Before West Africa was gripped by an epidemic, before images of abandoned bodies in the streets of Monrovia, before chlorine and quarantines, before CDC predictions of calamity, before the scare in Dallas and talk of closing the border, before the United States deployed the 101st Airborne Division to fight a disease, before Ebola, Liberia was known for its civil war.
By any objective measure, that 13 year slaughter was a human catastrophe: over 10% of the population dead and 80% internally displaced—numbers that dwarf (as if there is some sick contest here) today’s tragedy in Syria. But the 1989-2003 Liberian civil war gained infamy not for the quantitative count of its suffering, but rather for its grotesque headlines; child soldiers fought naked under the tutelage of teenage generals, juju priests in Halloween masks blessed fighters, and warlords tortured and exterminated whole villages.
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