Massacre Survivors Seek Assistance
A group under the banner the Association of Kpolokpala Massacre Victims in Bong County has launched an appeal seeking urgent assistance from government and other humanitarian organizations claiming that they have been forgotten and abandoned over the years and only surviving by the mercy of God.
The group’s chairperson Semeon Mulbah in an interview with this paper lamented that most of them were living in very appalling conditions, as they find it difficult to overcome their trauma as a result of the massacre that claimed the lives of more than five hundred persons in the 1994.
He said, their community does not have any improved facility not to mention the availability of safe drinking water and health center.
Mr. Mulbah said the only thing the community has benefited from since 1994 was the reburying of the massacre victims in a mass grave in 2009 at an elaborate program in Kpolokapala initiated by a group in Monrovia that brought several institutions and personalities together.
He said since then nothing has been done to accelerate development in the town to ensure a more sustainable transformation in the lives of the massacre survivors.
The massacre survivors head expressing grief indicated that they are still drinking from streams that got clot as the result of dumping the dead bodies during the massacre which he believes has serious health consequences.
He added that due to the lack of safe drinking water residence of the village sometimes encounter the outbreak of waterborne diseases such as diarrhea and cholera mainly among women and children.
“In 2008 some women discovered several bones in one of the streams near the town while fishing” Mr. Mulbah said.
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He expressed dismay over the manner in which government is giving cold shoulders to them as though nothing ever happened to them during the war and the facts are available as to the extend they suffered the consequences of the war.
He said, government needs to provide them reparation in keeping with the TRC recommendation but it appears their plight continues to be hidden or forgotten.
Mr. Mulbah further stated that the only striving institution of learning in the community was constructed with financial assistance from a citizen of the town who is currently residing in the United States of America.
The school is also said to be faced with lot of challenges as there are limited benches for the kids to sit on and almost all the teachers are volunteers who get compensation from the little contributions collected from parents to keep the school running.
The town of Kpolokpala Jorquelleh district , Bong County experienced one of the worst massacres during the civil crisis in Liberia where more than five hundred persons were slaughtered in cold blood at the peak of the war in September 1994, reportedly by fighters of the Liberia Peace Council (LPC) one of the fighting groups that took part in Liberia’s fourteen years brutal civil conflict.