By Kellita Rose

For decades, the Liberian state has resisted meaningful accountability for war crimes. Every attempt to honor the dead, to remember with dignity, has been met with silence, or worse, obstruction.

I remember it clearly: sometime in 1997 or 1998, survivors and families of those killed during the Phebe Massacre came together to organize a memorial. Parents, siblings, colleagues traveled from across the country to grieve, to remember, to say: never again.

Phebe Hospital had taken a bold  and empathetic step to erect murals and plaques to mourn and to warn. The pain in that small gathering was overwhelming. We looked at each other and knew: if not for God, we could have been in that grave.

Then came the message from the Government to stop the program. Their reasoning? “Phebe was not the only place people got killed in Liberia.” Imagine that. As if grief must be rationed. As if remembrance must be approved. We did not stop. We did not listen. We held the program.

And I remember another moment. Charles Taylor, former Liberian president, arrived at Phebe with gifts of rice, assorted items. A performance of reconciliation. But Dr. Walter Gwenigale, then head of Phebe Hospital, stood firm. He told Taylor to get in his car and go. That was it. No spectacle. No compromise. Because rice is not a currency for justice.

It’s been over thirty years.

Thirty years. Our memory remains etched with nightmares of mass graves, unnamed.

Mothers brutalized and murdered while the world looked away. Fathers hunted like animals and slaughtered in front of their families. Girls abducted. Women raped, some by their sons, forced to perform horror while their husbands watched.

We have carried this. We are still carrying it.

And now? We are handed microwaved symbolism. Handfuls of programs dressed as progress. And in those rooms, some of the very people who oversaw our destruction sit cross-legged, singing Jesus Paid It All or whatever it is you sing to soothe your conscience.

But where is justice?

Why is a Rwandan voice chosen to narrate our grief while Liberians, the ones who lived it, sit and listen?

We are not a pilot program. We are a nation of survivors. This treatment and handling of our pain is cruel. It is erasure masked as elegance and we have no time for that.

We demand:
1. Accountability for warlords still walking freely.
2. Reparations for families shattered and left with no graves to mourn.
3. Recognition of massacres in Bloe Town, St. Peter’s, and every silenced scream across our soil Liberian voices centered in our healing.
4. We ask for State transparency. Their plans for graves, justice, and memorials must not be decided behind closed doors.

We beg you. Do not bury us in mass graves again. Do not repeat that sin.
We are not here for empty gestures or delayed ceremonies. We want justice in every currency: Legal. Moral. Historical.

“Sorry ya” is good. It is progress but justice is right. It does not speak for 250,000 lives. It does not speak for my mother.

Reconciliation and accountability will never follow a performative path. You cannot choreograph healing. You cannot script justice. It has to be genuine and not for optics but for truth. It must be inclusive with survivors at the center, not on the margins. And it must be honest by naming names, acknowledging harm, and committing to repair. Anything less is a continuation of violence by other means.

We are not victims. We are witnesses. And we are still watching.

Kellita Rose is a governance expert with more than two decades of leadership across peace building and institutional accountability in fragile and post-conflict settings. She brings deep expertise in advancing evidence-based advocacy and storytelling for social justice.