All Sides in Liberian Conflict Make Women Spoils of War
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

TOTOTA, Liberia ? On that burning hot morning, peace had already been declared in this war-beaten country, West African peacekeepers were on the ground and President Charles G. Taylor had already left the country, ushering in what was widely seen as an end to strife.

Yet the lingering sound of gunfire sent Annie Joe running frightened through the woods and into a group of four or five men with AK-47's on their shoulders.

They demanded that she go with them. They kept her in a house all night and raped her, one after the other. In the morning they told her to go away. There was no use resisting. "When you want to fight, they say, `We kill you,' " she recalled.

Here as in other places, war made women the spoils of conquest, not unlike sacks of rice and four-wheel-drive vehicles. But what stands out is that in the succession of conflicts in Liberia since 1989, many women, and sometimes the same women, were raped by fighters from all sides.They were raped when Mr. Taylor was a rebel leader fighting his way to the presidency. They were raped when the next band of rebels fought to oust him. They have been raped since Mr. Taylor's departure on Aug. 11, as his loyalists and enemies continue to fight in remote jungle outposts far from areas patrolled by 4,000 United Nations peacekeepers.

The scale of the problem is impossible to ascertain precisely in a country where everything has been destroyed. But anecdotal evidence suggests that 14 years of intermittent warfare crushed many traditional sanctions, unleashing conduct unthinkable in normal times.

Mothers and daughters were raped by the same men. Boys assaulted women old enough to be their mothers.

Rebuilding the social fabric is among the toughest challenges facing Liberia's transitional government. That government is made up of the very warring factions that are accused of atrocities, and it remains to be seen how it will respond to the competing demands of reconciliation and redress.

The chairman of the unity government, C. Gyude Bryant, has said nothing publicly about how war crimes will be punished, but some human rights advocates are calling on the United Nations mission here to support a commission of inquiry.

"In terms of justice, it's something that has to be addressed," said Leslie Lefkow, a researcher with the New York-based group Human Rights Watch. "It has happened on such a huge scale, and it has had such enormous repercussions for the society. I'm convinced that the level at which this has happened would constitute war crimes."

So far, the courts in this country have been hardly provided recourse. The stigma of rape still makes it a crime that most women here find too difficult to speak of.

Still, Mrs. Joe, 23, and a few other women gathered the courage to tell their stories one afternoon in a tarpaulin-and-grass tent that serves as a rape counseling center at a sprawling camp for displaced people. One woman, like Mrs. Joe, recalled being captured by armed men as she was fleeing fighting just north of here.

A third described how armed men had broken into her house, demanded money and then assaulted her while her baby lay on the floor, wailing. She still has no clue who they were, nor whom they were fighting for.

"Rebel, government, they are the same people!" she said. Her baby, a malnourished little boy, clung to her back.

In the capital, Monrovia, one mother, who wanted to be identified only by her village name, Ma Voph, screamed as she recounted how her daughter, Nannu, had been raped and killed on the morning of her 10th birthday.

On that Sunday morning in July, in a quiet residential section of Monrovia, she recalled how she had sung a chorus of "Happy Birthday," fixed Nannu a bowl of oats and let her indulge in a bottle of syrupy grape-flavored Fanta.

It was not even noon when men loyal to Mr. Taylor burst into her home. Terrified, Nannu clutched the end of her mother's blouse, yelling, "Mommy!"

One soldier, who called himself Black Dog, raped and killed Ma Voph's daughter. Another militiaman assaulted a 14-year-old girl whom the mother was raising.

Most of all, Ma Voph said, they took away her sense of herself. A stout, proud woman of 42, she described how she had pulled herself up from her village, cared for her siblings when their own mother died, opened a shop in the capital, bought a car, raised her own children and took in someone else's.

Then three men with guns wrecked it all. Delirious from grief, the woman whispered the same refrain again and again: "They used to call me Mother."

Over and over, she told Mariama Brown, the director of the Concerned Christian Community, the Liberian nonprofit group that runs rape counseling centers, that she would rather die than live.

"Where do I start from?" she wondered aloud. "Everything's gone."

If she killed herself now, Ms. Brown reminded her, she would pay a potentially dear price. Her 16-year-old son would only seek revenge. The cycle would never end.

"How many persons depend on calling you Mother?" Ms. Brown demanded. "You will be back on your feet. They will still call you Mother. You have to be the one now to stand up."