In Liberia, There's Room in the Zoo

The Associated Press
January 4, 1995, Wednesday
People Displaced By Civil War Find Home in Zoo, Wherever There's Space

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

MONROVIA, Liberia _ Josiah Kuoh has a stiff left arm, its muscles mangled and paralyzed when the hippo he used to feed clamped its jaws around the limb and wouldn't let go.

The hippo is long gone, a casualty of Liberia's civil war. Kuoh, however, remains in Monrovia's zoo, wandering among the cages with about 60 other people who now call it home.

Before Liberia's civil war began on Christmas Eve in 1989, this seaside city had about 400,000 people. Now the population is about 1.2 million, mainly people who came to escape fighting in the countryside and settled wherever there was space.

The war was supposed to be over with a Dec. 28 cease-fire accord. But fighting has continued outside Monrovia, and the capital's displaced are not going to leave until they're sure life is back to normal.

Only when animals return to the zoo, when a government returns to the wrecked administrative buildings, when shops reopen in the old mall will the people living in them move out.

"I don't like it, but we've got nowhere else to go," said 22-year-old Louise Jolo, who has lived since January with her mother and hundreds of other people in the old Department of Foreign Affairs building.

In another city, this seven-story oceanside building might be an enviable address. The rooms are spacious, with magnificent views of the Atlantic. There's a well outside, so water is never a problem. It's cool even on the baking equator, thanks to thick concrete walls that keep out the heat. The sea breeze flows down the long dark corridors through huge gaps where there used to be windows, or where shells slammed in during fighting.

When night comes, however, kerosene lanterns are the only light. Jolo stays in her room, on the bed with a teddy bear, to avoid falling down the crumbling stairway or being caught by thugs who occasionally roam the building.

The civil war began when forces loyal to rebel leader Charles Taylor invaded from Ivory Coast to overthrow tribalist dictator Samuel Doe. Doe subsequently was tortured to death by a breakaway faction.

What began as a popular rebellion ballooned into a tribal war that has left more than 150,000 of this West African nation's 2.6 million people dead. About half the population has been displaced by the fighting.

Kuoh has lived and worked at the old Monrovia Zoo for more than a decade, but he never thought it would house people. By day, children run free among the cages that once housed bears, eagles, snakes, apes and big cats.

In 1990, when fighting raged across the country and food was scarce, army soldiers started coming to the zoo and asking for animals to feed themselves. They were given a deer or a bird, said Margaret Williams, whose Swiss brother-in-law, Charles Steiner, opened the zoo 30 years ago.

"Then when things got really bad, they would just come in and shoot the animals through the cages," said Williams, who also lives on the zoo grounds. The soldiers shot and killed leopards, panthers and other animals.

"My brother-in-law, he took care of them like they were human beings," Williams said. "All his life he worked to build something, and now it's all lost."

Kuoh was attacked by the hippo in 1989 but continued tending the animal until it, too, became a war victim. Today, he still guides visitors through the zoo as if the animals were there, pointing out where the species used to be housed. "On Saturdays, we used to have people lined up to come here and see them. I wouldn't have believed this," he said.

The zoo founder, Steiner, is back in Bern, Switzerland with his Liberian wife. Williams says she's confident the zoo will one day reopen, bigger and better than before.

Even when that happens it will be impossible to forget the past brutality: Across the street from the zoo entrance is a sign marking a mass grave of hundreds of civilians killed during rebel attacks.

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