A House with Two Rooms - The Advocates for Human Rights

people came and the attackers ran away. 9
While many Liberians saw their loved ones killed and tortured, other statement givers came home
to find their families had simply disappeared. Fearing for their own safety and hoping to find their
families on the road, they fled.
One day, I was out looking for food. When I came home, no one was there.
The neighbors told me that Prince Johnson’s [Independent National Patriotic
Front of Liberia] (INPFL) men [came] to the neighborhood and were asking
for Krahn people. They said that a stray bullet hit one of my daughters…
and she died. Since then, I have not seen my family and do not know what
happened to them…[W]hen I learned of the death of my daughter and that
the rest of my family was missing, I decided it was not safe to stay there.
Starting then, I began hiding in other parts of Liberia – mostly in the bush
in Grand Gedeh with some other relatives. 10
The experiences of these statement givers were repeated on a massive scale.
After a flight-triggering event such as those described above, displacement often proceeded in
phases: hiding, internal displacement within Liberia, refuge in a neighboring country, and for some,
resettlement in a third country. These phases generally were not linear, but were cyclical, with
movement between the phases occurring along with the phases of the conflict itself.
As the offensives of fighting factions spread in and out of Monrovia and through the outlying
counties of Liberia, and as peace accords were signed and broken, 11 individuals oscillated between
being forced to flee and being able to return to relative calm. One statement giver, whose husband was
a government official, described leaving their home in July 1990 to take refuge in the ELWA Christian
radio station compound. 12 The family stayed there for approximately a week, until they received word
that Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) forces were threatening to bomb the compound. The family
then fled to the University of Liberia campus, where they were able to find a room. They stayed there
until Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) forces entered
Monrovia. In 1992, the statement giver and her family went into hiding again. In 1996, the family
was staying with the statement giver’s mother when AFL forces entered the house and executed the
statement giver’s husband. After the trauma of seeing her husband executed, the woman took the 15
children staying with her and walked out of Liberia into Côte d’Ivoire. 13
During the first wave of fighting in 1990, as NPFL and AFL forces battled in Monrovia, many residents
hid in the city and its nearby suburbs to attempt to wait out the fighting. Individuals described hiding
in closets, on roofs, under beds, in swamps, in the “bush,” and in neighbors’ and family members’
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Chapter Thirteen