Tragic lives of Liberia's child soldiers

Walking to school in his uniform aged seven, Matthew Krouah was stopped and held by gunmen with eight of his friends.

The boys were thrown in the back of truck and taken to a child soldiers' training base, never to return home.

Provided camouflage uniform and an AK-47, Matthew and his friends were trained for only four days before going into battle.

Under the army for the Liberian United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), he attacked villages and towns controlled by President Charles Taylor.

The year was 2000 – it was the start of a three-year service which would only end at the finish of the second Liberian civil war.

Today, Matthew, now aged 24, is still suffering mentally and physically.

He was blinded in one eye by RPG fire and an open wound from a bullet still bleeds on his foot.

“I get nightmares when I am asleep and awake about what I saw,” he said.

“The battles, my friends dying and people I have killed.

“I don’t like to be on my own – I then think about it, it never leaves me.”

Matthew and his eight school friends – only four survived – are among thousands of child soldiers enlisted by force and voluntarily by armies for Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and rebel groups during the second Liberian civil war from 1999 to 2003.

With many adults having fled the country to Guinea and Senegal, army commanders turned to children as young as seven to fight their bloody battles.

Children like Matthew were given no option but to fight. Given alcohol and drugs, many become numb to the atrocities they were carrying out, often killing and raping innocent civilians.

“I look back and I realise it was wrong,” said Matthew.

“But you had no choice. If you did not fire, the enemy would shoot you or your own commander. I was always scared.

“We’d attack in units, walk out at the enemy firing and firing with an AK-47. It sometimes felt good when you won.”

Matthew was part of a unit called Efifend. There were 60 soldiers in his unit – around half were child soldiers.

He was based in Bongo Town, about an hour’s drive from the capital Monrovia.

Almost every day, the unit would take part in assaults on enemy positions. In the evenings they partied under the moonlight, causing havoc in communities.

In 2003, Matthew took part in the siege of Monrovia, the end of the second civil war - which killed 250,000 people and displaced one million others.

Today, he is a broken man.

He lives in a mud shack in Unification City, located next to Roberts International Airport.

He has no job and depends on help from the community, which includes many child soldiers from all sides of the conflict.

He believes his mother is still alive in his home town of Lofa. However, he fears he will not be accepted if he returns there because of his past as a child soldier.

“I want to go home, I want to see my mother and live in the place I call home,” he said.

“But people know I fought, some people have a problem with that, even though I did not have a choice.

“I feel like I am stuck here forever.”

Also living in Unification City is fellow child soldier Emmanuel Johnson, aged 32.

He voluntarily joined the NPFL in his home county of Maryland, in the south west of the country, after three of his sisters were raped by militia from LURD. They were aged 10, 12 and 13.

He joined aged 15 and trained in Buchanan, Liberia’s third largest city. He rose through the ranks to become Group Leader of the 124 platoon, leading 20 men – 10 died under his control.

“It felt like the right thing to do – take revenge for what happened to my family,” he said.

“I remember my first battle. It was an ambush on the enemy. We attacked using AK-47. Many people died that day.”

After the civil war, Emmanuel came to Unification City. Today he earns a dollar a day, hunting animals in the wild and chopping wood.

“I did many bad things. But I have had to stop thinking about it, think for the future.”

The civil wars in Liberia started when Charles Taylor led his NPFL into the country from the Ivory Coast in 1989 – seven years after he had been charged with embezzlement by President Samuel Doe’s government.

Mr Doe quickly lost control over the country which erupted with different military factions feuding over districts.

In 1996, the Economic Community of West African States’ Monitoring Group, an international armed force, spearheaded a ceasefire. An election was then held which Taylor won.

But three years later, after Taylor had supported Sierra Leone rebel group the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the United States-backed group LURD triggered a second civil war.

Taylor struggled to keep control of the country and another rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, was launched.

The United Nations Mission in Liberia arrived in 2003, followed by Taylor's resignation. In 2013 Taylor was given a 50-year prison sentence.

After the end of the war, a transitional government was formed with Africa’s first elected female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, taking power in 2005.

She is to step down later this year following an election, with former football star George Weah among the candidates to replace her.