(An extract from the novel The Boys Are Not to Blame by Liberian author Saah Millimono)
Prologue
The Italian police came to arrest me early on the morning of 12 February 2020. I remember the date because it was the first time I would be charged, arrested and sent to prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the civil war in Liberia.
But until my arrest and subsequent detention in an Italian prison and before I could be tried at the ICC – the International Criminal Court – in The Hague, I was living and working in the Italian city of Napoli where I own a football school and taught coaching and football management. But this was more as a hobby and due to my love of the game. For more than a decade and half, I had played as a footballer for a few big clubs in European football, among them Napoli, Inter Milan, and Liverpool, and was leading a life of relative luxury. My father and I had emigrated to Italy in 1994, having fled from the civil war in Liberia, and were living as Liberian refugees in the Guinean border town of N’zérékoré. It was in N’zérékoré that my father met Victoria, a young Italian woman for whom he was to work as a cook and gardener. Victoria was then working with the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) office in N’ zérékoré. It was through Victoria’s kindness that my father and I were brought to Italy as Liberian refugees. At the time, I was still only a sixteen-year-old boy, who happened to be a promising footballer, as I had been in Liberia before the outbreak of the civil war.
Arriving in Italy, I again started playing football. Soon I was given a contract to play as a right-back for the junior team of Italian football club Napoli. Within about two years, I had made enough progress to play for the first team where I would sign my first professional contract as a footballer. Finally, I would become widely known as one of the best right-backs in European football.
I looked through my window at the police. At first, several thoughts flashed through my head. Had one of the children at my coaching school accused me falsely, since I was a black man, and was that why the police had come? But the children at my coaching school were nice kids. I personally knew each of them, including their parents. I was sure that they would never have done something like that. Had some racist neighbor decided to target me because I was a black man? Or maybe there was an order for my deportation to Liberia? But for thirty-one years I had lived and worked in Italy. I was married to an Italian woman and had even obtained Italian citizenship. These thoughts aside, I felt that there was a most serious possibility of arrest – which I tried not to imagine because I simply couldn’t believe it – for war crimes which, as a twelve-year-old boy, I had committed during the height of the Liberian Civil War.
Scared and trembling, I left the window and walked across the marble floor to the bed where my wife, Rosa, was sleeping, buried deep in the sheets of pure silk which I had imported from Russia a few years before.
I sat on the edge of the bed and a little over the stand, made partly of gold and silver, to support my weight and not to sink into the bed. “Rosa…Rosa,” I called.
She turned in the bedclothes and opened her eyes, her face heavy with sleep and looking dull in the soft blue lighting of the bedroom.
“Rosa,” I said, “the police are outside.”
Immediately her eyebrows went up, her eyes turning nearly the size of my fist. “The police?”
“Yes,” I said, “the police.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Then she saw the red and blue orb of the sirens as they flashed from the police cars outside into the room, casting their eerie glows against the walls of the bedroom. She knew immediately that I was telling the truth.
Pulling the covers away from herself, she got out of bed. Together we went to the window; she saw the police with their cars in the yard outside.
“I don’t understand,” she said, turning away from the window a moment later and shaking her head. “Tell me what’s going on, Garwu. It seems like I’m dreaming.”
In the bedroom next to ours were our two small children, Small Garwu and our daughter Anita. Beyond that and in the next room was our eldest son, Mateo. All three were asleep. Except the whispering of my wife and I, the house was quiet. Personally, I knew I was in big trouble and that sooner or later I would be taken away from my family once and for all. But I couldn’t tell Rosa – at least not now. I had told her about my life in Liberia and from when I arrived in Italy as a Liberian refugee. But I had never told her about my life as a National Patriotic Front of Liberia, or NPFL, child soldier during the civil war in Liberia. It wasn’t because I was afraid. The Liberian Civil War had left me with too deep a scar instead. Rather than scratching at it, which could leave it festering, like an old sore, I felt – as I had often realized – to leave it alone. What was to be gained out of laying bare my dirty past as a child soldier? I had fled from the civil war and came to Italy where, as luck would have it, I had accomplished my dream of being a career footballer. Although I no longer played football, I was rich and had been blessed with a family. Those were in fact things for which I felt I ought to be grateful, given how hopeless and unpredictable life in Liberia had been. So, I thought it would be better to forget – especially a dirty past with all the kataka inside.
There was a knock at the door, followed by the voice of a policeman calling to me and demanding that I open the door at once.
I opened the door. My wife and I stepped outside. In the yard, a few of them heavily armed and dressed in ballistic proof vest and combat helmets, were more policemen than my wife and I thought we had seen from the window of the room.
Out of the envelope he carried, one of the policemen removed a sheave of papers and gave them to me. Along with my wife, I saw that it was a writ of arrest for me. My crime? War crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Liberian Civil War. My wife turned to look at me, while I tried to avoid looking at her, and it seemed like she couldn’t believe her own eyes.
To be cont’d next week Friday.