Scott Family Fellows: Views From Liberia
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February 22, 2008
Conor Hartman Quoted in the Media (Again)!
Posted by Rebecca Schutte at 12:14 PM
In this blog posted by Kevin Corke, a NBC News White House Correspondent, Conor Hartman speaks about optimism and progress in Liberia.
Quote:
"I know it's hard to tell if you've just gotten here from the U.S. or from another African country, but Liberia has made amazing progress in just a short time," said Conor Hartman, an advisor to Liberia’s Internal Affairs minister."Liberia was at rock bottom, but with good governance and continued growth I think you'll continue to see a great turn around."
It's not hard for Hartman to be optimistic. Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-banker who is known affectionately among her people as the "Iron Lady," is making progress.
Read the rest of the original post that quotes Conor at MSNBC.
Scott Family Fellow Conor Hartman Featured in the Media
Posted by Rebecca Schutte at 12:03 PM
Conor Hartman, a Scott Family Fellow working in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was featured in this article from America.gov, on Feb. 21, 2008.
American Volunteer Helps Liberians Realize a Better Life
Development specialist Conor Hartman praises the country’s leadership
Monrovia, Liberia -- “Liberia is the kind of country I wanted to come to as an American to be of assistance,” development specialist Conor D. Hartman says.
Hartman, a Scott Family Liberia Fellow, is in the country for one year to make a difference as a special adviser to the Liberian Ministry of Internal Affairs. He has been in Liberia for seven months and has worked elsewhere in Africa, including southern Sudan.
Hartman told America.gov he thinks Americans “have an obligation to help move the Liberians from a long civil war situation into an era of stability, economic growth and development. If you look at countries around the world that are emerging from conflict, Liberia is the most promising of all, in no small part because you have the best leadership team and most qualified president, with a very capable Cabinet.”
Harvard-educated President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given by the United States, on November 5, 2007. Her government, Hartman said, “is committed to making [Liberia] a better country for young Liberians and Liberians who are unborn.”
“With that kind of leadership,” he said, “in a very short period of time they turned this from a very serious war and conflict situation to one where you have tremendous growth and investment happening.”
Since the end of the country’s civil war, the United States has helped Liberia revitalize its economy, strengthen good governance and the rule of law and deliver basic services, and has provided more than $750 million in direct support. The United States also funds one-quarter of the costs of the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Liberia.
Hartman, who is seeking to help Liberians who are less affluent than he is, said the country is achieving a high rate of economic growth under the Sirleaf government. Real gross domestic product growth rates were 2.6 percent in 2004, 5.3 percent in 2005, 7.8 in 2006 and 9.5 percent in 2007, he said. The statistics he quotes come directly from the Liberian government’s Draft Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.
With the election of the Sirleaf government, Hartman said, the former banker has “turned this from a very serious, war conflict situation to one where the environment favors tremendous growth and investment”
From 1989 to 1996, one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars took place in Liberia, claiming the lives of more than 200,000 Liberians and displacing 1 million others into refugee camps in neighboring countries. The country endured many more years of uncertainty until November 23, 2005, when the Liberian Election Commission announced that Sirleaf had been elected the country’s president and the first freely elected woman president in Africa.
Significant growth in cement manufacturing and services has helped fuel those high economic growth rates, he said. A retooling of contracts in the country’s extractive industries -- such as rubber, hardwood, iron ore and diamonds -- is expected to bring even higher levels of economic growth to the country, according to the draft poverty report, as those sectors become more integrated into the country’s economy.
Commenting on the important links between the United States and Liberia, Hartman called those ties “very strong.” The country was founded by former American slaves in the 1800s, and during the war years in the 1990s many Liberians left for the United States, he said.
The Liberian government system was modeled on the American system, with three separate branches of government, and economic systems are based on the American model of free enterprise, Hartman added. For that reason, he said, “of all the places where America is investing money today, this is the one where I think we have the best chance of making a big difference and turning the situation around.”
Key attributes of the Sirleaf government, Hartman said, include good governance, transparency, accountability and a commitment to peace -- “all of the basic principles needed to bring in critical investment."
Liberia, “land of the free,” was founded by free African Americans and freed slaves from the United States. An initial group of 86 immigrants, who came to be called Americo-Liberians, established a settlement in Christopolis (now Monrovia, named after U.S. President James Monroe) on February 6, 1820.
