Etweda Cooper has a cold but that doesn’t stop her full rhetorical flow: “As Liberian women WE have won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s like a dream come true. Our efforts to bring peace to Liberia have been recognised. And the fact that our president as well as Leymah Gbowee – you know: two Liberian women! – have won this prize... we couldn’t have imagined it.”

By Bram Posthumus, Monrovia

Etweda Cooper can’t stop beaming and she has every reason to. After all, she was there, during the civil war (1989-2003), holding sit-down demonstrations for peace in strife-torn Monrovia, and blocking the meeting room in Accra, Ghana, where warlords were negotiating the umpteenth peace accord they had no intention of keeping. By their very presence, Gbowee, Cooper and many other women forced the hand of the warmongers who believed themselves untouchable.

Leymah Gbowee is expected back in Liberia on Monday. Cooper says of her: “I’ve seen her grow like a butterfly from a cocoon and I’m very proud of having worked with both women.” Yes, both women: Cooper is also a party activist for the better known Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who has appointed her as mayor of the town of her birth, Edina.

No pacifist
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was no pacifist in her earlier political life. Her support for rebel leader, warlord and later president of Liberia Charles Taylor is well-known. “It was, at the time, the only way I believed we could get rid of [military dictator] Samuel Doe,” she told me during an interview, more than a decade ago, while in exile in Abidjan.

Late 2009 the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its report, recommending major players in the war to be excluded from holding public office for 30 years. Johnson-Sirleaf was on that list. She waited with her response until Liberia commemorated its Independence, July 2010.

Rebuilding the country
That month, she addressed a crowd in the symbol-laden town of Gbarnga, Charles Taylor’s war headquarters. Yes, she said, I did support him. But I turned into his most implacable adversary once his true intentions became clear. She ended with a flourish: “I submitted my record to the Liberian people and I was elected president.”

“No, she did not start out as a pacifist,” Cooper readily concedes. “But as she got older, she realised that we did need peace and stability and she has really worked for that. Quite frankly, that is her main achievement: she has consolidated peace by rebuilding this country.”

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize will not harm President Johnson-Sirleaf’s re-election campaign. She declared herself “pleased and honoured”. But what will ultimately get her re-elected is her track record. Her Unity Party has been relentlessly hammering away at education, women’s rights, agriculture, building, and much more: “Da their area”, in Johnson-Sirleaf’s words, laying claim to her government’s achievements in plain Liberian English.

Opposition
Her main challengers are a lawyer, Winston Tubman, and former football star George Weah, who are running for the opposition Congress for Democratic Change.

On Friday, the CDC displayed a show of strength by throwing a massive dance party all over Monrovia. But ordinary Liberians have little truck with the opposition sniping at the president for having won the Nobel Peace Prize. Candidate Tubman, incidentally himself a former Justice Minister in Samuel Doe’s government, called her “a warmonger”.

This is not a popular view. “We should be proud of her,” says motor taxi man Nathaniel Yalla, as he deftly moves his bike – and me - along the busy Tubman Boulevard, Monrovia”s main street. “She has kept the peace, I can do my business freely, I have no fear; we should be proud of her, as Liberians.”

The women in white
Cooper concurs. “We have had eight years of peace and stability. Kids who were born eight years ago, for the first time, have not heard a gun go off.Their parents are not running away, they’re not frightened. We’re beginning to detraumatise ourselves. And now we have two beacons that young Liberian women – and men! - can follow.”

And follow they do. In an open space along Tubman Boulevard, close to the Spriggs-Payne city airfield, women in white clothes have formed a circle. They are sitting down. They were there during the war; Laymah Gbowee and Etweda Cooper sat there as well. And now, the women are back, as they always are, rain or sun, a vivid reminder of and a plea for a peaceful election.