By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Now that she is here, with a warm Silver Spring apartment and a steady nursing job, Wilhelmina Brewer never talks about it: the day 17 years ago when armed rebels stormed her neighborhood and her father disappeared, the cross-country trek to safety outside the borders of war-wracked Liberia, the corpses she passed along the way.
But on a recent chilly Sunday, Brewer sat in a Georgia Avenue restaurant and agreed to speak. She filled out a pale green form, volunteering to tell her story for a historic attempt to bring a degree of healing to her homeland, where 14 years of ethnically charged butchery left as many as 250,000 dead.
Like similar projects in other countries, Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission aims to document the atrocities that occurred in that West African nation in hopes of avoiding their repetition. But the Liberian commission, its organizers say, is the first to gather testimony from refugees outside its borders, who, like Brewer, carried with them memories of abuse and horror.
"The main thing that was in our mind was to escape," said Brewer, a round-faced woman of 30, her sweet voice growing impassioned as she recently recounted her family's flight. "You see the bodies in the street. It's the only thing in your mind -- to escape."
At least 30 nations have established truth commissions. In some countries, such as South Africa and Argentina, they have drawn global attention and issued powerful reports. In others, such as Bolivia, they have disbanded midway because they lacked resources and political will.
Facilitated by a Minnesota human rights group, the U.S. statement gathering began in Minneapolis in 2006 and has spread to seven other cities with significant numbers of Liberians, who now guard their stories in urban apartments and suburban developments. In the Washington region, home to more than 5,000 Liberian immigrants, the project was launched recently with a modest event at a yellow-walled eatery, where about a dozen people listened as a commissioner visiting from Liberia made her pitch.
"This is our time as Liberians to see how best we can face our past," said Oumu K. Syllah, a nurse wearing a celery-color suit and a serious expression. "We know that it's difficult. But this is the time to reconcile. This is the time to do justice."
There were no questions. Near the bar, Edwin Lloyd, a pastor, sipped juice from a plastic cup and said he was unsurprised by the silence. He has seen it at his Beltsville parish, Whosoever Will Christian Church, where his Liberian congregants sometimes publicly thank God for getting them out alive but mostly don't describe their experiences.
"A lot of them have vivid memories of what transpired," Lloyd, 42, said. "I have the mental strength to endure what I saw. A lot of people don't have that."
This is what Lloyd saw, as he walked in a long line of migrants fleeing Monrovia, the capital: Bodies "every 10 steps." Fathers killed in front of their children. Starving babies abandoned by mothers who had no food to give them. Rebels who had just beheaded a victim holding up bloody knives like trophies. This is what he heard: the rustling of people being dragged into bushes, then the blast of gunfire.
"Most of the time I would just turn my back, not to watch," Lloyd said. "It's not something you want to see."
Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves, was relatively stable until a 1980 coup ushered in a repressive military regime. That government was overthrown by rebel leader Charles Taylor in 1989, leading to 14 years of civil war characterized by mass rapes and brutality. Some victims were burned alive or disemboweled, others hacked with machetes or shot by machine gun-toting child soldiers. Hundreds of thousands more were displaced.
The fighting ended in 2003, and Taylor is now awaiting trial at the Hague for war crimes. The truth commission has set about creating a record of the mayhem from 1979 to 2003, and commissioners decided that the project could be accurate only if it included the testimony of the thousands of people who left, said Robin Phillips, executive director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. The overseas project has targeted Liberians in a Ghanaian refugee camp and in London and might expand elsewhere as resources allow, she said.
Unlike the South African commission, Liberia's commission is not offering the possibility of amnesty in exchange for confessions. And although it can recommend prosecutions, it has no power to bring perpetrators to justice.
The latter troubles some Liberians, said Patricia Minikon, a Liberian-born immigration lawyer who practices in Silver Spring and is overseeing the Washington area project.
"Some people have said, 'Well, is the truth and reconciliation commission all that's going to happen? What about accountability?' " Minikon said. "And my suggestion is, if you feel that accountability needs to enter the picture, then you need to give your statement and put that in the statement, to have your voice heard. You have to be a part of the process, or you can't really complain as to the result you get."
Minikon, who left Liberia during the military rule, volunteered to run the local project and was accepted -- after, she notes, her name was vetted by Liberian officials who made sure she did not have "unclean hands."
Aided by American University law students and a Washington law firm whose attorneys also are volunteering their time, Minikon has been papering African markets with fliers and knocking on doors at the apartment complexes where many Liberians have settled, most in Silver Spring. She tells them that they can give statements anonymously and that this is their chance to help establish truth about Liberia's gruesome past and help shape its future. Public hearings are scheduled in the United States sometime this year.
One who will not be giving a statement is Brentwood resident George Siaway, who calls the commission "a cop-out, totally."
Siaway, 54, fled Liberia two decades ago, leaving his young son, also named George, with family friends. Seven years later, with the civil war well underway, Siaway was making plans to send for the younger George.
Before that could happen, George, then 12, went out to search for food and never came back. Rebels later informed his caretakers that the boy had been murdered. His body was never found.
Siaway, now a public health analyst for the District government, said he would like to ask his son's killers why a hungry boy deserved death. And he would like to see them face justice.
Liberia's bloodshed, Siaway said, was caused by "just a bunch of greedy gangsters who held the country hostage. And I feel that they should be held accountable. Because if you don't, you set a precedent where there's incentive to repeat this entire act."
Brewer remembers lucidly the day rebels captured her Monrovia suburb. Her father, a police officer who worked for the government the fighters were ousting, was on duty.
Forced out of their home, Brewer, her mother and eight siblings set off on what became a two-year walk through the eastern hinterlands of Liberia, away from people who might know them and reveal their father's connection to the military regime. The family would stop along the way to stay in villages for days, sometimes months.
Not infrequently, fighters would drag away her brothers, tie them up and interrogate them. Were they from the wrong ethnic group? Did they have any connection to the former government?
"Everybody, we said, no matter what, you cannot be talking!" Brewer recalled later in her apartment, sitting on the edge of her sofa in a burgundy bathrobe. "Then the whole family -- dead."
The family made it to a refugee camp in Ivory Coast in 1992, then two years later to another camp in Ghana. In 2000, the family arrived in the United States. Today, she and her Liberian husband and friends often discuss their nation's progress and politics. Never its carnage.
But she will give a statement.
"In order to let things go, you have to be able to speak out," she said. "If you keep things in, you always have that hatred."
For her part, Brewer said she will be satisfied if Taylor alone faces justice. She notes that her father -- whose body was never found and whom she still refers to as "missing" -- worked for the military regime, and so there might be people who believe he should have been punished.
"I don't think we need to be at that level," Brewer said. "It's like a revenge thing. . . . That's the thing we need to leave."
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