining world attention and increasing the pressure for a ceasefire, which was now in the NPFL's [increasingly under attack] interests’.12
Appearing before the TRC on 15 January, M. Allen Nicholas, a.k.a. ‘Mission Ant’, a former child soldier of the NPFL, said that he was one of dozens of NPFL fighters, under the command of General ‘Jack the Rebel’ and Christopher Varmoh (‘Mosquito’), who carried out the killings. Nicholas, now a born-again Christian, alleged that NPFL fighters were ordered by Charles Taylor to carry out the killings in a way that would cast suspicion on the AFL, thus helping legitimize his campaign during the aforementioned negotiations to end the war.
Two days later, on 18 January, at the Special Court in The Hague, General Zigzag Marzah, a former NPFL commander who is now a key prosecution witness, with no apparent knowledge of the disclosure at the TRC in Monrovia, made the same claim about the massacre in this exchange with the Prosecutor:
Pros: You told us about a Death Squad. Are you familiar with Camp Carter?
Wit: Carter Camp in Harbel (sp.?). Carter Camp massacre was done by Taylor through [Benjamin] Yeaten. Yeaten said they were civilians at Camp Carter working with the AFL at Camp Shefflin. He said none of those people should live. Ben came to my house – I was sick. Mosquito – Christopher Varmoh, a small boy, carried out the execution with Joe Tuah (and others). All the people there were executed. The people killed were more than 600 at Carter Camp. The same thing happened at Depot (sp.?) Road.
Pros: Do you know if that massacre at Camp Carter was blamed on anyone else?
Wit: Yes. After that massacre, he [Taylor] left the blame on the AFL, then Prince Johnson.
Pros: Do you know how the blame was put on the AFL?
Wit: For NPFL not to be blamed for that instruction, the blame was cast on AFL. Because you cannot go and say it was NPFL that massacred, or the civilians would turn against us.
Pros: Do you know how they made it look like it was the AFL?
Wit: I don't know. I only heard over the radio that the NPFL massacred, I heard Taylor say it was the AFL.13
Marzah also explained in detail how, on the orders of Taylor, he led fighters to support the RUF in Sierra Leone, a testimony buttressed by another prosecution witness, Varmuyan Sheriff, formerly head of Taylor's security (1997–2000). At about the same time, a former NPFL Brigadier-General testified to the TRC that on becoming a marine in the rebel group in 1992, he was sent by Taylor, along with hundreds of NPFL fighters, to support the RUF. This was after a coup had brought to power in Sierra Leone young officers who were now fighting the war more vigorously than the overthrown Joseph Momoh's decrepit government. The NPFL fighter also stated, casually, that Taylor later sent other soldiers to fight in Ivory Coast and Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaïre). Amidst the piling-up of such disclosures, Moses Blah, Taylor's former Vice-President, warned the TRC, in an interview with a local newspaper, to ‘beware of false statements from so-called Generals’,14 but he himself did not volunteer to testify.
A difficulty faced by the TRC is that although many alleged perpetrators have voluntarily testified without even asking for immunity first, many of these, with the exception of Blahyi, were fairly minor and largely unknown figures during the war. The major players, like Prince Johnson (the rebel leader who killed Doe), who is now a Senior Senator, have so far refused to testify. Johnson has claimed that he has made peace with the family of Doe (even though he continues to insist, against the evidence of widely circulated video footage, that he did not kill Doe), and that he would only testify if makers of the 1980 coup testify as well. Only Alhaji Kromah, the former leader of ULIMO, and now a professor at the University of Liberia, has clearly stated that since his rebel faction did not have a policy of targeting civilians, he was willing to appear before the Commission at any time.15 He made this statement in mid-January, but has still not appeared before the Commission. Winston Tubman, the grand-nephew of William Tubman (the longest serving President of Liberia) and a former United Nations Secretary General's Special Envoy to Somalia, has dismissed the hearings as a ‘joke’ and a forum for promoting ‘ethnic interests’. Tubman is Americo-Liberian, and his anxiety is widely shared by others within that small but old and highly influential community.
At first glance, the anxiety is curious. Of the nine Commissioners, at least two – Pearl Brown Bull and Ambassador Gerald Coleman – are Americo-Liberians (who constitute only 5 percent of the population), and the current government has Americo-Liberians occupying important cabinet positions. But those in the TRC have felt harassed; in March, the TRC chair announced the sacking of Bull for alleged conflict of interest. The decision was ill-advised and probably illegal, and the Supreme Court quickly annulled it. Earlier, Bull, believed to be very close to the Johnson-Sirleaf government (increasingly seen as too weighted towards Americo-Liberian interests), was involved in a fist fight with another female Commissioner, Massa Washington. Post-war Liberia, it seems, is still involved in a serious identity struggle.
