By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, September 20, 2003; Page A26
MAGBURAKA, Sierra Leone -- One man walked across the border from Sierra Leone into Liberia to flee fighting and lack of food. The other went the opposite direction, to Sierra Leone from Liberia, for the same reasons. When the army of Liberian President Charles Taylor went hunting for reinforcements on both sides of the border two years ago, the men hid in the bushes with their wives and children.
In the darkness of night, they were discovered by men with AK-47 assault rifles and forced into the fight. Their journey into the same army unit -- Border Patrol, Liberia -- and, eventually, back to this town is a vivid example of how Liberia's war spread across borders and continues to pull in neighbors and threaten the stability of West Africa.
"For us, it has been like one long war with no borders," said one of the men, Babah Galeh, interviewed inside a fetid school building here.
The unit, he said, deserted in July. "We were never even trained. The whole time, I was feeling so embarrassed. I couldn't wait to leave."
The second man, Davidson Quirmolue, a Liberian metal worker, said he wasn't even sure if his five children and three wives were alive. He was the general of this unit, a title he said was given to him although he said he had never fired a weapon.
"I agreed to fight, " he said, looking down. "But only because they had guns and I didn't. I was always feeling really bad. I was not doing something great like I had thought I would when I was a boy. I just wanted to escape."
When Taylor ordered them to march to Monrovia from the border last July, a journey that takes up to a week, the entire unit threw down its guns, the two men said. The members of the unit agreed they would leave together.
"Especially the men from Sierra Leone," Quirmolue said. "They kept saying that if they went all the way to Monrovia, they would never make it back home. It was too far."
The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved up to 15,000 peacekeepers for Liberia yesterday -- a mission that will not include U.S. troops, according to a senior Defense Department official in Washington -- to help rebuild the country now that Taylor has gone into exile in Nigeria and a transitional government has been named. But analysts and non-military leaders in West Africa say that efforts must be made to bring peace to the region as a whole.
Taylor is widely viewed as the architect of West Africa's recent wars. He has been indicted by a U.N.-backed tribunal for crimes against humanity for supporting a brutal rebel force in Sierra Leone's 10-year civil war. His legacy can be seen today on the streets of Freetown, the capital, where civilians whose arms and legs have been hacked off by Taylor-backed rebels roam the streets tapping their stumps on car windows begging for change.
"You don't have a complete solution until you have a regional one," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "People tend to say, 'Okay, there was a war in Liberia,' when really there has been a regional war for a long time now with a lot of bad guys in that neighborhood. The sad thing is, it can easily tumble back into chaos again if the root causes are not addressed."
He said serious international pressure should be put not only on Liberia's new government, but also on the governments of Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Burkina Faso.
Burkina Faso's president is a longtime Taylor ally and has supplied weapons to him. Guinea, whose leader is a Taylor enemy, has backed Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, or LURD, the main rebel group.
Liberian fighters -- some backed by Taylor, others mercenaries -- crossed into Ivory Coast last year to fight the government, launching attacks from the border town of Toulepleu, according to Human Rights Watch investigators. In response, Ivory Coast sent fighters and weapons to the M ovement for Democracy in Liberia, or MODEL, the rebel group fighting Taylor that is based in the country's second city, Buchanan, according to human rights organizations and Western officials.
In the impoverished town, some of the fighters were seen recently speaking only French and wearing T-shirts from a splinter rebel movement from the Ivory Coast. Residents say that they can't communicate with them.
"These countries can sign peace agreements all they want, but without regional diplomacy any other solution is just temporary," Takirambudde said.
For the moment, Sierra Leone's government is being praised for its handling of combatants who fled to their country, which shares a wide 150-mile unguarded border with Liberia.
With the help of the International Red Cross, Liberian fighters were placed in camps and are being given meals and shelter. When Liberia's new government takes over in October and a disarmament program for ex-combatants is set up, they will be returned to Liberia to be retrained, officials in Sierra Leone said.
In addition to about 90 Liberians at the camp in Magburaka, 300 other ex-fighters are being housed in government buildings at a prison near the capital.
"We are handling it the best we can, but we are also worried that this sort of thing will go on for a long time," said Samba Wurie, a police commissioner in Magburaka who was appointed after the war in Sierra Leone ended in January 2002 and was trained in the United States. "We have suffered enough in this country. The Liberia problem has got to end," he said.
Magburaka, a trading town 130 miles east of Freetown, was formerly controlled by the Revolutionary United Front, the rebel group backed by Taylor. Inside the school, the soldiers fresh from the Liberian war seem lost. Dirty laundry was stuffed into corners, and a stench of urine floated through the school. Left without their families, they simply wait. Sometimes they play volleyball in the mud. Sometimes they cook porridge in steaming pots over charcoal.
The police who watch over them wonder if there are bad men among them, men who have killed many people. But they will never know because the men are quiet about their time on the battlefield. Most say they just want to return to their wives and their homes.