This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Climate Change and Land Rights Reporting Project. Funding was provided by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office and the American Jewish World Service…
Editor’s Note: This story is the first of a two-part series on growing tension between Equatorial Palm Oil and villagers in Grand Bassa County over land rights. JOGBAHN CLAN, Grand Bassa – October 6, 2016 was a happy day for Morris Beah and other townspeople of Gmenee, Wesseh Village, Paye Town, Morb Town and Kampala, which…
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Climate Change and Land Rights Reporting Project. Funding was provided by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office and the American Jewish World Service….
For more than a decade coastal erosion has devastated the lives of people in Liberia’s nine coastal counties. 10,000 people have had to move. Livelihoods of those who depend on the sea have been upended.The government, along with the United Nations Development Program, has been building a series of coastal defences – to hold back…
“The sea was coming closer but we were thinking that it was not serious. But in less than two to three months the sea wiped away the entire house,” he recalled on a recent visit to the site with reporters. “Other houses that were in front of us – we had about 200 to 300…
BARCONNIE AND HARMONVILLE COMMUNITY FOREST, Grand Bassa County – Powerful forces push the people of the 21 towns that make up this community forest area to abandon their efforts at conservation every day. Big money offered by foreign and local business people, amidst hardship, tempts them from their path. But the people say one thing is keeping them…
Few rural farmers will have borne more hardship than Augustine Moore. Beginning in the 1980s, he moved from Lofa to Bong counties and eventually here to Margibi to escape the war and consistent poor harvests. Finally he gave up. “My labor was going in vain. The farm’s yields were very low and could not sustain…
Across Liberia forestry operations are at a standstill as logging companies and small scale loggers square off over their right to operate. At the heart of the problem is poor implementation of regulations governing the industry. The logging companies are licensed by the national authorities, but local authorities are issuing permits to small scale loggers….
New Narratives Fellow Anthony Stephens of Power TV/FM with the piece that prompted Thursday’s dispute in the Liberian Senate saying Speaker Chambers is blocking legislation to establish a War Crimes Court in Liberia….
GBARMA, Gbarpolu County – When news broke that Jankuba Fofana had been arrested by British police as part of an investigation into war crimes one might have expected celebration here in Gbarma. Fofana is the first member of the rebel group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) to face justice for war crimes in Liberia’s…
GBARMA, Gbarpolu County – Miatta Gray wept as she recalled the day, nearly 20 years ago, that rebels with the absurdly named “Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy” (LURD) upended her life. Mrs. Gray said the rebels arrived here with a friendly request that everyone assemble in the town square for a meeting. Then the killing…
Mount Barclay, LIBERIA – Going to the “Sande Bush” school was never a dream for Dearest, Tina or Precious. The three girls, all high school students, say they were abducted by traditional leaders in September and taken by force to the Sande without the consent of their parents. They spent six terrifying weeks at the…
GBONYEA, Bong County – Emmanuel Tokpah always wanted a home of his own. The 27-year-old bike rider had saved enough money to begin construction on a house in this village. But his dreams were shattered in July 2016 when a group of men from neighboring Gbonata came and ordered him to stop work. The men claimed…
“How Will The Future Generation Manage?” RIVERCESS, Liberia–A dispute is brewing here in the Gbarsaw Clan in this southeast county over a large portion of land being cultivated by the Managing Director of the National Port Authority (NPA), Bill Tweahway. Mr. Tweahway, who also hails from this town, has hired dozens of people from the…
New Narratives Fellow Anthony Stephens of Power TV/FM with the piece that prompted an uproar in the Liberian Senate. Legislators say Speaker Chambers is blocking legislation to establish a war and economic crimes court in Liberia. Watch the story here….
Poor economies of Liberia and Sierra Leonean since the end of civil wars have made it almost impossible for hundreds of thousands of ex-combatants to make a living, despite the large rehabilitation and reintegration programs run by the UN at the end of the conflicts. Many, whose fighting days left them ostracized from communities, and…
Finally this month a trial over war crimes will start on Liberian soil. It’s been 18 years since the end of the Liberian civil war and nine years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended the country hold a war crimes court to bring those accused of directing the atrocities that left 250,000 dead to…
HENRY TOWN, Liberia and KENEMA, Sierra Leone – Ibrahim Sesay, a Sierra Leonean miner, never signed up to die when he crossed into Liberia in 2008 in search of greener pasture on mines in Korninga Chiefdom of Gbarpolu’s Bopolu District. A New Narratives cross-border investigation by Mae Azango and Emma Black in Sierra Leone and…
Kullie is one of thousands of Liberians who are still suffering as a result of shocking things that happened to them or what they saw happened to others during the war in Liberia. There are no recent statistics available but a 2008 study conducted five years after Liberia’s civil war ended by Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University, found that 40% of Liberians had symptoms of major depression and 44% appeared to have post-traumatic stress disorder….
NN’s Mae Azango and Prue Clarke write on the role of good journalism in breaking the taboo around female genital cutting in Liberia that led to its eventual ban for the Columbia Journalism Review. PRESIDENT ELLEN JOHNSON SIRLEAF left office in January with a tremendous, if overdue, parting gift for the girls of Liberia….
