Scars and Stripes (Page 2)

"What you have is a whole lot of rhetoric for support for Africa's first woman president and not a lot of substance," said Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. "Of the aid that does get on the ground from bilateral institutions, there's either strings attached or pledges are made and not followed through or the money is being used for security sector reform and not rehabilitation."

One example of a strings-attached aid policy is the anticorruption commission the International Monetary Fund required Liberia to set up before it would cancel the country's debt. The second condition for the arrears clearance to go forward was that the central bank be brought under the Finance Ministry to control the money supply and the inflation rate, even though Liberia's central bank is modeled on that of the United States. In a sense, Woods points out, Liberia is being asked to sacrifice schools and hospitals to have inflation at single digits and an anticorruption commission that even the United States doesn't have. "So to create this almost artificial standard in the case of Liberia as a rationale for not giving funding, to me seems idiotic."

While the multilateral and bilateral institutions drag their feet over funding, Sirleaf's hands are tied. There's not much she can do when Liberia's budget for this year is $199 million. Although that's an increase from the $135 million budget for last year, it's still only about $60 per Liberian. That makes providing electricity and running water, not to mention tackling the country's 85 percent unemployment rate and 42 percent illiteracy rate, daunting if not insurmountable challenges. Meanwhile, the president's promise to empower Liberia's youth to be full participants in the reconstruction of the country now rings hollow.

Even before Sirleaf came into office the DDRR rehabilitation program, which promised former soldiers $300 to put down their guns and pick up a book, was widely criticized. The reason: the funding was sufficient only to disarm 38,000 former fighters, but almost 103,000 applied. This meant that rehabilitation efforts had to be cut short or even stopped altogether. Human Rights Watch estimates the funding shortage at $39 million, leaving 40,000 ex-combatants at risk of missing out on job training and education.

Even those who did receive training said it was often delayed or the teachers were inadequate. And the tools that were supposed to be delivered upon completion of the programs, such as sewing kits and baking sets, often never arrived.

Part of the problem was that the whole process was prone to corruption. Commanders turned in the guns of their former fighters for cash. Ex-combatants sold their guns to nonfighters who then enrolled in the DDRR program. Some took the cash and never completed the rehabilitation programs. Meanwhile, those who completed the skills-training and education programs were often left without jobs in Liberia's struggling economy. For many, living on the streets became the only option.

Some of the youth who were disarmed made their way to the United States as refugees, settling in communities like the Park Hill Apartments in Staten Island, New York, without receiving counseling or rehabilitation and often lacking skills or education. Some of them were still addicted to drugs. Others suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental illnesses. Yet the focus of the US government's refugee program is economic self-sufficiency. "This means they are employed. Period," explained Elizabeth Campbell, director of the Refugee Council.

Federal funding provides $850 per refugee--$425 goes directly to the refugee for resettlement, and the other $425 goes to the agency for the first thirty days of basic needs support. Campbell calls the $425 given to the agencies "a joke," especially in places with higher costs of living, like New York: "You are not seeing a federal commitment to make sure refugees have access to reintegration services."

The consequences of these policies can be seen in the Liberian youth living in Park Hill. James Kollie, a case manager for an agency that resettles Liberians in Staten Island, says the whole system--from the organizations that set out to help the youth to the governments of Liberia and the United States--is failing. Kollie has seen newly arrived youth sleeping in hallways and staircases because the families who are supposed to take them in are overburdened. And he's seen teenagers drinking and drugging their days away because they have nothing to keep them busy, as job- and skills-training programs are unavailable and local rehabilitation offices are almost nonexistent because funding for refugee resettlement is limited and competitive. "It's like you're fighting crime and then creating criminals" by leaving young people with so few options, Kollie says.

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