Faced by a ‘rising chorus of voices’, not least that of legislator Rustonlyn Dennis, President George Weah is considering setting up a long-awaited tribunal into decades-old war crimes

As a child in Liberia’s first civil war, Rustonlyn Dennis remembers seeing dead bodies in the street. In 1991, her immediate family managed to get out of the shattered capital, Monrovia, and survived, but a dozen relatives starved to death.

Civilians were attacked, child soldiers recruited and ethnic groups were targeted in that war, setting a pattern for many of the wars that were to follow on the African continent. Hundreds of thousands of people died.