Vice: What was going on in Liberia when you took these photos?
Tim Hetherington: There had been civil war in Liberia for much of the 1990s until the warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor took power there in 1997. In 2000, an armed rebel group called the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy) started to challenge his rule and so the country returned to full-scale civil war. In August 2003, Taylor was forced to leave the country and a United Nations peacekeeping mission took over. By this time Liberia had been reduced to ruins. There was no functioning government, no running water or electricity, and large groups of armed men held various parts of the country hostage.
Did you see the people who did these?
In 2003 I lived with the LURD rebel group in the interior of the country as they made their final attacks on the capital Monrovia. Frontline towns were covered with graffiti made by their fighters and so I was present in a few circumstances. As well as making drawings, people would write their names on houses to show that the property now belonged to them. After the end of the war I continued to find these, but usually stumbled upon them without seeing who wrote them. Some people would write their names, or nicknames, and so you can kind of trace the movements of specific fighters within the country. |
