As Sudden Violence Hits Liberia, Aid Worker Holds Out Hope

MONROVIA, Liberia -- On Tuesday morning last week, I was making the nine-hour drive to Monrovia to meet up with my boss and have some R&R after two months in Voinjama, the town where I work for a humanitarian organization. As I stared out the window and contemplated the lives of the people around me, I was optimistic. With the rains over and the heat increasing by the day, new houses and buildings are being erected everywhere. Construction, I thought to myself, is a symbol of progress -- a sign that Liberians feel safe and hopeful enough to invest themselves again in their country, just seven years removed from a brutal civil war.

Three days later, my town was in flames. Several people were killed in rioting -- their bodies still not swept from the streets some 24 hours later -- and more were injured. Most of my Liberian friends had fled to the bush, to Monrovia, or to Guinea. Only the arrival of U.N. riot police stopped the violence, an occurrence that does not bode well for the government, given that it will have to take over responsibility for security when the U.N. begins to pull out next year.

Nobody is sure exactly how things started, but the following trajectory seems to be generally accepted: A young woman in a nearby town was killed, and the predominantly Loma community (Lomas are Christian) blamed a member of the local Mandingo population (Mandingos are Muslim) for the killing. Some Lomas set fire to a local mosque in anger. In retaliation, the Mandingos in Voinjama (the county capital) set fire to the churches, market and houses of government officials.

When I first heard reports of the violence, I imagined that people were exaggerating. But when I called my friend Siya, I could hear the panic in her voice as she and her children made their way out of town. "The war has come back," she cried before we got cut off. As for my Muslim friends, their phones were all off. I assume that they fled to nearby Guinea, but I have no way of knowing.

How could this have happened? How did the landscape of my town change so quickly? Over the past six months, I have never felt unsafe in Voinjama, perhaps because I am friendly and as a result am looked out for by the Liberians I interact with on my daily trips into town. I have found myself wondering whether I am friends with anyone who took part in the nation's civil war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003 and left the country almost entirely destroyed. Realistically speaking, I know this must be the case; and yet, I still find it so difficult to imagine that the people I've chatted and joked with to be capable of such violence. Following last week's events, I'm less certain. Was I always too gullible and naive to see the tensions lying below the surface? Or is it just too easy for a small number of angry people to wreak havoc on the peaceful majority?

Only when I return to Voinjama and see for myself the destruction and hear from my friends will I be able to grasp how this all came about. I hope I will also be able to retain some of the optimism I felt leaving town. I am rattled, however, and can't help but wonder whether Liberia's fragile peace will truly last. For myself and, more important, for my Liberian friends who have already suffered so much, I want to believe that it will. But with religious and ethnic hatred simmering below the surface, and with Friday's events indicating how quickly and easily such hatred can boil over into violence, I am not without doubts.