Vengeace for the Not-so-Hidden Past

"Everyone around here used to go to the big palm nut farm to cut palm and make oil to eat and sell."
"General Bill Horace and his men were passing. They entered the plantation and accused us of looting the place. He then ordered his men to arrest people."
"They started chasing us, and everybody was running all over the place. They then started firing at us. I first saw one woman fall. The bullet hit her on the head. Her husband was crying. Then one of the other fighters shot him also.Both of them died instantly."
Eyewitness report, Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation

"Many of us [Liberians] are here in Canada as a result of that war."
"We became refugees directly as a result of that war ... It has become a reality in the Liberian community that our community is a mix of victims of war crimes and the perpetrators at the same time."
Leo Johnson, president, Liberian Association of Canada

"The London Police Service has received several media inquiries about the identity of the deceased and possible historical association to [the] National Patriotic Front in Liberia."
"The London Police Service is aware of these inquiries, but cannot confirm this fact at this time."
London Police Service statement

The house where four masked men stormed through the door on early Sunday morning. Police said an altercation between the intruders and Bill Horrace likely spilled out of the home and onto a neighbour's yard. (Colin Butler/CBC News)

Neighbours of the occupants of a house in London, Ontario, reported seeing four men wearing face masks forcing their way into the house where 44-year-old Bill Horace lived with his family. Two of the men went to the front door and two  to the back. The neighbour heard a struggle, saw Mr. Horace dash out the front door, and there he was shot to death. His family was at home at the time. The four men were seen to leave the scene in two cars, after gunshots rang out.

The victim was taken to hospital by paramedics, and there he was pronounced dead. Initially, police stated their belief that this was no random incident, although they appeared not to know why the man had been targeted. And then the man was identified as the former leader of a rebel militia engaged in the 1990s war in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the late 1990s. And despite having been accused by former associates and witnesses of commanding "atrocities on a massive scale", the man lived quietly in Canada, a former general in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia..

Bill Horrace  (Facebook)

In 2012 Canada launched an investigation into war crimes purportedly committed by this man, the same year the former president of Liberia and leader of the NPFL, Charles Taylor, was convicted at the Special Court for Sierra Leone for planning, aiding and abetting war crimes, some of which were characterized as among the worst in recorded history. Taylor is serving a 50-year prison sentence in Britain.

Horace had sought refugee status in Canada in 2001 with false documents. He would have been declared inadmissible for entry to Canada had his true identity been known, as a rebel leader who was accused of war crimes inclusive of murder, rape and torture. He had made his way to Ghana before embarking on a journey to Canada using a false name and Dutch documents.

"It's a tragedy, because I think he evaded justice for alleged crimes. Nobody, regardless of their alleged past, deserves to die like that."
"What I've come to learn is that it's generally easier to simply deport somebody rather than convict them for war crimes."
"Because the burden of proof is so high, often it's easier to deport somebody because they lied on their refugee claim than it is to convict them of crimes against humanity."
"There are many people that would have liked to have seen him brought to justice. Getting gunned down is not justice. A legal process is justice."
"I'm confident a legal case could have been built against Bill Horace. The fact that he was still living freely, a decade after the evidence I had compiled was made publicly available, I think is troubling, and I think suggests that even if another 10 years went by, he might still be here."  
Michael Petrou, journalist, professor, Carleton University

"It's not within the Canadian Security Intelligence Service mandate. It's not terrorism, it's not espionage, it's not foreign interference and it's not subversion."
"The only people who may have been looking at him would have been the RCMP, because they would have a mandate to cooperate with the International Criminal Court at The Hague in case this guy was up on charges."
Phil Gurski, Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting

Police investigate a fatal home shooting in London, Ont., on June 22, 2020.

Ebola, Liberia

"The family says the person is not an Ebola patient and they pull them away from the other people. Then they say, 'We can give you a certificate from the Ministry of Health that it wasn't Ebola'."
"Sometimes it is $40. Sometimes it is $50. ... Then they offer bags to them and [the family] carry on their own thing."
Vincent Chounse, Community outreach worker, Monrovia, Liberia

"They told us not to bury the bodies. They told us to bury the bodies. They told us to call. But now I am not sure if they are the ones trying to eradicate this virus or to make it grow."
Robert Johnson, 17, Grand Gedeh County, Liberia

A sign lists the "10 Commandments of Ebola" in West Point. (Photo by Tim Freccia)

An epidemiologist at South Africa's University of Pretoria, who travelled to Liberia to help with the Ebola response, claimed to have received reports of people paying bribes to teams sent out for retrieval and safe disposal of the bodies of Ebola victims. The bribes resulted in the teams looking the other way, permitting the custom in the region of family washing, handling, and burying bodies of the deceased to take place as usual.

"Low-level corruption has a high-level impact", said Andrew Medina-Marino.

The teams whose job it is to retrieve dead Ebola victims issue death certificates to families claiming their family members died of other causes, accepting bribes for that privilege. The body is then left behind, for the families to practise their traditional burial procedures. Locals and health workers alike have made allusion to this dangerous practise.

A development that will make it all the more difficult to halt the dread virus from spreading. Since dead bodies of Ebola victims remain the major source of contagion. And the corruption of some of the teams in accepting bribes will ensure that the effort to contain the virus will be hugely unsuccessful, since Liberian funerals include washing the body and retaining it for a wake lasting days.

A health worker holds a poster warning that Ebola is real in the West Point area of Monrovia, Liberia. (Photo by Tim Freccia)

Relatives and friends attend the ceremonial practise to kiss the corpse before it is interred, most often in a family cemetery plot nearby. Another reason for families of the deceased to hope to deny that their loved ones suffered from Ebola, is that the deadly disease carries a social stigma. So avoidance of the reality of the cause of death becomes a point of family honour, one which guarantees wider spread of the devastating virus.

Outside the capital Monrovia, Commissioner Hawa Johnson has stopped issuing burial permits to anyone who cannot produce a death certificate from a hospital giving confirmation of a non-Ebola death. This, after one of her workers came to the realization that body-retrieval teams were offering to sell fake death certificates in the community. Funeral home directors too have taken to double-checking death certificates.

Vincent Chounse, a community outreach worker, claims to have witnessed the corrupt negotiations four times in another township on the outskirts of Monrovia. Teen-age Robert Johnson explained he saw the man who lived next door fall ill. When he died, a team from a funeral home came to collect the cadaver. The family protested and young Mr. Johnson watched as a document certifying the body was Ebola-free was handed over for $150.00.

He professes confusion now, that while the government informs residents they must call body-retrieval teams, the teams fail in their duty to remove the corpses.

A man showing serious symptoms of Ebola was sent to the JFK Ebola treatment center in Monrovia, where he was turned away. (Photo by Tim Freccia)