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Background

The conflict in Liberia, which began in late 1989, when then rebel leader Charles Taylor launched an incursion from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, has been characterized by brutal ethnic killings and massive abuses against the civilian population. Although the conflict is rooted in historical grievances, the brutal tactics employed from 1989 to 1997, including targeting of particular ethnic groups by Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) and later the United Liberian Movement for Democracy in Liberia (ULIMO) were previously unknown in Liberian history.

In the almost eight years of fighting before a binding ceasefire was negotiated in 1997, numerous efforts to bring about peace were unsuccessful. In the interim, civilians suffered at the hands of the fighting groups; thousands of Liberians were killed in the fighting and subject to torture, beatings, rape, and sexual assault, resulting in massive displacement inside and outside the country. Following the ceasefire of 1997, Charles Taylor, former head of the NPFL, was elected as president of the country.

The Taylor government was marred by widespread corruption and abuse, further widening the divisions and deepening popular resentments caused by the civil war. State power was regularly used for the personal enrichment of government officials with little or no accountability to the Liberian citizenry. The LURD incursion from Guinea, which began in 2000, was the fifth serious outbreak of violence in Liberia since Taylor’s election and launched Liberia back into four more years of civil warfare.3 In 2003, a negotiated ceasefire, the departure of Charles Taylor from office and the country, and the deployment of regional and later international peacekeepers have brought an end to major conflict, although fighting and human rights abuses persist in areas outside the U.N.’s control.

The use of children as soldiers dates to the start of the conflict in 1989. Taylor’s NPFL became infamous for the abduction and use of boys in war; a tactic later adopted by other Liberian fighting factions as well as other fighting groups in West Africa.4 Between 6,000 and 15,000 children are estimated to have taken up arms from 1989 to 1997.5 A demobilization program conducted in 1997 was only partially successful in rehabilitating children, in part due to limited funding and insecurity in the countryside. Many of the same children who had fought previously became easily re-recruited when fighting resumed in 2000.6



3 See Human Rights Watch, “Back to the Brink War Crimes by Liberian Government and Rebels,” A Human Rights Watch Report, Vol. 14, No. 4(A), May 2002, pp. 2-4.

4 See Human Rights Watch/Africa, “Easy Prey: Child Soldiers in Liberia,” A Human Rights Watch Report, September 8, 1994.

5 Kelly, David, The Disarmament, Demobilization & Reintegration of Child Soldiers in Liberia, 1994-1997: The Process and Lessons Learned, A Collaborative Report by UNICEF-Liberia and the U.S. National Committee for UNICEF, March 1998, p. 39.

6 Human Rights Watch interview, Monrovia, October 29, 2003.


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February 2004