The Clara Town Tragedy Soccer Legends

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh

     The community of Clara Town on Bushrod Island between Freeport and Waterside has a special place in my heart. Before I went to Sinoe County for mission schools in the early 70s, I spent a whole lot of time in that part of Monrovia visiting my mother who moved there from New Kru Town in the 1960s. 

 With vast swampland serving as a backdrop and a habitat for the area’s many endangered species, Clara Town became a destination for good times, a glittering nightlife and football, courtesy of the community’s many leaders including the late legend PSJ (Peter Slewion Jlakloh), who kept the place lively, and whose philanthropic endeavors and mentoring efforts guided many impoverished kids to live their dreams.                           

Even though Clara Town was often overshadowed by its larger than life nemeses, New Kru Town whose own established social scenes and organized football stayed intact even as those who frequented the night clubs and neighborhood football “arenas” there found it difficult to maintain a sustainable standard of living, Clara Town found its own appeal as a place for fun and entertainment on any given day.

     However, like others who moved to Clara Town during that period, my mother also moved there to start life anew. Together with the rest of her family, friends, neighbors, and other Liberians, they lived happily – or they thought they were living happily until their lives, their hopes, their dreams and everything they worked so hard for were abruptly taken away by an executive order from the highest political authority of the land, President William V.S. Tubman.

     Before his death in 1971, and according to news reports, it is believed that the dictatorial Liberian president who was a life long senior member of the United Methodist Church of Liberia at the time signed an executive order (through the insistence of the church) to have Clara Town demolished in order to get the church's land back from those who occupied it “illegally.” That executive order, unfortunately, was carried out by the newly chosen, unelected and crowned President William R. Tolbert Jr., whose administration presided over and committed at the time one of the worst violations of human rights in the history of the Liberian nation.

     Without any public or court hearings to show proof of ownership that the land actually belonged to the United Methodist Church, the victims, who were never compensated financially for their losses, and were never provided permanent or temporary public housing where they could at least cry and/or recuperate from the numbing experience they endured after their homes were bulldozed by the state and its dreaded security network, were told by the Liberian government to leave Clara Town. As a result, the former Clara Town residents, on that day had to scramble all over the City of Monrovia and elsewhere to find a place to live in a country they always believed also belong to them.

     The feeling of helplessness – the idea that their government let them down and did nothing to protect them proved fatal for some, and also traumatized many who experienced psychological problems. The pressure that emanated from the demolition of those homes and the city of Clara Town was unbearable, and is believed by some to have led perhaps to the untimely death in 1973 of the young and vibrant Bishop S. Trowen Nagbe, who was partly blamed by his indigenous people for what happened to them. However, with all the pains and injustice those people experienced during that time, the Liberian government then did not care to investigate why those Liberians were treated in such a horrible way.

     Another painful part about the tragedy is the fact that over three decades since the residents of Clara Town were uprooted from their homes by the state to make room for the United Methodist Church of Liberia, the land remains empty, a ghost town with no economic development going on except for sprinkles of foreigners, (Lebanese and Syrians, etc) occupying few buildings in the area pretending to be doing business there.

     So why did the government of Liberia rushed to forcibly remove those people from their homes when the church was never in the position of turning the area into a vibrant and economically resourceful community that spurs growth and development? Why didn’t the government hold hearings or appoint a commission at the time to study the land issue between the church and the residents of Clara Town before taking such draconian action against its own citizens? Why demolished those homes without compensating the residents, or without finding them affordable housing?

     This is a class issue, exactly the same problem that caused the 1980 bloody revolution and the civil war of 1990, which bodes on political, social and economic injustice and unfairness, the violation of liberties, hate and intolerance against a poor and voiceless indigenous population that couldn’t fend for themselves at the time.

     So far, it seems the abuse of human rights by the Government of Liberia against the former residents of Clara Town has been ignored for over three decades, with not a single body – government or human rights’ groups ascertaining as to why Liberians were driven forcibly from their homes, and why hasn’t successive Liberian governments condemn, punish and hold financially liable those who violated the human rights of their fellow citizens?

     With a land commission set up by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to address the prevailing land issue in Liberia, which often pits one Liberian citizen against the other (including President Sirleaf), who also found herself defending against a lawsuit brought on by a Liberian who believed she took the individual’s land, something drastic has to be done to end this crippling nightmare.

     There can never be lasting peace when age-old issues such as injustice and human rights violations against the Liberian people by their own government are buried under the rug, forgotten and not addressed. For Liberians to feel they are fully a part of the peace and reconciliation process, a commission must be appointed by the Sirleaf administration to investigate the Clara Town tragedy of the 1970s, that demolished the homes of its citizens and an entire city to satisfy the selfish wishes of a powerful force such as the United Methodist Church of Liberia.

     The rights of those Liberians were violated in Clara Town, and when one’s human rights are violated, everything must be done to investigate, compensate and/or prosecute those who caused such pain against its fellow citizens.