A Flame Is Not a Verdict

NATIONS ARE JUDGED not by the monuments they unveil but by the debts they settle. Last week, in the Parlor of the Executive Mansion, President Joseph Nyuma Boakai unveiled the model of a National Memorial Park on Bali Island: a 15-story tower with a floor for each county, a peace museum shaped like women with raised hands, an eternal flame to burn at 7 p.m. every evening, and a Heroes’ Park for our past leaders. We welcome it. After 23 years of silence, a nation that buried its dead in shallow graves and hushed voices deserves a place to grieve in daylight.

BUT WE MUST say plainly what the ceremony did not. It disclosed no cost. It named no source of funding. It set no date for breaking ground, let alone for lighting the flame. A tower of 15 floors, an observatory, a solar farm and parking for 700 vehicles are not built with speeches. Liberians have seen Bali Island dressed in grand drawings before; a previous administration promised to turn it into a modern city. The island is still waiting.

MR. PRESIDENT, THE families you addressed deserve better than another beautiful model. You told them, “Liberia sees you,” and that “this nation owes you more than words.” We agree, and we hold you to it. The first thing owed is honesty about money. Let the Executive tell the Legislature, in the budget now before it, how much this memorial will cost, who will pay, and who will build it. Let the contract pass through open, competitive procurement, so that a monument to the dead does not become a feeding trough for the living.

THE SECOND DEBT is justice, and here the government’s record is unfinished. In 2009, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) handed this nation a road map: prosecutions, reparations and memorials. Seventeen years on, the memorials have arrived first, on paper, while the prosecutions and the reparations still wait. Men named in that report have walked the halls of power. War amputees still scrape a living on our streets. A flame that lights the Monrovia skyline every evening cannot light the conscience of a nation that has not yet faced its accused in a courtroom.

WE GIVE CREDIT where it is due. The President signed the executive order creating an office for the War and Economic Crimes Court (WECC), and the Legislature endorsed the court. Yet the court itself is still not standing, which is why the Federation of Liberian Youth (FLY) marched on the Capitol last week and vowed to keep marching until it is created. When young people must demonstrate for justice while the government unveils architecture, the order of priorities is upside down.

IT WAS TELLING that the strongest calls for accountability at the unveiling came from the United Nations, the religious leaders and the youth, not from the podium of power. The President spoke of “justice over vengeance” and of “never again.” Those are fine words, but “never again” has a legal meaning. It means that those who ordered massacres, conscripted children and looted this country answer for it before a judge. Anything less turns the memorial into a polished headstone over unfinished business.

THE THIRD DEBT is to the living. The ma in Lofa who still does not know where her son was buried, the woman raped at a checkpoint, the child soldier now a grown man with no trade: these are the survivors the President praised. They need a victims’ register, a reparations fund with real money in it, and trauma care in every county. A national museum in Monrovia will mean little to a survivor in Gbarpolu who cannot afford the transport to visit it.

WE DO NOT ask the government to abandon the memorial. We ask it to sequence its conscience. Fund the court before the tower. Register the victims before the Heroes’ Park. Publish the cost before the next unveiling. If the Liberia Peace, Reconciliation and Memorial Museum Steering Committee, which meets from November 16 to 18, wants to be taken seriously, it should leave that session with a budget, a timeline and a public pledge on reparations.

PRESIDENT BOAKAI HAS made reconciliation a theme of his presidency. History will credit him for it only if the flame on Bali Island burns beside a working war crimes court and a paid reparations program. Otherwise it will be one more fire for the cameras in a country that has learned to mourn in public and forget in private. Liberia has waited 23 years. The victims cannot be asked to wait on a model.