Thousands of freed American slaves and free African Americans arrived during the following years, leading to the formation of more settlements and culminating in a declaration of independence of the Republic of Liberia on July 26, 1847.
February 19, 2008
Getting Ready for Bush
Posted by Conor Hartman at 12:03 PM
On Thursday, President Bush will be stopping in Liberia for 5 hours to meet with President Sirleaf. Monrovia’s hotels are awash with American security and presidential advance teams. Roads that have sorely been in the need of repair are suddenly being torn up and re-paved – all because the motorcade will be passing over them. Fences are getting re-painted and decorations are going up on the unoccupied Executive Mansion. This is a big event for Liberia. Rumor has it that Thursday might even be declared a national holiday. On Saturday I attended a meeting of the traditional chiefs from the 15 counties. In his opening remarks, the chairman of the National Traditional Council said, “in Liberia, we have Jesus Christ. Not so?” The chiefs affirmed. “On Thursday, God is coming.” Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is Jesus Christ and President Bush is God. That’s one way of putting it.
February 11, 2008
Peacebuilding Fund Supports Liberia at US$15 million
Posted by Conor Hartman at 10:27 AM
In mid-December, the UN Peace Building Fund (PBF) awarded US$15 million to Liberia for short-term, catalytic peacebuilding efforts over the next 18 months based on Liberia’s Peace Building Priority Plan, developed together by the Government and UN. Liberia is the first country to receive support through the 2nd window of the PBF; Burundi and Sierra Leone were the only countries to receive support under the 1st window. A Joint Steering Committee (JSC), co-chaired by the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General (Recovery and Governance), and comprising members from government, UN, multilaterals, bilaterals, civil society, and the Liberian business community, will be convened in the coming weeks. The JSC is responsible for selecting projects and overseeing PBF implementation.
This is an exciting moment in Liberia’s post-conflict reconstruction. We are moving beyond the security aspects of peacebuilding (though this still constitutes a very important component of the priority plan) to address the underlying ethnic tensions, political environment and institutional weaknesses that are important to consolidating peace. We are making every effort to ensure that the PBF allocations are transparent, wisely invested and contribute to building capacity within Liberian institutions (both government and non-government) through strong partnerships with UN organizations. One or more of the PBF projects will be independently evaluated, and the M&E components of all projects will be examined closely to ensure that we learn what works best in this environment. More to come as the JSC selects projects and implementation begins…
February 07, 2008
Introduction and Inauguration of “Liberia in Pictures”
Posted by Ben Spatz at 12:00 PM
My position in the Scott Family Liberia Fellows program is Special Advisor and Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The position is dynamic and offers great insight into the workings of a Foreign Ministry that is looking to rebuild itself after decades of conflict and mismanagement.
The breadth of issues covered by the Foreign Ministry ensures that my duties vary greatly. On any given day I could be found in my small three-person office writing letters to heads of state, drafting speeches or devising ways to enhance Ministry efficiency and coordination. On those same days I would surely be trying to find ways to make copies or print in a building with inconsistent generator power and often no ink or paper; challenges to Government come in many forms.
On what time I have off I try my best to get out of the office, out of the house, away from the international crowd and into Monrovia’s streets and neighborhoods. I seek out the back roads where I can get an up-close view and hear anecdotes of the extraordinary yet utterly normal problems facing Liberians who struggle to rebuild their lives in a complex and demanding environment.
I don’t do this out of a voyeuristic desire to see how hard life can be in Monrovia. That is quite obvious even through a tinted car window. For me this is an education and an opportunity to humanize the development challenges here in a way that compliments my formal position in the Ministry.
When in the Ministry and dealing with high-level qualified government officials it is all too easy to forget the texture and magnitude of the challenges that remain in Liberia and those facing the majority of Liberians. From two floors beneath the President, figures such as 70% unemployment and 80% illiteracy become abstractions, as do entire categories of people, such as former combatants or the mentally ill. As an international, it is all too easy to fall into a closeted expatriate life, riding from air-conditioned flats in air-conditioned white jeeps to air-conditioned offices and back again, hardly hearing the sounds of the street. To be sure this is a Liberian reality too given the massive international presence. But this is not a balanced look at Liberia. I constantly push myself out of this comfort zone (and, on weekends, out of the hammock on my balcony). The results are some of the most enjoyable, memorable and educational experiences I’ve had here.
