I was born in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, on April 14, 1981. My father was a trader in clothes. He came from the Fulah ethnic group. He was also an Imam, respected for his spiritual teachings throughout Grand Gedeh County, in the east, where we went to live. Because my mother knew the President, Samuel Doe, as a child, our family counted as his supporters.
The tall young man, with a round face and an innocent, disbelieving, look who is telling me his story, is called Alpha. Today, he lives on the streets of Cairo, where he fled to seek asylum after President Does assassination.
Because my mothers closest friend Alice had no children, and my mother had six, Alice asked for me to go to live with her. Alice worked for the President in an office in his mansion and when I was four I was sent to Monrovia to live in her house and go to school nearby, seeing my family only in the holidays. Like my mother, Alice was a Krahn. I was very happy with her, and she loved me. Her husband, who had been one of the Presidents bodyguards, had been killed in an attempted coup.
On December 24 1989, rebel forces under Charles Taylor crossed the border from the Ivory Coast into Liberia. Fighting began in the east, in Nimba County, soon spreading to Grand Gedeh.
Alphas father was conducting prayers in the mosque in a town called Sanniquille when the rebels arrived. Recognizing the Imam as a supporter of President Doe, they cut his throat, leaving a note on the body saying that they would do the same to the President. Before they withdrew, they shot the other men caught praying in the mosque. Later, the Imams body, with the note pinned to his robes, was carried to Monrovia. Alpha was then eight.
Alice told me what had happened to my father, Alpha continues. The President spoke to me kindly and took me to see fathers body. I was very unhappy, and for several days I wouldnt eat. The President gave Alice some money to get me a bicycle and some new clothes.
A brutal civil war
The random horror of civil war runs through every chapter of Alphas story. All through the spring of 1990 the rebels advanced on Monrovia. They had by now split into two rival forces, those of Prince Johnson and those of Charles Taylor. Johnson and his men reached the city first, but it was Taylor who declared himself President. Doe appealed to the Economic Committee of West African States for help. Alice took Alpha and fled to a suburb of the city where many Krahns lived. When food ran out, they ate the leaves of five fingers, a plant that grew wild in the cemetery. In August, the West African security forces, ECOMOG, reached Monrovia where, helped by Johnson and his men, who were in favour of free elections, they landed troops and set up a base. Taylor continued to hold part of the city. Reassured by the presence of ECOMOG forces, President Doe, surrounded by bodyguards and carrying a white flag, was driven towards the port. Before he could reach safety his convoy was attacked and his bodyguards killed. Doe himself, still alive, was stripped naked and a broken bottle used to cut off one ear. Word had gone out that he was protected by magic powers, and he was beaten to disprove it. His genitals were cut off. After his death, Khrans, Mandingos and Muslims, all seen by the rebels as opponents, were murdered all over the city. Alice and the eight year old Alpha now had two choices: they could try to reach the port and board a ship for Sierra Leone or Ghana, or they could start walking towards the Sierra Leonean border. Alice decided to walk.
We were soon stopped by rebel soldiers. Alice spoke Bassa, the language of one of the tribes still accepted by the rebels, and she told them in Bassa that she was my mother. They didnt believe her and forced us to get into a truck where there were two dead bodies. But a rebel officer wanted the truck and we managed to escape and join thousands of people walking towards Duala, away from the city.
We were lucky. Every time we were stopped by soldiers something happened and we managed to get away. There were thousands and thousands of refugees on the roads, and no one really knew what was happening. So we kept on walking towards the border. Many days passed. We got nearer and nearer to Sierra Leone.
One morning we reached the town of Bag, just inside Grand Cape Mount County. Bag had become a killing field for the rebels. Here I saw people with their arms tied back, while the rebels split their stomachs open with their knives, to look at their hearts, or, if they were pregnant women, to see if the babies were boys or girls. It was the first time I had seen killings like this, like cutting up sheep. The rebel commander in charge in Bag thought he recognised Alice from a trip she had once made to the area with the President. She denied it and kept saying that she wasnt a Krahn but a Bassa. When he asked about me, she said she had no idea who I was and that I was simply a little boy she had picked up along the way. I had to watch while he hit her and slapped her. Then he took her away and locked her in a room, saying that another commander was coming next day and that he would decide what to do with her. I spent all night in a field nearby.
Next morning very early, more rebels arrived. They brought Alice out with her arms tied behind her, and they kept hitting her. Her body was so covered in blood that I could hardly recognise her. They shot some people. Then they pulled Alice out and cut her head off, then sawed bits of her body off. I just stood there watching. I couldnt move. I couldnt speak. I saw them pull her head off and then they took it to the field and began to kick it around. They were laughing. I felt dazed. I didnt know what I was doing.
Alpha doesnt remember what happened to him next. He knows that he must have joined some of the other refugees and kept walking towards the border, and that there he must have found a way across. What he remembers next is being in Jenema across the frontier in Sierra Leone and doing odd jobs for people in exchange for food. He fell ill and was looked after by an old woman. Then with another Liberian child, also on her own, he went back into Liberia, where the ECOMOG soldiers were now in control of part of the country. He washed clothes for the officers. They took him back with them in their jeep to Monrovia. He was now nine years old.
I wandered around the city. I went back to where I had lived with Alice but all the people I had known had gone. I was very hungry. I heard that the UN had a camp and I went there and was fed. There was a market and I carried things. One day I recognised a woman who told me that my mother was still alive and in Monrovia. When my mother saw me she cried. She told me that my brothers and sisters had escaped to the Ivory Coast but that she had come back to Monrovia to try to find me. I felt very happy. We found out that a ship was leaving for Ghana in a few days time and we planned to take it. But next day Charles Taylors rebels attacked Monrovia. My mother had been living in a community of European nuns. The rebels killed them all and my mother as well.
From violence to uncertainty
Alpha was alone again. The rebels were forced back by ECOMOG and he lived in a displaced peoples camp. There was relative peace in the city and he started to go to school, paid for by a Muslim family who had befriended him. When fighting resumed and they were killed, the school let him stay on and he did washing in return for food. He made new friends, but they too died in a further massacre of Khrans and he saw their bodies laid out on a church floor. What happened to him next, however, saved his life.
I didnt know what to do next. I had to keep moving. One day I went to the government offices and I was standing there when a senator called Sam Fineboy came by. He asked me what I was doing and I told him what had happened to me. He told me to come back next day. When I saw him again he said that he had found out about my family and that I would not be safe if I stayed in Liberia. Somehow he got me a passport. A few days later he took me to the airport and put me on a plane. I asked him where I was going. He told me I was going to Cairo.
Alpha reached Egypt on December 9, 1999. He was 18. He spoke Fulah, the language of his father, a little Bassa and good English, which he had learned at school. It took him many, many hours of waiting to get an appointment with UNHCR for an interview set for May 2002. He has had clashes with Egyptians in the street and once been hit on the head with a stick with a rusty nail, which bled heavily. He sleeps on the floor of a friends room and does the washing for an Egyptian, in exchange for his food.
In Liberia, Charles Taylor, whose soldiers murdered first his father and Alice, and then his mother, and whose attacks on Krahns and Mandingos continue, remains in power. Alpha believes, almost certainly correctly, that if he goes home, he will be killed. He has had no contact with his brothers and sisters since he was eight. He has no papers and his passport has long since expired. Unable to go home, unwanted by Egypt, unrecognised by UNHCR, Alpha simply waits.
His appointment with UNHCR is in May of this year.
