A peace on uneasy ground

The main street of Ganta, shrouded with dust and decorated with ribbons of plastic rubbish, hardly seems worth fighting over.

Three years after the end of the civil wars that burned across the country for 14 years, tribal rivalries over land and housing are threatening to tear apart this east-central Liberian border town once more.

When Hawa Jabateh, 40, a member of the Mandingo tribe, returned last year after spending 15 years in a refugee camp in neighboring Guinea, she discovered that her family’s property had been taken over.

A militia commander who called himself General Peanut Butter had turned the family’s cafe into a bar. The 13 houses the family owned had been torn down, and other people had built new houses on the land.

“They call you Mandingo dog,” she said. “You hear it everywhere. It’s like background music all the time. Every day our hearts are burning.”

With thousands more refugees expected to return to Liberia in coming months, the land problem is a potential tinderbox that could undermine this nation’s fragile peace. But in a country where 80% of the people live below the poverty line and the unemployment rate is 85%, it’s just one of many issues that could ignite violence, dragging in the ready pool of former combatants.

Jabateh was lucky that Peanut Butter, now a senator, whose real name is Adolphus Dolo, agreed to give back the cafe. None of the other land was returned.

When her brother Korkesi Jabateh, 42, returned a few months after she did, he asked the new occupants to leave the land. The atmosphere was ugly. People told him he would never get it back.

“They said, ‘Mandingo man has no land here,’ ” he said. “Our people are very angry.”

Disbanding and downsizing

The arrest of former President Charles Taylor to stand trial at a United Nations war crimes tribunal has removed one major source of danger to the country’s security, but new threats may emerge.

The disbanding of the armed forces and security forces has left a large pool of disaffected and angry former soldiers with the potential to rally behind any military challenge to the government, led by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, elected a year ago. Many of them blame her for the disbandment, though that decision was made before she took office.

Tens of thousands of civil servants are being dismissed in a major downsizing of government, leaving them jobless and their families often hungry.

And stalls in Ganta’s Waterside market recently were razed as part of the city “beautification” plan, forcing many former combatants who worked there as traders out of business.

With 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers still spread across the country, none of these factors alone is a major security threat. But they could be exploited by opponents of the government, particularly if there is no dramatic improvement in the economy and employment.

“Those who lost power in the recent election in this country are not very happy,” said Ezekiel Pajibo of the Center for Democratic Empowerment, a nongovernmental organization based in Monrovia, the capital. “Some of them employed violence to hold power. Usually, people don’t like giving up power.”

Competing claims

In Ganta, shops and businesses are washed in a faded blue paint and carry names such as Friendship or Joy or Ma Love Good Will.

But there is little of those elements here.

The land conflict is complicated by the fact that some refugees did not take their property deeds when they fled the chaos of war, others never had deeds, and in some cases different deeds appeared to confer ownership on different parties.

The Liberian government has set up a commission to untangle the competing claims.

“If the government fails to solve the problem, those who own the land will come and take it by force,” Hawa Jabateh said. “And that’s war.”

Price Yeanay, 22, and her sister Rebecca Boyou, 33, refuse to leave the Jabatehs’ land.

“They come and tell you, ‘Move off my land.’ They’re not doing it with friendship. They’re doing it with violence. They say if they don’t get their land back, they’ll bring war,” said Yeanay, who fears that her family will be attacked.

Faleuku Donza, 78, frail, skinny and sick after years in a refugee camp, has had no luck removing Cecilia Dono, 45, from his family’s land, where she built a house.

She sees the Mandingos as “troublemakers” and has demanded that Donza pay for the house she built. But after 15 hungry years in the camp, he had no way to pay.

There are different tensions in other parts of the country.

In Monrovia, hundreds of demobilized soldiers and officers have been spending their days hanging around a shabby former barracks since the army was disbanded in an attempt to purge those who had committed abuses under Taylor. Most are angry about what they see as inadequate severance packages and the requirement that they formally reapply to enter Liberia’s new army.

Pajibo of the Monrovia-based NGO said members of the old army and security services had no real grievance, given the country’s violent history.

“All of the warring factions, without exception, visited mayhem on this country,” he said. “If anybody has a right to be angry, it’s the victims of the war, not the tormentors and perpetrators.”

Poverty at the root

As the tensions fuel discontent, public expectations of rapid transformation, job opportunities and an end to poverty are so high that the inevitable letdown could leave the government vulnerable, some analysts say.

Pajibo warned that unless international donors offered immediate support for poverty reduction, the country’s security could be undermined.

“The greatest threat to our peace is the endemic poverty in our country,” Pajibo said, because former militias and government opponents could exploit the big pool of dissatisfied Liberians. He said the international community must act swiftly to prevent a slide back into war.

In Ganta, finding a solution that is fair and won’t fuel the tensions is going to be difficult.

Dono, who built the house on the elderly former refugee’s land, is doing better business in her shop on the main street than she ever did in the market stall she used to own.

But she says she is annoyed by the daily “palaver,” a common Liberian expression for argument, over landownership.

Dressed in her best clothes one recent Sunday, she grew angry over questions about why she thought the former owner should pay her to get his land back.

She ruffled her Sunday finery and strutted off to church.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com