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| By Ruth Sinai | "Haaretz", February 08, 2007 |
'They'll kill us if we return'
In the middle of the night the rebels broke into V.G.'s home in Lofa County, Liberia. The year was 1992 and she was 23 years old. She panicked so much that she ran out of the house, and only after running a few hundred meters did she remember that she had left her two-month-old son behind in his cradle. She ran back, but arrived too late. Her son's small body had already been slashed to death.
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| Liberians in South Tel Aviv. Only a fragile calm prevails in their homeland. (Alon Ron) |
'Two decades of decay'
Liberia was established in the mid-19th century by liberated slaves who returned from the United States and ruled over the large native-born majority. For about a century it was considered one of the more progressive countries in Africa, but years of a failing and corrupt government and 14 years of war brought about its destruction. About a quarter of a million Liberians - almost 10 percent of the population - were murdered or died. About 850,000 became refugees, some in Liberia itself, but most in neighboring countries. The law enforcement, health and education systems fell apart, houses were burned and looted, the electricity and water infrastructures were destroyed. Today only one-quarter of the inhabitants have access to clean drinking water. Only 30 percent are literate. The war ended in 2003, and a year later the UN began to bring refugees home. So far over 200,000 have returned. In late 2005 elections were held. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, an economist who lived in the United States for many years, was elected president. Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman to be elected to head an African state, called on the refugees to return and rebuild their country. But in a speech she delivered a few months ago at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., she confirmed that at this point the refugees are burdening the limited resources of her country and therefore it may be preferable for them to wait a while and return when the situation improves. "Over the past two decades of decay, a criminal culture took root," said Johnson-Sirleaf during that same speech in Washington. As a result, three years after the end of the battles, crime and hooliganism are still dominant in many regions. The Liberian refugees who arrived in Israel in 2004-2005 tell of horrors from the ostensible era of peace. Sako Popana's uncle, for example, was murdered in 2004. Popana displays a picture showing his corpse with a bullet hole in his temple. Mohammed Sharif saw his father and his two brothers murdered in 2004 by neighbors who had joined the rebels. "Two of the murderers live in my street. They can easily organize a force and murder me at night if I return there," he says. H.D. got married at the age of 15, the year the terrible war broke out. She and her older sister fled to neighboring Guinea, where they lived for six years. Her husband disappeared. After the end of the fighting in 1996, after an international force was deployed in Liberia, after democratic elections that brought Charles Taylor to power and after the UN announced that the refugees had no reason to be afraid - H.D. returned to her country together with many other refugees. Less than two years later they understood that they had made a mistake. The war broke out again and her brother, 28, was murdered when armed men entered the family home looking for money. H.D.'s mother and another brother disappeared; apparently they were killed, too. Her sister was raped before her eyes. "My nephew, three years old, saw a strange man lying on his mother and tried to help her. They kicked him and threw her on the floor," she says, sobbing. Several of the rapists wore African masks. "All the women in Liberia - young, old - were the rebels' women. They took whomever they wanted, whatever they wanted," H.D. recalls. She was also raped repeatedly, although she was menstruating. She lowers her pants a little and shows the only external scar that has remained from the horror: a circle the size of a coin that the rapists burned into her left thigh with the muzzle of a rifle they heated by firing into the air. After the rapists left, her sister begged her to flee. "My sister loved me very much. She was like a mother to me. She had children and she couldn't run away," she says, crying. H.D. took the family savings, reached the capital, Monrovia, and paid $500 to sail to Egypt. There she paid the smugglers $1,000 so that they would bring her to Israel. When she arrived she contacted her sister and told her she had reached a safe haven. During that emotional conversation her sister told her that she had discovered who raped them: It was their neighbors. That was the last conversation between the sisters. A short time later the rebels burned the family home and murdered her sister. It is evident that H.D. has been traumatized. She wakes up at night, remembering, forgets things during the day, cries. The thought that she will soon be sent back to Liberia terrifies her. She does have one consolation: Miraculously, they found her husband in Israel; he had arrived here a year earlier. "I arrived in Tel Aviv. I saw a black man in the street and asked him if there were Liberians here," she recalls. The man took her to a Liberian acquaintance - and thus she found her husband. They had not seen one another for 15 years, they barely recognized each other. "I cried. He asked me, 'Where were you?' I was embarrassed to tell him I had been raped, but he understood. It happened to almost all the women."
