Welcome to this special edition of Democracy in Focus, a collaboration between New Narratives and Front Page Africa. I’m Anthony Stephens.
As plans for Liberia’s war and economic crimes courts get underway, we’re running a series of special interviews with Liberian and international experts and stakeholders about how the courts could work.
In this interview, I speak with Peterson Sonyah, head of Liberia’s largest victims and survivors’ organization, Liberia Massacre Survivors and Association. Peterson is a survivor himself having narrowly escaped his own death at the St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in 1990 in one of the bloodiest massacres of Liberia’s civil wars. While he escaped witnessed the murder of his father and six other members of his family by troops with the Armed Forces of Liberia.
Support for this podcast came from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Union. (Until September 2026, the program was supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and American Jewish World Service.)

