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NEWS STORY
Jonathan Clayton July 28, 2003 THE small arm shot out of the darkness and tugged my sleeve. I looked down and was met by a sea of wide-open moonstone eyes, staring out of the darkness. They belonged to children, some no more than toddlers, who were hiding in the darkest recesses of the Greater Refuge Temple, a church almost within shouting distance of Monrovia’s front line. Hoping that a foreigner might be offering some respite after days of heavy shelling and gunfire, the children gathered round quickly, begging for help. “We want people to come and help, we are dying here. It is no good here we want peace” said Beddeah, a 16-year-old girl, who has been looking after some of the younger children. “We are hungry. There is no food and no toilets.” The church, their sanctuary, offers little protection. It took a direct hit on Saturday, killing three people outright. A mortar fired from the far side of one of the last bridges preventing Liberia’s rebels from overrunning half of the beleaguered city crashed into the upper half of the church. Shrapnel and pieces of rafter ricocheted around the packed assembly room, wounding more than 40 others, 13 of them critically. Pews and chairs and old bits of clothing are now piled up against every window. The floor is a patchwork of mattresses, plastic bowls, bits of clothing and other bundles containing the few possessions that people could grab before fleeing the latest advance of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd). An old woman, coughing incessantly, sat forlornly in one corner. Nearby a man sat, quickly turning the pages of a battered old Bible. “We are trapped like rats in here. Some people went out today to get water, but had to come back after they came under fire,” Michael Chea, the church minister, said. It is impossible to say how many people are crammed into this small church in central Monrovia, but figures, even of dead and wounded, are increasingly irrelevant in this beleaguered city, which is now virtually encircled. Similar scenes are repeated across Monrovia. Thousands of terrified people are crammed into every stairwell in every bombed-out building, in every conceivable space. The buildings offer scant safety. Dozens of people were killed and wounded last week as mortars crashed into the flimsy structures. Another 13 died yesterday in a mortar attack on the centre of the capital The air is alive with stray bullets. The few foreign aid workers left in the city scurry around during any relative lull to do what little they can to relieve people’s suffering. “We are seeing movement of people of almost biblical proportions. We are only just managing to keep many of them alive. They are very hungry and have no water,” said Magnus Wolfe-Cook, of the medical charity Merlin, the only British aid agency still operating in the city. Nigerian peacekeepers are supposed to arrive in Liberia later this week, but Washington continues to equivocate about supplying an all-important American force. “We are prepared to assist the United Nations to establish a ceasefire, to evacuate (President) Charles Taylor, to bring in regional troops,” Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, said. But asked whether American troops would join West African peacekeepers on the ground in Liberia, he replied: “We will help them to get there.” When I last visited Monrovia just over a month ago, it was a crazy, surreal city where drugged-up teenage soldiers wearing women’s wigs and other strange outfits manned road blocks and demanded cigarettes and other booty. Now it is an evil place where the fear of death lurks on every corner. The centre of town is eerily deserted. The blackened remains of recently bombed buildings smoulder in the fetid, tropical air. The smell of cordite is ominously present. The random shelling that began last Monday is a new development in this phase of Liberia’s 17 years of almost non-stop conflict. It is most unnerving. During every break in the fighting people, rush out to try to grab some food or water. Hundreds of cans and plastic bowls litter the ground to catch rainwater from the heavy tropical storms that lash the city for several hours every day. The water may slake the thirst, but it brings with it other dangers. Huge dirty puddles fill pot-holed streets, providing the perfect breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes and other respiratory diseases. Cholera has broken out already. “We have no choice, we must try and carry on,” said Frafa Karzolu, whose wife was killed last Monday together with 13 other people when a shell hit the Newport High School, where they had been hiding. Even some of the road blocks are unmanned, with Mr Taylor’s men sheltering deep inside roadside buildings, primed for the dreaded street-to-street fighting that the President has promised if the rebels cross the last bridges and the much-touted peacekeeping force does not appear. The militia fighters are jumpy, frightened and tired. “Me, I’m Lieutenant Okello. Please come and see my place,” one doped-up child soldier said as he beckoned me into his vantage point. It overlooked one of the roads leading to the creek before Bush Rod Island, the location of the port and now firmly under rebel control. His fellow soldier was asleep, cradling a battered AK47 rifle like a teddy bear. Two girls sat huddled in the corner, leaning against unpainted breeze blocks. The fighters, the people and even, it seems, Mr Taylor himself are desperate for peace-keepers to come quickly. On Saturday, Mr Taylor raced out of his heavily fortified compound to address an independence day rally at the Samuel Doe Sports Stadium, now crammed with 30,000 destitute and starving people. “I am convinced that as long as I am here you will continue to die . . . I thank the international community for responding and hope they come sooner rather than later and I will step down. “If I were not here, there would be more bodies all over the place.” story url
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The Children and Armed Conflict Unit