'Rape is the new war'
According to a survey conducted by the Liberian government last year among 1,600 women, 92 percent said they had been victims of sexual assault. According to reports from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 48 percent of the victims of rape who arrived in recent months at the hospital in Monrovia were aged 5-12. Only a year ago, a law was passed in Liberia making rape a crime with a maximum punishment of life imprisonment. Until then only gang rape had been considered a crime. "Rape is the new war in Liberia," said a doctor who was interviewed there for a UN magazine. Recently the government and the UN launched a campaign against rape and sexual exploitation, which will last for five years. The Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia has recommended the establishment of a special court for trying rapists. It is clear to everyone that rehabilitating Liberia will require a tremendous effort. Many of the refugees prefer to wait in exile and see how things develop. Those who returned during the past year have frequently discovered that during their absence rebels took over their homes, their businesses and their fields. UN soldiers who are deployed in Liberia have succeeded in disarming about 100,000 fighters, but in a country in which 85 percent of people of working age are unemployed, there is no employment for former rebels whose only skills are murder and looting. Liberia is today considered one of the poorest countries in the world. Indeed, most of its citizens live on less than $1 a day. Aid workers and human rights activists tell of parents who allow well-to-do men to rape their daughters in order to receive payment from them, in exchange for their silence. The problem is so widespread that in December Johnson-Sirleaf announced that she considers its eradication one of the challenges confronting her government. "Those of you who have had the good fortune of succeeding in business, those who represent the international community - I beg you not to exploit your wealth to exploit women and girls," she said. Rape, says Dr. Galia Sabar of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, has a long-term effect. "It causes damage to two or three generations. Children who are born to rape victims do not have much chance in life, either," she says, explaining that before the Europeans came to Africa, African societies had mechanisms to check the power of men and to protect weaker groups. "Without idealizing these societies, there is no evidence that during the ethnic and tribal wars that preceded the era of colonialism, there were such extreme cases of pure evil, whose depth and horror are hard even to comprehend," says Sabar. The existing mechanisms fell apart under the influence of the violent colonialism forced on the continent, she continues. "Wherever they found a resource in Africa a horrible struggle developed - first over the slaves, afterward over the gold, the rubber, the diamonds. There were no limits and no laws that determined how to attain the resources. This led to the creation of societies and countries in which force is the basis for the way everything is run."
'A crime to be a Mandinka'
M.K. was 22 years old when three soldiers shot her mother to death in the street near their home in Monrovia. Afterward they threw M.K. onto the road and raped her. When they finished, M.K. got up and ran home. But there was nowhere to return to; her house had been burned down. That happened on October 29, 2004 - a year after the end of the war. That same day her girlfriend took her to the port, where M.K. boarded a ship that took her to Egypt. She stayed in Cairo for three months, suffered from harassment and poverty, and was smuggled to Israel. On April 4, 2005 she crossed the border from Sinai, arrived in Tel Aviv and was arrested in the street. She sat in prison for a month and a half and was released by the UN, which recognized her as a refugee. When she told the UN representatives that she had been raped, they sent her for a blood test. Fortunately no signs of illness were found. But the signs of the trauma are evident. Every time she talks about what she experienced, she can barely stop crying. "I have nobody left in the world," says M.K. Hawa Donezo also has no relatives, except for uncles and aunts whom she doesn't know how to find. In 2004, when she was 16, soldiers broke into the family home in Monrovia. Her father had a clothing shop and they wanted his money. The soldiers shot her parents and her 14-year-old sister. Donezo was saved because she happened to be at girlfriend's house at the time. An Egyptian woman, a resident of Monrovia, who employed her mother as a cleaning woman, suggested that Donezo accompany her to Egypt. "She turned me into a slave," says Donezo. "She was a very bad woman." One day Donezo stole money from her to pay smugglers to bring her to Israel. In Tel Aviv she was arrested, held in detention for three months, released and given refugee status. Many of the Liberians who found refuge in Israel are members of the Mandika tribe, descendants of the Mali empire that dominated the trade routes from the Middle East to West Africa. Most of them are Sunni Muslims who were financially successful and therefore acquired enemies. They are proud to relate that Kunta Kinte, a central figure in "Roots," the famous book by Alex Haley that describes how the Liberians were brought as slaves to the U.S., was a Mandinka. "It's a crime to be a Mandinka," says Mohammed Sharif, who arrived in Israel in 2005. On July 27, 1990, when he was 20 years old, he explains, neighbors who had joined the rebels led by Prince Johnson entered his home in Monrovia. One of the neighbors was employed by Sharif's father and knew that he was a diamond dealer. They demanded money from his father and when they didn't get it, took him and Sharif's two brothers downstairs and shot the three of them to death in front of the building. Fourteen years later, on October 28, 2004, the family home was attacked once again. This time it was burned as well. Sharif fled. The murderous neighbors remained in the neighborhood. He is afraid to see them again, for fear that they will hurt him as well.
