Memorialization

After a turbulent three years of national inquiry into Liberia’s violent past, the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) submitted a final report to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the legislature on June 30, 2009. The report made far reaching recommendations, many of which are considered controversial. Senior government officials (past and present) are recommended for criminal accountability through an extraordinary tribunal, or may face domestic prosecution and could barred from holding public office for thirty years. But controversy arising from these now problematic recommendations has overshadowed other critical aspects of the report. Post-conflict memorialization, a component of many transitional justice processes, is one element of the recommendations that Liberians tend to agree with but which has received relatively little attention. Liberians want to remember the unspeakable horrors of the conflict so they may never again occur. In spite of the collective urge to remember the past and the commonalities in what is remembered, memorialization is not a simple process. Liberia’s post-war “memoryscape” evokes pain, misery, identity, and deep ethnic cleavages. Based on four years of research and direct programmatic engagement on the inventory of memories  involving victims’ communities and interactions with victims’ groups in Liberia, this article seeks to unpack the memoryscape, highlight the issues, explain progress—both at national and community levels—and discuss post-conflict memorialization as a crucial dimension to Liberia’s post-war reconciliation.