Finding Loves Ones Alive Is a Gift After Yearlong Civil War in Liberia : Battle: Scarred survivors find it hard to put ‘patchwork quilt’ of life back together again. More than 15,000 civilians were killed.

Eunicer George’s Christmas present was learning that her sister had survived the yearlong civil war that killed more than 15,000 civilians and separated countless families.

When fighting ended more than a year ago, relief workers buried the bones of scores of victims in a mass grave at the edge of the city airport. The burial ground is overgrown with bush grass now, and cows graze on it.

Buildings still show bullet scars. Some are only shells, their roofs or walls blown away by rocket fire or bombs.

“I’d assumed Juanitta had been killed, like my other sister,” George said, then told of returning to Monrovia in November, 1990, with her own family:

“We found them all--my sister, her husband, their three beautiful children and my cousin and five other people they had been sheltering. They were gunned down in the house. The bodies had rotted, but we recognized them from belts and bits of clothing.”

They buried the family in the back yard: Annie Coleman and her husband, James, their 15-year-old son and two daughters, ages 19 and 17.

George said neighbors told her the killers were soldiers loyal to slain President Samuel K. Doe.

“There were no reasons for the killings,” she said. “It was a senseless war. If you were unlucky, you got shot up on the street, or if a neighbor told the wrong side you were connected with the government or rebels, you got killed too.”

She described how her cousin, Precious Gibson, was killed a month before a West African army forced a cease-fire in November, 1990.

“A rocket hit their house, and Precious, he was 22 and had just graduated from university, fled with a friend. They were stopped by soldiers who demanded ID. Precious had his, but his friend didn’t. So they said they were rebels and killed them.”

Monrovia and life since the war are “like a patchwork quilt; you keep finding pieces, but so many are missing,” said George, who has returned to her job as an administrative assistant for the U.N. World Food Program.

She received news of her living sister, Juanitta Scott, from a Lutheran relief worker who traveled behind rebel lines. Scott lives with her disabled husband in Suehn, a town in central Liberia.

Like many Liberian families, the sisters are separated by checkpoints manned by rebel leader Charles Taylor’s fighters, an unruly lot who extort bribes. Taylor recently opened two of three roads between Monrovia and the interior.

The United Nations suspended operations in Liberia after a Liberian army assault May 29, 1990, on its compound, where hundreds of civilians had taken refuge.

Thirty men were taken away by the soldiers. The sole survivor said the others were massacred on a beach that had become a favorite killing ground.

Two months later, soldiers attacked nearby St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, where 2,000 people were sheltered. They slaughtered about 200, mainly women and children, with submachine guns, bayonets and swords.

Doe’s soldiers, numbering from 3,000 to 7,000 by various estimates, now are camped at two barracks and insist that they still are Liberia’s official army.

Taylor started the war with an invasion from neighboring Ivory Coast on Christmas Eve, 1989. A breakaway group beat him to Monrovia, caught Doe and tortured him to death.

Now Taylor is accused of stalling on a peace plan brokered by West African nations that calls for him to disarm his 10,000 fighters and permit elections.

Although his forces were unable to seize the capital, they have overrun the rest of Liberia, a West African nation about the size of Ohio founded in 1847 by freed American slaves.

For Myrtle Gibson, a businesswoman turned relief worker, getting on with life means refurbishing a five-bedroom villa that had sheltered 100 displaced people.

About 600,000 refugees are in neighboring lands and an estimated 1 million of Liberia’s 2.5 million people are believed to be displaced within the country.

Gibson got running water into her house recently. It gushed from a newly repaired reservoir through taps that would not close. Neighbors came to fill buckets, bottles, even garbage cans.

White Plains, a U.S.-built dam outside the capital that provided water and hydroelectric power, was badly damaged in the war. Germany has approved a loan for its repair.

Monrovia was without piped water for more than a year. Little has been available since engineers deserted the dam in the face of advancing rebels in May, 1990.

Electricity is available only four to six hours a day. The diesel generator could serve the city of 600,000 adequately, but fuel is short.

Food is plentiful. At Waterside Market, vendors hawk everything from potatoes to American corn chips.

Gibson gleefully showed off three large lobsters bought from a passing fisherman.

Most of the orphans she helped feed last year have been reunited with relatives. In December, the interim government closed war orphanages and relief organizations stopped emergency feeding.

Surplus American military rations from the Persian Gulf War are distributed to 70,000 children at the city’s 192 schools.

“The malnutrition level has returned to 2%, where it stood before the war,” said Shirley Hanazawa, a Canadian working for International Action Against Hunger, a French agency.

Gibson worries about rehabilitating thousands of Taylor’s child soldiers, some as young as 9.

One day, she drove 25 miles to the Po River, which is guarded on one side by the West African intervention force and on the other by Taylor rebels.

“I called and some of the young boys came across,” she said.

“They’re just children, and sat munching at cookies I gave them. I told them to lay down their guns. They said they were scared--scared they would be blamed for people they had killed, scared for the future.”