After decade of peace, threat of violence still stalks Liberia

At midday the streets of Liberia’s capital bustle with life, a thousand raised voices drowned out by motorbike horns and the air thick with the aroma of boiled casava and palm butter.
Further out, empty buildings peppered with bullet holes bear silent witness to an all too recent trauma, their crumbling facades disfigured by charred window frames resembling hollow, dead eyes looking out at Monrovia.
Liberia is entering its second decade of fragile peace after one of the bloodiest civil wars in African history, yet the spectre of renewed conflict haunts the battle-scarred streets of its shattered capital.
At his desk in a squalid office in downtown Monrovia, Liberia’s wartime rebel leader Sekou Damateh Conneh warns of growing discontent among his former fighters.
“If I were a troublemaker we would have trouble here every day because, as combatants who are ready for trouble, they are talking to me every day,” says the onetime head of the disbanded Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).
“They are ready,” Conneh warned.
“They don’t have money and they are frustrated. They can do anything. I tell them no, we can’t do that now, we need peace in this country. People have suffered in this country a lot.”
Deep psychological and physical scars persist after two back-to-back civil wars that ran from 1989 to 2003 and claimed a quarter of a million lives.
Numerous rebel factions raped, maimed and killed civilians, some making use of drugged child soldiers, and deep ethnic rivalries and bitterness remain across the country of 4.2 million.
In June 2003, LURD laid siege to Monrovia, deposing warlord president Charles Taylor after several bloody battles in which fighters were accused of firing mortar shells into civilian areas, killing dozens.
Taylor bowed to pressure to go into exile and is serving a 50-year sentence in a British jail for arming rebels during neighboring Sierra Leone’s civil war, which claimed 120,000 lives.
Since 2004, the United Nations has disarmed some 100,000 Liberian fighters, providing each with $300 (219 euros) and promises of free education and training — which opposition politicians say were never kept.
In the bleak economy of post-war Liberia, thousands of experienced killers are suffering ill health and drug addiction, but have no access to welfare. “There are a lot of people who, as combatants, there are no jobs for them, no programs for them. Everybody is abandoned,” Conneh said.