Liberia

The skeletal remains of hundreds of people killed 15 years ago near the small Liberian village of Kpolokpai were transported in wheelbarrows to a marked mass grave Sunday where they were buried in a formal ceremony. The church service honoring the dead is intended to try to put to rest this particular chapter in Liberia's 14-year civil war, which left an estimated 250,000 people dead. Mourners, including church leaders and farmers, stood with their hands folded as the remains were lowered into a 10-foot-wide pit. Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that the Kpolokpai massacre in 1994 was led by fighters of the Liberia Peace Council, a rebel group fighting Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia.

Liberia handed over the body of warlord Sam Bockarie to neighboring Sierra Leone, which has indicted him for atrocities. Bockarie, a former disco dancer and hairdresser who became one of the region's most feared rebel commanders, was killed in a shootout with Liberian government forces May 6. Since then, Sierra Leone's U.N.-backed special court for war crimes had demanded that the corpse be handed over for independent identification. The court is probing crimes such as amputations and mass rape.

They torched George Weah's seaside home the other day, burning it to the ground. Before that, they flogged several of his relatives, raped two of his teenage cousins, ransacked his house and commandeered two of his 15 cars. All because of something he had been quoted as saying in the New York Times.

A "blood diamond" expert offered the first testimony in the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor on Monday, and a Sierra Leone miner said in videotaped evidence that laughing rebels hacked off his hands and burned his family. The trial before the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, set up to try those behind the 1991-2002 civil war, resumed after a six-month adjournment that began in June when Taylor boycotted proceedings and fired his lawyer.

A former bodyguard for Charles Taylor gave an insider's view Wednesday of the former Liberian president's rule, testifying that he funneled arms, fighters, communications equipment and cash to rebels in Sierra Leone who were notorious for their brutality.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor ordered his militias to eat the flesh of captured enemies and United Nations soldiers, a former close aide testified at Taylor's war crimes trial in The Hague. Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, who described himself as Taylor's former death squad commander, gave graphic details of atrocities in Liberia and Sierra Leone at the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. He has described how he killed so many men, women and children that he lost count, and said he had slit open the stomachs of pregnant women on Taylor's orders.

The main street of Ganta, shrouded with dust and decorated with ribbons of plastic rubbish, hardly seems worth fighting over. Three years after the end of the civil wars that burned across the country for 14 years, tribal rivalries over land and housing are threatening to tear apart this east-central Liberian border town once more.

Liberians call her "da woma," in their soft patois where the word endings seem to die in the steamy West African heat. "Da woma', she tra' her bes'," they tell you earnestly, if you inquire about the state of affairs in a country shredded by a 14-year civil war. "She tra'." She's trying. One hip-hop song played on Monrovia radio these days just calls her Ma. At times, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first elected female head of state, seems like a mild, smiling, grandmotherly figure.

The United Nations' first women-only peacekeeping contingent -- made up of about 100 Indian police officers -- arrived in Liberia, officials said. Ben Malor, spokesman for the U.N.'s 15,000-strong peacekeeping force in the West African country, said the female force would be stationed in the capital, Monrovia. Women have served in many U.N. peacekeeping forces, but this is the first all-female group.

The perpetrators of hundreds of thousands of cases of rape, torture and sexual abuse are living unpunished in Liberia more than three years after the end of a civil war, Amnesty International said today. The rights group said the government of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf must do more to bring those responsible to justice if the country was to recover.