Soccer
star gets kids on side
Monrovia - Liberia's star footballer George Oppong Weah began a
four-day mission on Wednesday to support a UN campaign to disarm
children who had fought in the country's civil wars and to get them
back to school.
Weah, who is also goodwill ambassador
for the UN children's agency (Unicef), returned to his home country
on Tuesday and a day later visited the Monrovia Demonstration School
with a message about the futility of war, which has devastated the
west African state for most of the past 14 years.
During a press briefing at the UN mission's
military base on Bushrod Island, in the capital Monrovia, Weah
stressed the need for Liberians to spare their children the ravages
of war.
An estimated 21 000 of Liberia's fighting forces - over
half of the total - are under the age 18.
The football star advised adults against putting
youths in "situations where they can't control themselves", in an
apparent reference to warlords.
"We have to create awareness in this country for the
parents to understand the value of life," Weah added.
He said it was improper for parents to send their
five-year-olds into the street to sell, noting: "If you have value
for your kid, you have to go out there to struggle for the kid, and
not the kid for you".
Weah spoke of his own childhood one of Monrovia's
harsh ghettos: "I was also a kid living in the ghetto. It's not good
to suffer because I went through it. There were days I never had
food to eat. There were days I went home thinking that I would see
food only to find out that I had nothing to eat."
He pledged to use his influence to lobby
Liberia's interim government to put children's interest first, and
to solicit funds abroad for child-focused humanitarian programmes.
The former European and Africa "best player" was
associated with one ill-fated children's village project, in
association with the Italian opera star Luciano Pavarotti.
More than one million dollars raised at the
Pavarotti concert was misapplied by former senator Myrtle Gibson,
apparently with the complicity of exiled former president Charles
Taylor.
Liberia endured 14 years of nearly continuous civil war
until August 2003, when Taylor fled into exile.
Internal Affairs Minister Dan Morais said the Liberian
civil wars, which killed about 300 000 people and made refugees of
one in five of the population, had damaged an entire generation of
children.
Unicef's massive child disarmament and Back to School
campaigns kicked off on Saturday.
On Thursday Weah is due to visit interim care
centers focused on reintegrating children who have been traumatized
by their war experiences.
He is expected to visit camps for internally displaced persons on
Friday and to organize a football tournament for children from
various camps around Monrovia |
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