By far one of the most informative and under-appreciated sites on the internet is Panos.co.uk. Panos is a haven for photojournalists from around the globe, many of whom often risk their lives in troubled areas to help expose the plights of others. The turbulent state of the African nation of Liberia was recently documented by Panos photographer Tim A. Hetherington’s in a collection entitled “No Men No War”.

Here is a description of the collection in Tim’s own words:

In 2000, a UN combat unit entered a deserted village near Shegbwema, eastern Sierra Leone, in territory held by the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The abandoned buildings were covered with cryptic and deranged drawings. Here and there were sentences and names, questions and statements that at the time made no sense…..

Three years later in neighbouring Liberia, I found myself staring at similar drawings and scrawled taglines in the dilapidated interior town of Tubmanberg. I’d been living with the rebel faction Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), a ragtag army of dissidents and young men that was attempting to overthrow president Charles Taylor. I started to document the odd pieces of graffiti and continued to do so over the next three years, collecting together these psychic scars.

Liberia was initially formed in 1822 by what was then known as the American Colonization Society, as a place to send freed African slaves. Literally born out of an early America, Liberia initially modeled much of it’s government and society after it’s mother country although it wasn’t long before it became independent. Throughout the years Liberia has faced many difficulties, but perhaps none have been more agonizing than the most recent Liberian Civil War in which Charles G. Taylor fronted a coup that resulted in the videotaped torture and death of former Liberian president Samuel Doe. The grisly murder tape shows a Taylor ally, Prince Johnson, nonchalantly slurping a Budweiser as Doe’s ear is cut off. Excerpts of the video were broadcast around the world.

The story of Charles Taylor is a quixotic one, sometimes seeming a bit larger than life. After graduating from Bentley College in Massachusetts in 1977, Taylor was arrested for allegedly embezzling nearly one million dollars of government funds while he acting as head of Liberia’s General Services Administration. Shortly after his arrest, Taylor escaped from a US House of Corrections and fled America for Libya. It was in Libya that Taylor joined the guerrilla training regime of Muammar Qaddafi. This relationship would later prove a critical aid, resulting in his wresting the Liberian presidency following the Civil War.

Charles Taylor was ousted in 2003 and is currently awaiting trail for war crimes. Among the many charges he’s facing, he’s credited with creating and supporting the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Lionne, a group notorious for using child soldiers in combat. These children, although trained to become experts in death, have the wild imaginations of any other child at such an age. Sometimes the confusion, anguish and helplessness of their conditions is expressed through art. This is the art of the children of Liberia as documented by Tim Hetherington.