This moment, they have been waiting for it for so long. Since bloodthirsty madness plunged their country, Liberia, into civil war at the end of the 20e century. Monday, October 10, in Paris, three men and a woman from this distant West African state will take their place on the bench of the civil parties, in front of the Assize Court. For magistrates and jurors, Stephen C., Jasper C., Fayah G. and Rebecca K. will once again describe the atrocities they witnessed and suffered in their Lofa county in 1993 and 1994.
Facing them, a compatriot they thought they would never see again: Kunti Kamara, 47, a former commander of the United Liberation Movement for Democracy (Ulimo), one of the armed groups whose struggle for power made 250,000 died between 1989 and 2003. A murderer, a torturer and a cannibal, swear his accusers. An innocent by his defense. The charges are heavy – “acts of torture and aggravated barbarity”, “crimes against humanity” – and could earn him life imprisonment.
Colonel Kamara, alias “CO Kunti” (commanding officer Kunti), surely did not imagine having to one day give an account of the horrors perpetrated in Lofa, when Ulimo fought its opponents from the National Patriotic Front of Liberia ( NPFL) by Charles Taylor. During those years of blood and terror, far from prying eyes and television cameras, the various factions competed in cruelty against civilians whose ethnicity was worth allegiance to one or the other of the camps: pregnant women eviscerated, castrated men, intestines stretched out as a barrier at checkpoints, pieces of human bodies sold to dumbfounded villagers at the cry of “Who wants to buy beef? ».
The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, published in 2009, revealed the extent of these horrors and underlined that Lofa, occupied by Ulimo, was among the most martyred regions. But the Liberian judiciary did not hold accountable the former warlords who remained in the country or their henchmen.
Their comrades settled in the West also seemed out of reach. It took the courage of a few victims, and the tenacity of a Swiss NGO, Civitas Maxima, created in 2012 to document the barbarity of these forgotten conflicts, to bring their bloody past back to life.
Small arrangements with the truth
In October 2017 the first warning shot sounded: the former commander of Ulimo Mohammed Jabbateh, known as “Jungle Jabbah”, a refugee in the United States, was sentenced to thirty years in prison for having lied on his CV to the American security services. ‘immigration.
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