Rebels and human rights
The most veteran refugee in Israel, Edwin Baroni, has been here for 17 years. Ayuba Akana, who was elected last year as the president of the Liberian community in Israel and is leading their struggle, has been in Israel for nine years. Like some of his friends, he is married to a Filipina. Others married refugees from other African countries. In Israel 16 children were born to the group. The exiles do not believe that their welfare will be guaranteed if they return home. They remember the bitter lesson learned by the refugees who returned a decade ago. "We will prefer to sit in prison in Israel rather than returning there," says Paley Apsila. "They'll kill us if we return." Apsila was a farmer until the outbreak of the war. Together with his father he raised cacao and vegetables, as well as tending a herd of cows. One day when he went out with his father to take care of the herd, the rebels arrived in the village. "We heard shooting. My father began to go back home. I heard three shots and saw him fall. I climbed a tree and hid," he says. Meanwhile in the village the women were raped, even the older ones, and the men were shot. Apsila's mother and his wife disappeared. The village was burned to the ground. "Where will we live if we return there?" he asks now. Dr. Sabar says that even today, some of the rebel organizations, particularly in districts distant from the capital, do not accept the authority of the Liberian president. "Her regime is very committed to human rights, and the situation is much better than it was. But the rule is that there are no rules and nobody knows what will happen there," she explains. In light of the fragile calm, the UN extended the mandate of its 15,000 soldiers until 2008. Attorney Ari Syrquin, who was hired by the local Liberian refugees in an attempt to prevent their deportation, believes that the extension of the UN mandate is proof of the fact that returning refugees are still in danger. Therefore he wants Israel to enable the refugees to remain here for another year - or at least until this coming October, the date determined by the U.S. for the Liberians who have found refuge within its borders to leave. "They're a small, high-quality and dedicated group," Syrquin wrote a week ago to Interior Minister Roni Bar-On, "who will not do any harm by remaining in Israel until the international organizations confirm that the rule of law has in fact been restored to their homeland, Liberia."
They can go home - in nine months
Michael Bavli, the Israeli representative of the UN High Commission for Refugees, says that the war in Liberia ended a long time ago, as did the elections. The UN waited to see how the results of the elections would be accepted by the opposition, and saw that there was no resistance. Therefore - and because the UN has thus far helped about 250,000 refugees to return to their country - Bavli has told the Interior Ministry that as far as the UN is concerned, the Liberians can go back. However, Bavli has asked that they be allowed to remain in Israel for another nine months in order to get organized, to undergo professional training in mechanics and computers, and to submit individual requests for refuge status in Israel on the basis of a well-founded fear that they would be in danger in their homeland. Most of the Liberians have submitted requests and have been interviewed by Bavli's office. Only two were found to be eligible to remain in Israel as refugees. Bavli says that every group of refugees from Africa that arrives in Israel tells about horrific experiences. That is true of the Ethiopians, the Sierra Leoneans and the Togolese. But most return to their country in the end and are reabsorbed there. Today there are about 150 refugees in Israel with permanent status, and about another 700 with temporary status. "The desire of the Liberians to stay here is understandable, but I don't think we have to give in on this issue," he says.
