Grappling With Bad Signals From Camp Schefflin

LIBERIANS AND THEIR international partners basking in the tranquilizing fantasy of national return to stability and peace now need to think twice and double up so as to face the new vexing challenges hovering on the horizon. Scores of the newly trained Armed Forces Liberia soldiers, for whom some US$147m was provided in assistance by the United States Congress, are defecting back into civilian life; in a sense going under ground having imbibed high-class military knowledge provided by ace servicemen of the World's sole Superpower. About 21 of them have already taken their exit and many more vow that if things continue to deteriorate at their Edward Binyah Kessely barracks, the nation and the world would see more surging exodus of soldiers out of the camp and the army.

NO POLITICAL AND military theory can divorce this potentially troubling military brouhaha emanating from one of the new Army's renowned fortresses from national security and peace implications. Soldiers, who during their training sessions were given VIP treatments, reportedly fed thrice a day with sumptuous meals, sojourned in fully air-conditioned facilities, are reportedly clustered in cramped up abodes, some without sanitation facilities. The trained professional soldiers of the New Liberia whose grooming has made wild headlines and formed centerpieces of official orations here and abroad are reportedly going without sufficient food, money, logistics and equipment. The soldiers themselves, probably out of sheer anger, torment and disappointment of the mounting of problems facing them, braved all odds under professional codes, and divulged their plights and woes to the media. They claim that they are earning barely US$80 per month, highly incommensurable to prevailing economic realities. They said they are therefore forced to resort to eating wild roots and fruits and combing nearby communities in search of handouts.

ALREADY, THE AFL crisis aside, Liberia is faced with serious domestic security problems in the aftermath of massive irregularities in settling arrears and other benefits to former servicemen of the AFL and other security units in the country. There has also been the problem of mass layoffs of Liberians who were in the public service. Most of these Liberians believed to be in their thousands were “downsized” and left to tot their own kinjas as they see fit , as the Liberian parlance goes. Liberia has become a land of mass unemployment where able-body men roam aimlessly about. The cumulative result is the unprecedented peak of criminality characterized by cold-bloody murders, armed robberies, burglaries, hijacking, pick-pocketing, amongst others; all on the daily, if not hourly basis. With swarms of soldiers newly trained to shoot and kill joining the bandwagon of idleness and hassling, one's guess about the impact on national security and peace is just as good as the prospect for unprecedented horror, chaos and insecurity.

PEACE ARCHITECTS AND brokers need not give the reverberations coming out of Schefflin cold shoulders and complacency. The problems on the ground are real, not merely because the foot soldiers have been demonstrating the unusual courage to freely talk about their plights, but also because top insiders divulge that the sum of US$147m has largely short-landed in the hands of expatriate partners and has hardly filtered down to service some or most of the problems that constitute the soldiers' grievances. This means, the evolving crisis hitting the new AFL has no quick fix. It has diplomatic implications. National decision-making have little or no control over the situation, because Government does not have the amounts of money to take the place of international assistances that have come for the new AFL. Giving the complications of the solution to the soldiers' grievances, coupled with the fact that the soldiers are not biting their tongues on their desire to quit the army, it is only wise and urgent that stakeholders hasten to response in a holistic and wholesome manner so that the cliché of building a dedicate, disciplined and credible army would be made real.

THE LIBERIAN ARMY , from time immemorial, has earned notoriety for its lewd human rights deportments, defection in times of war and serving only the whims of their political demigods, amongst other unholy traits. From the days of the National Republican Guard, the National Frontier Force to the disbanded Armed Forces of Liberia, the Liberian army in the eye of public opinion is synonymous to cruelty, fear and criminality. And it has been in the center of our national imbroglios. It is against this backdrop that the stakeholders in the Liberian peace process targeted the security forces, particularly the AFL for forensic reform and restructuring. And since the last two years, many nations and peoples have contributed immensely in cash, material and otherwise to have the new Army in the new Liberia properly repented and baptized.

UNFORTUNATELY, WHAT IS obtaining at the barracks of the new army is worrying to say the least. It almost suggest that all the lucrative investments made in the restructuring of the Army are laid waste. It heralds gloom and doom for a nation still cruising through social, economic and political turbulence in search of a brighter and stable environment not actually afar. Indeed, it is an utmost imperative that much be done, and now, by those concerned so that the situation is reversed to order and sanity in the soonest possible time.