Chapter Two Beatrice and Her Boys
In 1997, at about the same time Luma was graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, a woman named Beatrice Ziaty was struggling with her husband and sons—Jeremiah, Mandela, Darlington, and Erich—to survive in the middle of a civil war in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Rival rebel factions had laid siege to the city, and soldiers roamed about, some decked in women’s wigs and costumes—partly because of a superstitious belief that such costumes would fend off harm and partly because of the sheer terror such surreal getups induced in others. Bullets from the fighting cut down civilians with regularity, and mortars pierced the rooftops of family dwellings without warning. Then one night, the Ziatys were startled by a knock at the door.
Beatrice’s husband was a paymaster, a midlevel bureaucrat whose job entailed handing out wages to employees of the former government, and the men at the door wanted whatever cash he could access. Yelling, with machine guns, and in disguises, the men seemed like emissaries from hell. Beatrice couldn’t make out what faction they belonged to, or if they were simply common thugs.
“You got all the government money—we got to get rid of you,” one of the men said to Ziaty.
“Why? I’m only paymaster,” he protested. “I want to take care of the people. I only want to work to give the people a check! I got no government money.”
“You have to give the government money. If not, we will kill you.”
“I don’t have!” he pleaded.
THE ZIATYS’ STORY, as well as any, shows the extent to which modern refugees can trace their displacement to the mistakes, greed, fears, crimes, and foibles of men who long preceded them, sometimes by decades—or longer. Liberia had been founded in 1821 by a group of Americans as a colony for freed slaves who lived there first under white American rule and then, in 1847, under their own authority, as Africa’s first self-governing republic. For the next 130 years, the Americo-Liberian minority—just 3 percent of the population—backed by the U.S. government, ruled the nation of around 2.5 million as a kind of feudal oligarchy.
Americo-Liberian rule came to a brutal end on April 12, 1980, when Samuel Doe, an army sergeant who had been trained by American Green Berets, stormed the presidential compound with soldiers, disemboweled President William Tolbert, and proclaimed himself Liberia’s new leader. Doe was a member of the Krahn tribe, a tiny ethnic group that composed just 4 percent of the population, far less than the larger tribes in Liberia, the Gio and Mano. With the Krahn essentially replacing the Americo-Liberians as an American-backed oppressive ruling elite, it was only a matter of time before other ethnic groups felt aggrieved enough to revolt as well.
The man who consolidated their rage was a former Doe associate named Charles Taylor, a Liberian who had gone to college in Boston and New Hampshire and, after being convicted in an embezzling scheme, escaped an American jail through a window, using a hacksaw and a rope of knotted bedsheets.
Taylor began with a band of just 150 soldiers in a Gio section of the country. Their motto: “Kill the Krahn.” His incitement to ethnic violence worked and his force grew, in no small part because of boys—some of them orphans whose parents had been killed by Doe, some of them kidnapped from their families by Taylor’s own militias—that he armed and drugged into a killing frenzy. By 1990 he had laid siege to Monrovia. Water was cut off. There was no food or medicine. Soldiers terrorized citizens and looted at will. More than 100,000 Krahn refugees flooded into Ivory Coast, even as Doe’s Krahn soldiers committed atrocities of their own. Over one hundred and fifty thousand Liberians died.
In 1996, Taylor made another attack on Monrovia and the Krahn who lived there. “Fighters on both sides engaged in cannibalism, ripping out hearts and eating them,” wrote Martin Meredith in his book The Fate of Africa. “One group known as the ‘Butt Naked Brigade’ fought naked in the belief that this would protect them against bullets.” Even soldiers from ECOMOG—a regional peacekeeping force deployed to separate the warring factions—joined in the looting. “Monrovia,” Meredith wrote, “was reduced to a wrecked city.”
MONROVIA, OF COURSE, was where Beatrice Ziaty lived. She and her husband were Krahn and remained in the sector of the city under Krahn control. During the siege of 1996, they hid in their house as battles raged outside. When her youngest son, Jeremiah, fell sick, Beatrice could do nothing but pray. It was too dangerous to go outside for help.
“There was no food, no medicine, nothing,” she said. “I saw my child sick for five days. When that child doesn’t die, then you tell God, ‘Thank you.’”
Eventually, though, even the Ziatys’ home failed to provide refuge. The men who came in the night for Beatrice’s husband began to beat him when he said he didn’t have access to any stash of government money. Beatrice panicked. She grabbed Jeremiah and Mandela, her next oldest, and ran for the back door, which let out onto an alley full of shadows. The last words she heard her husband speak echo in her mind today as clearly as when they were spoken that night.
“Oh, what do you do!” he cried. “They are killing me! Oh—they are killing me!”
WITH JEREMIAH AND Mandela, Beatrice trekked through the darkened streets of Monrovia, past checkpoints manned by menacing teenage boys and young men burdened by the weight of guns and bandoliers absurdly oversize for their small frames. The soldiers were content to let the Krahn leave Monrovia. Beatrice and her sons made it out of town and began walking east, toward the border with Ivory Coast. She scavenged for food and hitched rides when she could. But mostly she lumbered through the bush until, after ten days of travel, she arrived at an overflowing refugee camp across the border. She had left behind Darlington, who was staying with his grandparents in the Liberian countryside. Eventually Darlington got word of his mother’s whereabouts and made his own harrowing two-day trek on foot to the camp to reunite with his mother and younger brothers.
Together and with the help of other refugees, Beatrice and her sons built a mud hut for shelter. Then they waited—for what, they weren’t exactly sure. The end of the war—if it ever occurred—wouldn’t be enough to lure them back to Monrovia. Beatrice’s husband was gone. The city was in shambles. Taylor, whose forces laid waste to Monrovia, would come to power in an election in 1997—famously employing the campaign slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa. But I will vote for him.”—winning largely because people feared he would restart a civil war if he lost. He used the power of his post to continue the killing until he eventually became the rare example of a Liberian leader who fell out of favor with Washington. He went into exile in Nigeria, was indicted for war crimes by the UN, and was eventually captured in an SUV stashed with cash and heroin on the Nigeria-Cameroon border.
Beatrice passed the time in the camp by standing in lines to apply for resettlement by the United Nations, an act she undertook out of equal parts desperation and stubbornness. She knew the odds that she would be selected were minuscule—but what else was there to do? The camp, home to more than twenty thousand refugees from the war in Liberia, was squalid, with frequent food shortages and a quiet threat in the form of soldiers who worked in the camp to recruit young men back into the war. In such conditions, education for her boys was next to impossible. Beatrice focused her energies on surviving, protecting her sons from recruitment, and getting out.
Beatrice and her sons spent five years in that camp. Against all odds and after countless interviews with UN personnel, Beatrice learned that she and her boys had been accepted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for resettlement. They would be sent first to Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast, and from there they’d fly to New York and then to Atlanta, Georgia, and their new home in Clarkston, a place they had never heard of.
THE ZIATYS’ RESETTLEMENT followed a typical path. They were granted a $3,016 loan by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement for four one-way plane tickets to the