The Graveyard

We walked down a dirt path surrounded by swamp on all sides. There at the end of the Payne-Spriggs Airport runway was a collection of bones. The people of Lapazee, West Point in Monrovia call it the graveyard because it is where mass executions were carried out by Samuel Doe's army in 1990, the bodies left to rot in the sun. Anyone suspected of being a rebel or collaborating with the rebels was killed. People starving of hunger searching for chicken green, a vegetable that grows in the swamp, were accused of being rebels and killed. "They brought you to the end of the air strip and they shot you down," said Samuel Tarr, a Lakpazee resident since 1977. The field is inconspicuous. The only sounds are of the gentle wind blowing in the tall grass and the roosters' crow. You have to look closely to see the bits of femur jutting out of the sand, half covered in tattered clothing, mixed in with bullet casings. Here bodies were carelessly tossed, left for residents to retrieve and bury. "The whole place is full of bones," said a man in a t-shirt emblazoned with an American eagle. "There's no place in this area where you won't find bodies," said Isaac Weede, another long-time resident. Weede, who, along with other residents, took it upon himself in 1991 to bury some of the bodies, was working in his garden two weeks ago. He found bones and flung them into the swamp. Another mass grave sits next to the Giple Elementary School, named for a family of 14 massacred in the war. A giant white tomb holds the Giple family.