Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
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Change had its euphoric and dysphoric potentialities. Time seemed to drag endlessly, but there was a sense of panicky haste around emerging political and cultural possibilities. Women who sought greater political participation rallied behind the presidential candidacy of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (“Ma Ellen”) and held billboards that read, “Now is the time for us to get on top.” Social roles were being redefined in people’s intimate relationships, norms and morality were being challenged, and histories underwent recodification. In postconflict time, there wasn’t just a possibility of transforming the self into a new form of social citizen; there was a moral imperative to do so. Politicians, pastors, and humanitarians called upon each and every Liberian citizen, saying, “Now is the time”: to change, to search for their own culpability in perpetuating the war, and to take upon themselves the mantle of responsibility for change.
Among humanitarian actors, state bureaucrats, and Liberian civilians, I found a vocal diversity of interests, intentions, and wills to govern, as well as an intense debate over the meaning and application of sovereignty in their daily lives. Across Liberia, people negotiated the pragmatic meaning of postconflict human rights, which promised autonomy and independence in their everyday lives, as well as the rights, goods, and services they were entitled to from the Liberian state (and its proxy, international NGOs). And across Liberia, UNMIL media campaigns issued a call for the restoration of law and order through advertising methods like peace concerts, billboards, posters, and radio jingles.
Postconflict life in Liberia was life outside of the law, in search of law and order. In the early years after the war, when Liberian civilians assembled themselves into community watches to protect against murderous bands of armed burglars, international observers both hailed vigilantism as a sign of civil society and denounced it as a sign of lawlessness. The courts were in disarray, the police forces were effectively demobilized, and the legal system was in a state of suspension, while international consultants and local leaders sifted through twenty years of changes to the Liberian constitution and Liberian legislation in search of the letter of “the law” that was to be restored. In the meantime, the daily violence of postconflict life involved minute, nuanced, personal performances of terror. Even today Liberians recall the punchings, stabbings, and fistfights that transpired around day-to-day acts of hailing a taxi, buying a snack, or waiting in line for a phone card, and they remember how difficult it was to find work, food, and housing. Human life, for a time, was cheap, and rumor had it that young men could be hired to assassinate an enemy or nemesis for as little as $60.
Without an effective police or justice system, fear and insecurity were widespread. The Asakaba gang, rumored to be a group of armed ex-combatants, continuously engaged in break-ins, carjackings, and rapes. Newspapers, radio, and gossip reported witchcraft ordeals, sacrificial child murders, and sorcery-driven dismemberment and cannibalism, in which police were sometimes implicated. Adult children directed gangs to rob their parents’ property, while family members stole from each other.
Unpredictable and uncertain conditions were pervasive. One young social worker, Michael, was completing his associate’s degree in social work while working full-time. On the eve of his final tuition installment, he found that a family member had stolen his entire tuition and savings, leaving him penniless. It was impossible to demand compensation, as both formal and traditional justice systems were broken. Another young man, Sebastian, an ex-combatant, had started a small chicken coop of twenty chickens, which were stolen one night by local robbers. He had nothing left after three years of saved wages from the DDRR process. In DDRR he had studied carpentry, but the six-month skills training had been intermittent and incomplete, and all he could do was work as a manual laborer or gather firewood in the bush. Doing this work was excruciatingly painful; he had a war wound from his years as a National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fighter that ran directly through his right buttock and groin, and he had lost a testicle and the full mobility of his hip joint.
Travel at night was especially unsafe. Taxis are a crucial part of work life in Monrovia, and sharing taxis over long distances is often the only way to get from affordable homes in the urban periphery to low-salaried jobs in Monrovia’s downtown. Fatuma, an NGO worker, was kneecapped by a bandit while waiting for a taxi and then robbed. She also knew of another woman who had been pulled into a cab late at night, then kidnaped, raped, and robbed. Both women had thought there were other passengers in the taxi, but the other passengers were accomplices.
Daniel’s meditation on the denaturing influence of violence speaks to Liberian experiences of the postconflict period:
Where the present dominates, the future and the past, because they have to pass through the present, are shaken even as they partake of the present’s impermanence. Friends whom one considers to be unshakably like-minded change their opinions on vital matters. Today’s good cause turns out to be tomorrow’s evil. Yesterday’s liberators become today’s torturers. Last months’ confidants become next month’s informers. This week’s promise becomes next week’s betrayal. There are shifts in the other direction as well: from worse to better. Bigots turn into ardent nondiscriminators, murderers into penitent helpers, avengers into satyagrahis (nonviolent activists), hatemongers into compassionate human beings, raving extremists into rational mediators, chauvinists into humanists…. When the present looms large in this matter, both memory and hope become either emaciated or bloated. In either case, it is the present that dominates the past, making the past a mere simulacrum of the present. (1996, 107–108)
The country became a time out of time, a time-bounded zone of social, political, and legal experimentation. Activists were able to advance unpopular legislation that supported women’s rights, democratic elections, and state governance. Numerous issues that were heretofore unacceptable for public debate, like Poro and Sande societies, Leopard societies, female genital cutting, and witchcraft ordeals, were being openly discussed. However, the newfound flexibility around the law challenged Liberians’ sense that the law was certain, that it had the legitimacy and the moral conviction that customary and formal legal systems required. In cafés, in newspapers, and on call-in radio shows, Liberians discussed the problems of the recent social, moral, and political order and questioned the legal, moral, and normative foundations of the new postwar society and government.
The Structure of the Book
This book is divided into eight chapters, written with the intention that, “taken as a whole, they are juxtaposed in mutual discordance so as to echo the discordance of the phenomenon being studied—violence and its effects—albeit in a different register” (Daniel 1996, 6). The first chapter has framed the topic of trauma, psychosocial rehabilitation, the project of postconflict reconstruction, and the problem of humanitarian scale. The ethnographic core of the book begins in Chapter 2, which offers a “history of the present” (Moore 1987) of international health policy, Liberian national politics, and NGO coordination of psychosocial and mental health services in Liberia during the time period under investigation; much has changed in the last several years, and this is addressed at the conclusion of the chapter. Chapter 3 conveys the meaning of normality and trauma in postwar Liberia. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 address major sites of mental health and psychosocial interventions: individual and group counseling, gender-based violence, and ex-combatant rehabilitation and DDRR. Chapter 8 focuses on the life stories of Liberian psychosocial workers and examines how they understand the nature of their own labor