What I see isn’t all negative. To the contrary: I am constantly inspired, and frankly surprised, to see how positive many Liberians are. Even in some of the darkest boroughs, where one might expect hope to have dried up decades ago with the last flows of pipe-borne water or electricity, I see people who believe that a better tomorrow is possible. This is both a credit to the Liberian spirit and to the progress made by President Sirleaf.
My training as a photojournalist does not allow me to go on these little journeys without toting a camera and I am almost always accepted in the communities and allowed to move and photograph as I wish. This post will inaugurate the Liberia in Pictures section, a regular forum in which I hope to provide vignettes into “normal” Liberian life so as to give a fuller understanding of the context of the work we do here as Scott Fellows while also providing a visual side to the blog.
This first posting is a series of images I took during the 2005 Liberian elections, and is, in my opinion, a seminal moment in which hope was reborn. For background, in 2005 Liberians voted peacefully in the first truly free and fair elections in Liberia’s 160-year history. Harvard-trained economist Ellen Johnson Sirleaf defeated former World Footballer of the Year George Manneh Weah by a margin of nearly 20 points in a run-off to become Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state.
I was in Liberia at this time working with the United Nations Office for Project Services re-building badly damaged physical infrastructure, mainly roads and bridges. In October and November of that year I had the privilege to serve as an election observer for both rounds of the election. The eight images above capture some of the tension, excitement and hope that marked the historic moment.
To see the photos presented with their captions, please visit: http://www.cpoy.org/index.php?s=WinningImages&yr=61&c=28&p=2.0.
February 06, 2008
A Jack that Portends a Full House
Posted by Conor Hartman at 01:53 PM
Last weekend, I decided to make good on a New Year’s resolution to explore this country – in 6 months of living here, I still have not slept outside of Monrovia (work always calls, unless I make an effort). Early on Sunday morning, I set out on a beach run with backpack, machete and fly rod strapped on – a journey to find salt flats holding some of the great saltwater sport fish: tarpon, bonefish and permit. A couple hours of wading through mangroves and shallow tidal areas yielded no results (just the wrong place…several hours up and down the coast, reportedly some of the highest concentrations of these game fish in completely pristine waters). I switched to fishing the pounding surf and soon was locked into a 20 minute battle with a 10 lb jack, which I gave to the local fisherman to supplement their small buckets of 5 inch snapper.
Liberia still hasn’t been discovered in the world of water sports and eco-tourism. The rainforests are untouched and full of wildlife, including chimpanzees, bush elephants and many other exotic animals. The rivers are full of mind-blowingly large catfish and the aggressive tiger fish. The salt flats are unparalleled for their concentration of game fish. The sport fishing in-shore yields jacks, grouper, barracuda and snapper that rival any place in the world. And even deep-sea fishing yields big results here – marlin and ahi tuna in good numbers and size (as long as we can keep the international commercial fleets from raping Liberia’s territorial waters, as they do today). My one jack on Sunday morning makes me wonder: when will Liberia fill its house with tourists to enjoy all these great natural wonders?
Observations from the Brussels Airport
Posted by Dan Hymowitz at 01:05 PM
Hey, there. Dan Hymowitz, one of the new fellows here. I've been in Liberia for two weeks now. So far it's been an incredible experience and obviously there are lots of interesting things to report. But I'll use my first entry to describe something surprising (to me) I saw before I even landed in Liberia. The main route to Monrovia right now is a flight that leaves from Brussels. My plane from New York got in to Brussels about five hours before my connection so I had plenty of time just sitting around in the airport.
As other Monrovia-bound passengers wandered into the waiting area I found myself surprised by the types of things the other non-Liberians were traveling to the country to do: a couple from Alaska moving to a remote part of Liberia for a year to help rebuild the country's Jesuit college. A group of American couples on their way to adopt orphaned children. A man headed into the country for two weeks to train a class of Liberian ministers. And all sorts of groups of businessmen.
It's probably just a reflection of my background but, prior to seeing this, my notion of a "typical" non-Liberian waiting for that flight was a World Bank consultant to the Ministry of Finance or a young NGO worker helping to reassimilate recently returned refugees.
