Civil war has ended in the west African state, but the sexual violence that characterised the conflict remains. Now, women are fighting for their right to peace writes SUSAN McKAY in Gbarnga.
WE ARE sitting in Teeta’s office when the girl walks in, hand in hand with a little boy. There’s hardly room to move in the tiny office, in a government building in Gbarnga town, in the north of Liberia. Teeta’s two co-workers are hardly visible behind the stacks of paper on their desks and the room is crammed with stacked-up plastic chairs and boxes and placards from a recent anti-rape march. The posters on the wall say, “No sex for help”, “Don’t touch ma body”, “no means no” and “my friend, take your hands from on me”. The girl is small and thin in a green T-shirt and a long, dusty skirt. She’s carrying some rolled-up pages.
She talks in a low, urgent voice to Teeta in Liberian pidgin English.
Teeta listens. The girl pushes the papers across the desk. Teeta reads them and explains the girl’s story. “This child was about 14 when a man had sex with her, and she had this boy. The man is an attorney – probably some relative. He was up on a charge and the girl was offered as a way of getting him off. This man promised to pay her some money to look after the child. There was a written agreement.”
Teeta shows me the papers. They are receipts. Strange receipts, which include clauses such as “when she shall find another man to keep her I will no more be responsible”. There’s a scrawl at the bottom which is meant to be the girl’s signature. “She’s illiterate,” says Teeta.
“She’s been signing these but she says he hasn’t paid her a thing.She’s walked a long way to come here today because she needs a dollar to pay her rent. She’s about 17 and she has three children, all to different men. Her mother is dead and she doesn’t know where her father is. The only income she has is what she makes from selling firewood she gathers in the forest.”
Teeta sighs. I ask her what she can do for the girl. She says she’ll refer her to a clinic for contraceptive advice and a medical check, and that she’ll write to the children’s unit at the ministry of justice. “There’s no point referring this to her local court,” she says. “The man who raped her works there.”
The girl sits perfectly still, staring ahead. Her little boy points excitedly at the bright posters.
Teeta is a local gender co-ordinator for Liberia’s ministry of gender, part of a network of women around the west African state. She also runs Teeta’s Place, a small bar in a shack by the side of Gbarnga’s wide, red earth road. She’s a war widow – her husband was one of the 300,000 or so who were killed during 14 years of brutal civil war. Most of the dead were civilians. Over a million people fled the countryside. A peace agreement was signed in 2003. A recent survey conducted by the World Health Organisation found that in areas effected by the conflict, more than 75 per cent of women had been raped, and 92 per cent had experienced some level of sexual violence.
Gbarnga was a particularly violent place, the headquarters of former president Charles Taylor. His mansion, empty now, is still visible among the banana trees on the edge of town. He was exiled in 2003 and is currently on trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. His son has just been jailed for 97 years in the US for crimes against humanity committed in Liberia. The town still has plenty of abandoned houses, their walls pockmarked by bullets.
Teeta spends her days listening to women talking about what happened during the war, and what has happened since. “There was one village we went to and every single woman there had been raped or gang raped,” she says. “Then they burned the houses down.” She tells me other stories, too disturbing to recount.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission held a hearing in Gbarnga. It found that all factions which were engaged in the conflict “violated, degraded, abused and denigrated, committed sexual and gender-based violence against women including rape, sexual slavery, forced marriages and other dehumanising forms of violations.”
Young boys were enlisted into militias, fed with drink and drugs, and encouraged to excessive violence. Sometimes they dressed up in wigs and women’s clothes as they went marauding through the countryside.
The trouble is, Teeta says, the war is over, but the gender-based violence hasn’t stopped. Very young children, including babies, are being raped; schoolgirls are being forced to have sex with teachers in return for getting good marks; domestic violence is rife. New laws and awareness campaigns are encouraging women and girls to speak out, but too often, victims withdraw the charges before their cases come to court. “Every day in this office we hear of two to four cases of sexual or domestic violence,” Teeta says. “We help them to go to the police but we can’t force them. Often, when we turn our backs, they compromise.”
The abuser will work on his victim and her family, offering money and gifts if the charge is dropped, threatening dire consequences if it isn’t, she explains. They used to try to bribe Teeta, too, but they found it didn’t work. “We recently had a perpetrator jailed for life. The woman couldn’t be compromised because he had beaten her so badly that she died.”
Liberian women are fighting back, standing for election into local government, demanding a say among the traditional village elders. Some are taking advantage of new property laws pioneered by the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia (Afell) to reclaim the land they used to farm with their husbands before the war, but which their in-laws took back after their husbands were killed. Traditional marriage laws allowed this – Afell has outlawed it. Many women work as market traders, walking miles every day to collect and sell their goods. When one of them was picked up on a roadside and brutally murdered last year, the women mounted a campaign to have the perpetrator brought to justice.
The president is a feminist, which helps. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who is 71, is deeply concerned both because many of her female citizens are deeply traumatised and because the violence is ongoing.
“There was a culture of impunity because of the war. There has been a complete breakdown of morality,” she tells me. “Our approach right now is to try to empower the women to become normal again, by engaging them in productive activities, by ensuring they are part of society, by introducing education and training, to enable them to understand their potential.”
There are huge, graphic billboards in the capital declaring that “Rape is a crime” and that “Women are precious – don’t beat them.” The Irish government is exploring a twinning arrangement with Liberia on the implementation of UN resolution 1325, which recognises women’s experience of gender-based violence in war, and insists on their involvement in peace building. Irish aid agencies including Trócaire and Concern have programmes in the country.
The Duport Road clinic is on the edge of Monrovia’s red light district, named, it turns out, after a now defunct traffic light. This is the market area – hundreds of men, women and children sit cross-legged over stacks of pineapples and yams, potato greens, soap, bicycle tyres or great chunks of bony meat. A football match blares out on speakers from a bar. There are shacks with tin roofs, like the Two Sister’s Beauty Salon – “looking good is money” – and the Tell Jesus Communication Centre. Cars and trucks crawl through a constant traffic jam.Ramshackle yellow taxis have painted slogans, like “life can change” and “thank God I made it”. At the clinic, run by a religious charity, I am introduced to Ave, a woman who has come for treatment. Ave, a market trader, walks painfully and sits down with difficulty. A week ago, she tells us, she was woken up in the early hours by a gang of people chopping at her door with cutlasses. While some of them ransacked her house, stealing everything of value, the others stripped her and dragged her outside, taking turns to rape her. One of them was a woman. Ave’s 12-year-old daughter screamed for help and the police came.
Seven people were arrested. Ave knew them. She says some of them were ex-combatants. “Can you imagine, the pastor in my father’s church came and asked us to forgive them?” Ave says. “My husband says we are disgraced. This horrible story will always be with us now. I am so hurt. For them to invade me like that. I am so angry.” She begins to shout. “For God in heaven! I will revenge! The government should kill these wicked people. There is no justice for the poor in Liberia. But with God all things are possible.” And then Ave stands up and unwraps her dress. She stands in front of us, scraped and cut and naked.
Susan McKay travelled to Liberia with the assistance of a bursary from the Simon Cumbers fund