Liberia’s civil war ended in 2003. Now it wants to try its war criminals.

It has been two decades since the end of Liberia’s second civil war, but Adama Kiatamba Dempster’s memories of the conflict are still vivid and haunting. 

One in particular is seared in his mind. Rebels had set up a checkpoint, where they asked each person passing through to state their tribe. As Mr. Dempster waited his turn, he watched people who gave the “wrong” answer being ushered away from the line. Then “you hear gunshots, and you never see those people come back,” he remembers. 

Today, Mr. Dempster is a human rights activist and father of four. But like many who experienced the horrors of Liberia’s two civil wars, which lasted from 1989 to 2003 and killed around 250,000 people, he has struggled to fully put the past behind him. 

This is in part because there has been so little accountability for the crimes of that era, which included widespread rape, massacres, and the forced conscription of thousands of child soldiers. Although a few of those responsible have been convicted in international courts, not a single suspect has been prosecuted in Liberia itself. 

“No wounds have been healed, no reparations have taken place, no form of apologies have been recorded,” says Mr. Dempster, co-founder of the Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for accountability for war crimes. 

That could now change. In May, Liberia’s president, Joseph Boakai, signed an executive order to create a special war crimes court. Now, activists say, the fight is to ensure that promise does not fall by the wayside, and that victims are given a path to justice before it is too late. 

A long road to reconciliation

For more than a century, Liberia was ruled by the descendants of formerly enslaved people from the United States. Indigenous Liberians were an oppressed underclass. In 1980, an Indigenous-led faction of the military overthrew the government, setting in motion a bloody struggle for power that eventually exploded into two back-to-back civil wars. 

Over the course of that conflict, 10% of the population died and half were forced to flee their homes. More than 20,000 children fought on the front lines. 

The wars’ extraordinary brutality blurred the lines between perpetrators and victims, and left few Liberians untouched. After the war, a truth and reconciliation commission was set up to allow Liberians to record the horrors they experienced or inflicted. 

The commission collected more than 20,000 testimonies. In 2010, it issued a set of recommendations based on that evidence. It called for, among other things, the creation of a war crimes court. 

That never happened.

A big part of the problem, experts say, was that many of the people likely to be tried by such a court were then running the country. 

“The politicians who once played major roles in bringing the war, executing a war, violating people’s rights are the ones who want to move forward and say let bygones be bygones,” says Ahmed Sirleaf, a scholar of transitional justice at the University of Minnesota, who was himself a refugee during the first civil war. 

He helped the truth commission to collect testimonies of Liberians living in the diaspora, and he says that even today, a generation after the war, the conflict remains an open wound. In particular, he says, few citizens have been given the mental health care they need to recover from their traumas. “People are hurting. The country is not moving forward,” Mr. Sirleaf says. 

Meanwhile, a few of the conflict’s leaders have been tried in international courts, notably Charles Taylor. In 2012, the rebel leader-turned-president was sentenced to life in prison by a special court in neighboring Sierra Leone, whose own parallel civil war he helped instigate. The court found him guilty of “aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.” 

“Justice and closure”

In Liberia itself, however, justice has remained largely elusive. That is, until April of this year, when the country’s Legislature voted almost unanimously in favor of establishing a new government office whose purpose was to set up a war crimes court. When Mr. Boakai signed the bill in early May, he explained the court was key to “bringing justice and closure” to the country. 

Activists stress that the court must be victim-focused and independent of local political power struggles if it is to succeed. Organizations supporting survivors and other human rights groups must be allowed to act as “the moral guarantor” of the court, argues Mr. Dempster.

For now, the court remains a long way off. The executive order created an office, which in turn is meant to come up with the “mechanisms and processes for the establishment of a Special War Crimes Court.”  

Years of campaigning by survivors, as well as diplomatic efforts by foreign governments, helped bring Liberia to this point. But some politicians’ support for the court remains difficult to parse. For instance, among those who voted to establish the court were former rebel leaders, including Prince Johnson, who was infamously filmed drinking a beer as he ordered his forces to torture and kill the country’s then-president, Samuel Doe, in 1989. 

“We are up for peace, and we do not want any trouble,” Mr. Johnson told local journalists in April, before adding that his own actions in the war had been just. “I am a brave soldier. I came to liberate my people,” he said.