Admittedly, since arriving here, I have mainly been encountering that more "stereotypical" development worker. But fascinating to see there is a far broader array of rebuilding/aid efforts going on inside the country than I'd realized.
Presidential Recognition
Posted by Conor Hartman at 11:44 AM
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf delivered her annual message to the National Legislature on January 28th to report on the state of the nation. After reviewing accomplishments under the four pillars of the interim Poverty Reduction Strategy (iPRS) – Peace and Security, Economic Revitalization, Governance and Rule of Law, Infrastructure and Basic Services - she said “[Liberia] continues to enjoy the confidence of non official partners…the Scott Family Fellowship and Senior Executive Service provide important support for the enhancement of our national capacity.”
Certainly credit and thanks go to Ed Scott and his family for starting this new program, which is clearly contributing in meaningful ways to Liberia’s development during this critical post-conflict period.
February 01, 2008
Beginnings of Regional Unity through Soccer?
Posted by Ben Spatz at 04:29 PM
Just after the Guinean soccer team defeated Morocco in an early round of the Africa Cup of Nations (the equivalent of the soccer World Cup for Africa) dozens of young men ran, shouting and singing, through the capital’s central streets wearing faded and torn bandanas of tri-color green, yellow and red – the flag of victorious Guinea. No, this isn’t Conakry and these aren’t celebrating Guineans; these are Liberians in Monrovia.
The next day, while walking through the South Beach slum I began talking to the residents about the day’s Africa Cup matches, always an easy way to strike up conversation in a potentially hostile situation. Almost without exception they were supporting Cote d’Ivoire. Hours later, after Cote d’Ivoire soundly beat Benin, excited Liberians in knockoff Ivorian-orange jerseys were celebrating, giving the Guinean supporters of the previous day a run for their money as the loudest fans in Monrovia.
What struck me was not that Liberians would be highly energized about soccer, because they are indeed true soccer fans, but that the vast majority supported their neighbors Guinea and Ivory Coast (Sierra Leone, like Liberia, did not qualify for the tournament) over all other African teams, despite the recent bloody history among the countries of the sub-region.
At the same time, Nigeria, often seen as Liberia and West Africa’s big brother, couldn’t muster any support aside from the battalions of Nigerian peacekeepers. In fact, when walking behind the raucous Guinean fans I saw them divert from their victory lap just to taunt the driver of a taxicab who was unfortunate to have been caught in traffic while having a Nigerian flag draped on the hood of his taxi.
The teasing was friendly and the atmosphere happy, a sharp contrast to 2003 when groups of young men running down the street would have been a terrifying and potentially deadly sight. That year was the climax of Liberia’s 14-year civil war, which was decidedly regional in character. The most publicized example of the regionalized nature of the conflict is former Liberian President Charles Taylor’s ongoing trial in front of the Special Court of Sierra Leone. He is charged with 11 counts of violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity for, among other things, supporting the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) militia in Sierra Leone, made infamous by brutally hacking off limbs of their victims.
Taylor was not alone in supporting cross-border fighters. Just as he was funding and arming groups that crossed into all three of his neighbors’ territory, Sierra Leone and Guinea organized the militia United Liberation Movement for Democracy in Liberia (ULIMO). Guinea also backed the new group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Development (LURD). Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo supported anyone and everyone willing to fight against Taylor, in particular the LURD faction Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). It is an alphabet soup of factions, all composed of drug-addled fighters recruited mainly from displaced youth from across the sub-region.
Nigeria on the other hand has played a more constructive role in the sub-region. Nigerian peacekeeping troops have featured prominently in Liberian life since the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) deployed the Monitoring Observer Group peacekeeping mission (ECOMOG) in 1990. Now, Nigerian soldiers comprise a key portion of the 13,000-strong United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) peacekeeping force that has helped keep the peace in Liberia since 2003. Perhaps more pervasive although subtler, is Nigeria’s cultural dominance in Liberia through music, television and clothing, which is rivaled only by American cultural influence.
Back in South Beach, I asked why they are all rooting for Cote d’Ivoire today and for Guinea the day before. “We are all brothers,” say the young men. “We must support our brothers.” If this spirit of togetherness can spread beyond the soccer field and gel into true sub-regional unity, it will be a good sign in what has been for all too long an example of a very dangerous neighborhood.