The more corrosive issue for the TRC, however, is the very public criticism of the Commission by the President and key players in the war. The Commission can legally compel Liberians to appear before it, but the use of such a blunt instrument can defeat the purpose of the entire exercise, which is to record voluntary and truthful statements. Doubtless thinking that fear of prosecution might be behind the reluctance of key players in the war to appear before the Commission, the Chairman in March issued a series of statements underlining the amnesty and immunity provisions of the TRC Act. The amnesty provision states that the Commission can recommend prosecution, but it can also recommend amnesty for those who make ‘full disclosure of their wrongs and ... [express] remorse for their acts and/or omissions, whether as an accomplice or a perpetrator, provided that amnesty or exoneration shall not apply to violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity in conformity with international laws and standards’.16 In the March statement, the TRC chair amended this provision somewhat, stating that the TRC ‘will determine what constitutes international human rights law violations’, and that it will take into consideration ‘the strong desire for national unity and reconciliation’.17 This gives it a measure of flexibility clearly not anticipated by the TRC Act. And Article VIII, Section 30 of the TRC Act provides that ‘The TRC shall grant immunity to all persons or groups of persons, organizations or institutions from prosecution or tort actions on account of statements made or evidence given before the TRC....’18 It remains to be seen whether these will offer enough enticement to leaders of the various militia groups to come forward and testify voluntarily.
Until this is done, the work of the TRC will look incomplete, and its findings will be hotly disputed, and probably lack credibility. Truth itself, in other words, is being held hostage to the whims of those who started the problem that led to the setting up of the Commission in the first place.
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In its brutality and anarchic colourfulness, its factional fluidity, and in the gruesome perversion of religious rituals, the Liberian war was quite unique. The hearings have been dominated by accounts of ritual cannibalism, the drinking of the blood of human beings, the gouging of human hearts for consumption in the hope that this would make the consumers’ bodies impervious to bullets. There is no point in dismissing these accounts as deluded or merely sensational, since they form the dominant narrative of the war, and they are widely believed. Liberians are generally religious; the overwhelming majority of Liberians claim they are Christian, many of them Baptist Christians. But Christianity in the country has always been fused by the vast majority of its adherents with other traditional religious practices; outside of Monrovia few people are literate in the Western sense. Some such practices are both bizarre and clearly harmful.
Since her election, Johnson-Sirleaf has made reform of key governance institutions, including the justice sector, and economic recovery the top priority for her administration. The President promised to govern ‘differently, decisively breaking from the past’.19 But the capacity constraints are overwhelming. Liberian law states that magistrates and judges must hold law degrees, and that they must be Liberian citizens. In practice, however, because of the dearth of educated and trained Liberians, 90 percent of judicial officials barely finished high school; only 3 percent attended university. This has severe consequences for individual human rights – and the capacity of the degraded justice system to cope with the needs of the country. At present, only nineteen of the 790 people in prisons in Monrovia have been convicted; the rest are on remand, a status which can be indefinite.20
One measure of progress in governance in Liberia is the degree of openness with which the government conducts its business, as well as the robust anti-corruption posture of the President. Anti-corruption measures have included the prosecution of the former Transitional President Gyude Bryant on corruption charges and the sacking of key government officials for the same reason. In March, a Deputy Minister and an assistant minister were sacked for allegedly granting bogus mining licences, and a top official very close to the President was forced to resign early in the year when a picture– showing him in a lewd act with two women – surfaced in local newspapers.
There is an ongoing process of decentralization, which includes efforts to extend the writ of the state or strengthen its capacity in long-neglected areas outside of Monrovia. The UN has created County Support Teams (CSTs) in each of the 15 counties, with the aim of strengthening the capacity of local administration and extending modern justice systems across the country from its concentrated area of Monrovia. Implementation has been stymied, however, by poor infrastructure and the constricting powers of traditional chiefs: Liberia has about 250 senior chiefs along with over 500 clan chiefs.
Institutional reform, then, can only go so far – in other words, not far enough. It means that the problems that caused the war and ensured its gruesome character will not, at least in the short run, be tackled by governance reform so favoured by outsiders and some of the enlightened members of the governing elite, like Amos Sawyer, now the head of the Governance Commission. So what other options are there?
