Victims of Liberia’s civil war are still waiting for justice

“THERE WAS a lot of blood all over the place,” remembers Patricia, her voice cracking. She survived the night in 1990 when government soldiers shot and chopped to death about 600 civilians who had been sheltering from Liberia’s civil war in the Lutheran Church in Monrovia, the capital. “We saw the pregnant women, their stomachs open, the children on their mother, sucking, crying.”Today, not far from the bullet-scarred church, gold letters on the Temple of Justice declare: “Let Justice Be Done To All”. Yet not a single person has been convicted in Liberia for the massacre—or for any war crimes committed during the back-to-back civil wars between 1989 and 2003, in which about 250,000 people were killed.