Liberian President Joseph Boakai offered a state apology to Liberians on Saturday over the brutal violence and lingering trauma caused by the country’s two civil wars, as the nation grapples with how to remember its troubled past.
The president made the formal gesture during a reconciliation ceremony in the capital, Monrovia.
He spoke days after attending official funeral memorials for former Liberian presidents Samuel Doe — tortured and murdered in 1990 at the beginning of the civil wars — and William Tolbert, assassinated in 1980 when Doe staged a coup.
Photo: EPA
The ceremonies were also part of the ongoing national reconciliation effort.
Liberia’s two back-to-back wars devastated the small West African country from 1989 until 2003, claiming about 250,000 lives and resulting in massacres, mutilation, rape and the widespread use of child soldiers.
“On this historic occasion, I offer a formal apology on behalf of the state,” Bokai said. “To every victim of our civil conflict, to every family broken, to every dream shattered, we say: We are sorry.”
The speech marked the first time since a 2009 reconciliation report recommended an apology that a president had so formally issued one, said Aaron Weah, director of the Ducor Institute for Social and Economic Research.
The 2009 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report also recommended the establishment of a war crimes tribunal, but Liberia has yet to try anyone for crimes committed during the bloody conflicts.
The tribunal recommendation went mostly unheeded in the name of peacekeeping, as a number of accused warlords remained influential in the country’s politics.
In May last year Boakai took one step towards initiating the tribunal by signing an order setting up the Office of War and Economic Crimes Court. It is tasked with creating the eventual war crimes court.
On Saturday, Boakai called for “implementing key recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
“There is hardly a Liberian family that has not been touched by the pain, the violence, and the injustice that have haunted our nation,” he said.
For Weah, the funeral services and apology marked several weeks of “transitional justice in Liberia” and “actual deliberate actions of trying to implement the TRC.”
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