Many other Liberians see their predicament in a religious light. In his account of the Liberian war, James Youboty, a journalist, writes that the war ‘could be partly blamed on the segregational way in which the ex-slaves from America founded the country and kept the majority of the native population benighted for more than a hundred years. All these disparities in the society set the stage for Satan to take advantage in brutally turning brothers against brothers.’ Even Charles Taylor, Youboty writes, is not unlike most Liberians– among the ‘most generous people on the face of the earth’. ‘But Satan, the devil, came from hell and corrupted the minds of the peace-loving Liberian people to start killing one another for no good reason.’21
Given the overtly religious perspective of most Liberians on their country's problems, it might be that true reconciliation and closure should most appropriately be sought, at least in part, from religion. Stephen Ellis made this point in 1995, long before the end of the war. He wrote:
Healing [in the circumstances of the religious nature of the Liberian war] lies in the spiritual field at least as much as in the political one, and at the local level rather than the national one. The spirit world is the only domain in which constructive action is still detectable, and in this a leading role may fall to the churches. Unlike Poro society or other traditional cults, they are universal in orientation, having the potential to incorporate all Liberians. In their own symbolic language, the Holy Spirit is pacific and universal in nature and can enter anybody. The Christian God can forgive any crime, no matter how terrible. In the case of the international and other former missionary churches, they also have the connections and even the material resources to help in the process. Their greatest disability is the unwillingness to come to grips with the anarchic spiritual world of Liberia which may well necessitate assuming more of the symbolic language of Liberian spirituality than is the case at present.22
Most liberals recoil at any assertion of religion in the political and even social life of states, but it is important to remember that the church in Liberia, unlike that in Rwanda, played a positive role during the war – it condemned the atrocities, and was one of the spearheads of the attempts to forge a negotiated solution. It seems clearly central to Liberian life. Two of the TRC Commissioners are clergymen, and it is curious that one of them was not made chair of the Commission. Certainly both of them are older (an important issue in Liberia) and of a higher national standing than Verdier, the chair, and either one of them could have given greater traction to the Commission. If Liberia's truth and reconciliation process is to have success, the church ought surely to play a more important role.
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1 An Act to Establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Liberia (TRC Act), 12 May 2005, accessed at <http://www.ictj.org/static/Africa/Liberia/liberiatrcact.eng.pdf>.
2 Article IV Section 4(a) of TRC Act.
3 See, for example, the very affecting recollections of Helene Cooper, ‘In search of a lost Africa’, New York Times Magazine, 6 April 2008.
4 Amnesty International, ‘Truth, justice and reparation: memorandum on Truth and Reconciliation Act’, 22 June 2006, accessed at <http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR34/005/2006>.
5 Interview, Monrovia, 10 March 2008.
6 The presidential criticism looked suspiciously like a cop-out, and it was widely condemned by the vocal Liberian press. Johnson-Sirleaf was Finance Minister in the Tolbert administration that was overthrown in 1980, and was one of the most prominent supporters of Taylor in the early stages of the war. This support continued even after thousands had been slaughtered in ethnic pogroms and Taylor was besieging Monrovia. As for Dearboy, he at first denied the charges, and then admitted that he had been recruited by Taylor as a child soldier. He has, however, denied committing atrocities, and has launched a noisy campaign against the TRC, refusing to appear before it. The musician was influential in the Johnson-Sirleaf election campaign, helping to rally thousands of young people to her side.
7 Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The destruction of Liberia and the religious dimensions of an African civil war (Christopher Hurst, London, revised edition, 2006), p. 267.
8 Joshua Blahyi, Trading Priesthood for Priesthood: A testimonial account of a Liberian brutal war general and traditional priest that dramatically met Christ and is now a Christian ambassador (BeeGee Productions, Monrovia, 2006).
9 I am not alone in finding this remarkable. Many foreign observers, including UN human rights officials, have complained about this attitude. One of them, the Deputy Head of UNMIL, told me that Liberians are simply ‘too traumatized’, and that, in any case, with the total absence of the rule of law for so long, they simply have no conception of their civic responsibility, not to mention crime and punishment (Interview, Monrovia, 18 February 2008.) Liberians, in other words, lived in a kind of Hobbesian universe where the strongest survived, and there was no moral distinction of right and wrong.
10 Interview, Monrovia, 4 March 2008.
11 See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, New York, NY, 1963).
12 Ellis, Mask of Anarchy, p. 101.
13 Extracts are taken from www.charlestaylortrial.org (accessed April 2008).
14 The News (Monrovia) 28 January 2008.
15 ‘Kromah: I’m preparing to appear,’ The Analyst (Monrovia) 16 January 2008.
16 Article VII, Section 26 of the TRC Act.
17 ‘Policy paper on application for amnesty’, TRC Bulletin No. 6, March 2008.
18 Article VIII, Section 30 of the TRC Act; quoted in ‘Policy paper on general immunity for all witnesses’, TRC Bulletin No. 2, March 2008.
19 Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, ‘Forward to Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper 2006’, accessed at <http://www.emansion.gov.lr/doc/iprs_final.pdf>.
20 Interview, Monrovia, 15 February 2008.
21 A Nation in Terror: The true story of the Liberian civil war (Parkside Impressions Enterprises, Philadelphia, PA, 2004), p. 123.
22 Stephen Ellis, ‘Liberia 1989–1994: a study of ethnic and spiritual violence’, African Affairs 94, 375(1995), p. 197.
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