At 14, a Liberian War Veteran Dreams of Finding a Way Home
By TIM WEINER
AYNESVILLE, Liberia, Aug. 23 — "The war came before the rains in 2000," Dukuly Togbah remembered. "I was 10 years old."
Dukuly is a smart, tough country boy from the northern hills. He was one among the thousands of child soldiers who have fought this nation's grisly battles for 14 years.
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He is 14 himself, born on Independence Day, July 26. His story is the story of Liberia. When he was in the first grade he started to fight with rebel forces and, when captured, he was forced on pain of death to fight for the government. He survived it all by the skin of his teeth.
With the chance that the war may be dying down now, Dukuly (pronounced Due-CLAY) has been out of combat almost three weeks, and lives in a shelter run by a Catholic charity here in Paynesville, on the outskirts of Monrovia, where he is learning to read and write. He stands about 5 feet 2 inches and weighs perhaps 100 pounds.
Three years and four months ago, he was taken from his village, Kambolahun, in Lofa County, near the borders of Sierra Leone and Guinea, by the rebel group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, known as L.U.R.D., who overran his village.
What happened to his family is unknown; it is very possible that they are among the 600,000 refugees among Liberia's population of three million.
The rebels tried to overthrow President Charles G. Taylor, himself a former warlord who fought his way to power on the backs of battalions of child soldiers, who seldom lack for weaponry.
Mr. Taylor, who left power Aug. 11, under indictment for war crimes in Sierra Leone, did not invent the practice of using children in combat.
But he did introduce the phenomenon to Liberia. Perhaps 10,000 children remain mobilized among government forces and the rebels. All the main factions used what they call Small Boy Units, sometimes abducting children, sometimes luring them with the promise of the glory of war.
Dr. Peter Coleman, the Liberian minister of health and social welfare, said of the child soldiers: "In some areas they are 40 to 50 percent of the fighting force. Young people with arms has become a way of life." Dr. Coleman said there were no social services or public health facilities in the nation to treat or rehabilitate the thousands of child soldiers.
Dukuly spoke vividly and dispassionately in English of his experience. By comparison, some of his youthful colleagues are so traumatized by the experience that they can hardly speak.
"I can remember I used to play with my friends, and sometimes we would go in the bush and set traps to catch meat," he said. "But since the war I can't see my friends.
"The first time I saw fighting I was 10 years old," he said. "It was dissidents and government. The dissidents were four or five in the village by the time the sun come up. They shot up my home and we all run in the bush. My parents, everybody run away, me too. I started running and they opened up firing. They captured me."
"So now I can't see my family," he said. "So I followed the people."
"I fought with L.U.R.D. in the bush," he said, learning to fire an AK-47, walking point, winning a battlefield commission and a nom de guerre. "I was the deputy commander of the Small Boy Unit under General Iron Jacket. They call me Quick to Fire. Iron Jacket gave me that name."
Iron Jacket's Small Boy Unit was about 100 strong, Dukuly said, and the rebel force under the general grew to about 2,000, including many women and girls abducted from villages to cook rice, catch fish and serve the men and boys. Babies were born in the bush.
The rebel force slowly fought its way south through Lofa County, battling government troops in at least four major engagements and countless skirmishes during the next three years, destroying villages and displacing tens of thousands of people in the process.
Liberia's government-run radio station reported late tonight that major fighting had broken out in Bong County, in the heart of the nation. The station broadcast unconfirmed reports that rebels had killed hundreds of civilians in recent days.
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