Liberian church massacre survivors seek US justice

The Monrovia Church massacre in 1990 was the worst single atrocity of the Liberian civil war. About 600 civilians, including many children, were killed while taking refuge in a church.

Now, four survivors are bringing a claim for damages against one of the men they believe was responsible, reports Elizabeth Blunt who was a BBC correspondent in Liberia at the time.

It was July 1990, and rebel fighters were advancing on the capital, Monrovia. President Samuel Doe was holed up in his vast, gloomy Executive Mansion.

After dark bands of soldiers roamed the streets, looting shops and warehouses and seeking out people from Nimba County, the area where the rebellion had started. They dragged the men from their homes, beating and often killing them.

Hundreds of terrified families, looking for a safer place to sleep, took refuge in St Peter's Lutheran Church - a spacious building in a walled compound. Huge Red Cross flags flew at every corner.

Image caption
Bullet holes on church windows
But on the night of 29 July, government soldiers came over the wall and started killing those inside. An estimated 600 people - men, women, children, even babies - were shot or hacked to death with machetes before the order was given to stop.

A Guinean woman doctor, who was one of the first to reach the church the next day, described to me the scene of utter horror.

Dead bodies were everywhere. The only sign of life was a baby crying.

She describes having to walk over corpses to reach the child, but when she picked it up and tried to comfort it, she said she suddenly saw a flicker of movement, and then another.

A few children had survived, protected by the bodies of their parents, but only when they saw her, a civilian and a woman taking care of the baby, did they dare to come out. One of the child survivors is among those now suing for damages.

'Protected status'
American missionary Bette McCrandall was there, too, that morning - she had lain awake the previous night, listening to everything that was happening from the Lutheran bishop's compound close by.

She says those events have stayed with her, even all these years afterwards, as they have with all the survivors.

"The memories of that day and that night don't leave me," she says.

source:www.bbc.com