Liberia: on the rocky road to rebirth

Liberia’s main opposition candidate said he might seek the annulment of a presidential
run-off boycotted by his supporters.

Analysts say this move could raise the prospect of confrontation in a country recovering from civil war.

Many Liberians stayed home for Tuesday's vote, either fearful of a repeat of election-related violence earlier this week, or obeying a boycott call by Winston Tubman, the main rival to incumbent Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

Tubman alleged fraud in the first round of voting last month from which Johnson-Sirleaf, a newly-named Nobel peace laureate, emerged with an 11-point lead.

Meanwhile the National Election Commission said it would begin releasing results from the second round late on Thursday.

The election is the first locally organised presidential vote in Liberia since 14 years of fighting that killed nearly a quarter of a million people ended in 2003.

Sean Patrick Lovett, head of Vatican Radio’s English Programme, was very recently in Liberia teaching a communications course in the county’s major seminary and working with Radio Veritas.

Linda Bordoni asked him to share his impressions of the nation and its people as they prepared to cast their ballots in Tuesday’s run-off election.

Sean Lovett explained that he had taste both of the capital Monrovia, and up in the north of the country in a place called Bunga in the rainforest.

He highlights the differences between these two very different realities: the dynamic feeling inside the capital city, he says, is very different from what it is 4 hours drive way up inside the rainforest.

However, Lovett continues, the physical and the emotional scars of the people of Liberia are very present. You see the war veterans, without limbs in the streets; but the emotional scars are also still very evident in their eyes and in their hearts. This, he says, is the down-side as it makes it very difficult to talk to people about essential things like family and home because it is very likely the person you are talking to had their family murdered in front of them, their house burnt down again and again by one of the rival rebel groups, so the pain is still there. But that, he says, is reality. Liberia is a country which is still coming out of a dreadful war in which over 25.000 people died, were dispersed, with refugees and all the horror.

The up-side, Lovett says, is that there is a huge desire to leave all that behind and get on with it. And that’s what swept Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to power in 2005.

Lovett says they call Sirleaf “the woman”. He says there is something enigmatic and significant about that as well that refers to her ability to reconcile, seek healing and offer a ray of hope.

The opposition party of course, he explains, made an issue of the timing of the awarding of the Nobel peace prize. But the people in the forests he says live a totally different reality in which priorities are much more essential, and revolve around sending their children to school and feeding their families.

Whoever, Lovett concludes, is finally chosen to take the helm of the nation, doesn’t make a lot of difference, as long as he or she represents a change for the good.

listen to the interview...