Episcopal Press and News
Hopes to Restore Cuttington College Dashed by New Fighting in Liberia
Episcopal News Service. April 19, 1996 [96-1441]
(ENS) With high hopes mixed with apprehension, Dr. Melvin Mason, president of Cuttington University College, left the United States for Liberia April 4 to resurrect the school that was an early casualty of his country's brutal civil war.
He never made it, stopped at the Ivory Coast by the new and vicious outbreak of fighting in Monrovia, Liberia's capital.
"There was a cancellation of my flight after waiting for hours because the pilot that had to take us into Monrovia was unable to get to the airport," said Mason on his return to the United States little more than a week later. "The shooting was taking place between his home and the airport."
The resurgence of fighting between rival factions also forced Liberia's newly enthroned Bishop Edward Neufville and other religious leaders to flee to Freetown in Sierra Leone. "The United Nations decided to include us in the evacuation because it had become unsafe," Neufville said in a telephone interview from Freetown. "Church leaders had become targets."
After Neufville left his residence in Monrovia, looters ransacked it, taking diocesan vehicles and apparently all of his belongings, he said.
Neufville said he hoped to develop a ministry in the refugee camps in Sierra Leone with other clergy who managed to flee, and planned to use a $22,000 emergency grant from the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief to purchase food, medicine and other relief supplies to transport, if possible, back to Monrovia by boat.
Clergy still trapped in Monrovia reported critical conditions as food and water supplies dwindled and the chaos of urban guerilla warfare continued. In a telephone interview with national church staff, the Rev. Jonathan Hart, a Liberian priest, told of taking refuge with another priest, squeezing the 12 people of their combined families into one house without electricity in a suburb north of Monrovia.
While there was no gunfire in the immediate area of the house, bands of armed rebels could be seen driving through the streets, he said. The diocesan cathedral, location of the bishop's office, reportedly was struck by a rocket and looted, along with a nearby Episcopal school, Hart said.
Neufville pleaded for more international support for the West African Peace Keeping Force (ECOMOG) that is charged with controlling the rival bands in Liberia. "More ECOMOG soldiers throughout the country will help to stall the emergence of new factions," he said. With reports of millions being spent each day in peace-keeping efforts in Bosnia, "perhaps a little bit of that could be spent" in Liberia, he said.
Six years of exile in the United States for Mason and other Cuttington staff were supposedly coming to an end as the Association of Episcopal Colleges gave Mason an emotional send-off with a commissioning ceremony at the Episcopal Church Center in New York, March 28.
The college, the only private, co-educational, four-year, degree-granting institution in sub-Saharan Africa, was forced to close in May, 1990, soon after the war broke out that killed 150,000 people and displaced nearly half the country's 2.5 million people.
As Cuttington-in-Exile (CIE), based at St. Paul's College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, the college continued to assist its scattered students, many of whom fled to other countries or found themselves in refugee camps. College administrators helped students enroll in other institutions, and through St. Paul's, "we were able to grant 12 Cuttington degrees last year," Mason said with pride.
But even at the time of the ceremony, Mason admitted mixed emotions about his return, noting that despite a peace agreement reached last year Liberia's traumatized population has only begun to relearn how to live in peace. With the rebel armies only partially disarmed, and his campus buildings no more than stripped shells, "We are excited about going back, yet we are not unaware of the dangers," Mason said. "Conditions there are risky, unsafe and uncertain, yet we have a commitment, which we have to carry out."
Overcome by the emotional significance of the moment, Mason burst into tears at one point in the service, which included prayers for a number of his relatives and friends killed in the fighting.
Now, Cuttington's restoration is again on hold. "It is a disappointment, but I am hopeful that the situation will be under control, and at some point we will be able to return and pick up where we left off," Mason said after his failed effort to reach Liberia. "I will do my best to run the Monrovia office from here, at least by telephone and fax."
Mason had planned to operate Cuttington out of offices in Monrovia until the campus, about 120 miles away in Suakoko, can be restored. The campus buildings, looted of all fixtures of any value, have been home to more than 6,000 people displaced by the war. Former members of the college's staff risked their own safety to provide services that included a food-distribution center and a much-needed out-patient clinic. In addition, ECOMOG is using the college's administration building as its headquarters. "That's a double occupancy, so to speak," Mason said.
In January, while in Liberia for Neufville's enthronement, Mason visited the campus for the first time since leaving. "My office is a conference room" for the peace-keeping force, he said. "They gave us a tour of the building."
Mason's top priority, he said, was to find a building in Monrovia to use for classes and the money to renovate and furnish it. Some of the college's faculty have remained in Liberia, but with many others scattered, Mason also will have to rebuild the teaching and administrative staff.
Before the war, the college employed 120 staff members, including 75 teachers, to serve nearly 1,000 students studying education, nursing, natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and theology. Perhaps half that many students are still in the area of Monrovia now, he said.
Despite the difficulties of setting up temporary headquarters, Mason said the college needed to re-establish its presence in Liberia. "The students are tired. They can't keep waiting and waiting and waiting," he said. "Neither can we keep waiting until we go back to the campus."
The new curriculum of a restored Cuttington would have one crucial difference, Mason said: the college must assume that both students and faculty will be in dire need of counseling to combat the traumatic effects of the prolonged bloodshed.
"This whole thing of traumatic counseling is needed nation-wide," Mason said. More than 20,000 "child soldiers," conscripted to fight have, in effect, lost their childhoods. They "learned to disregard human life or human rights," he said. "They take things by force. You have to re-orient their minds. You have to bring them back into society to respect law and order."
As it rebuilds, the college would help heal as well as educate, and help replenish the country's decimated leadership, he said. In the past, Cuttington graduates made up 45 percent of Liberia's civil servants. As society re-emerges from its ashes, "Our presence there should enhance, or at least get us involved in whatever is taking place," he said.
Annual grants from the Episcopal Church of $24,100 for this year and next would help with the restoration. The Association of Episcopal Colleges set aside $10,000 to assist in relocating Mason and the college office back to Liberia, and covered $18,000 of the expense for Cuttington's stay at St. Paul's, said the Rev. John Powers, the association's vice president. The association also will conduct a campaign within its organization to raise other funds and to gather books to replenish the college library, which was decimated.
In addition to the emergency grant for relief supplies, the Presiding Bishop's Fund contributed $5,600 to help transport educational materials back to Liberia (the materials are being held in Italy pending an end to the current fighting), and will be considering additional assistance for Cuttington and the church in Liberia, said Nancy Marvel, director.
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