Charles Taylor was the successful warlord who overthrew Doe (who assassinated Tolbert), and got himself a nice veneer of respectability by getting elected President of Liberia. His involvement in Sierra Leone's "revolution" (diamond mine warlords) and general mischief in West Africa was well known. He maintained his own private army parallel to the national one, got rich, killed opponents, and attracted another revolutionary group: LURD, which banded to destroy him.
The "armies" were ill-disciplined, to put it mildly, and lived off the land; and civilians suffered, fled, died by the tens of thousands. To be of the wrong tribe in the wrong place was death. Rape and torture and useless murder and kidnapping were pervasive--even in the refugee camp in Monrovia, nominally protected from the fighting.
A group of women decided to protest for peace--both Christians and Muslims. They started a gathering dressed in white at the fish market which Taylor rode past every day. It grew, and grew, and as the battlefield reports got worse Taylor agreed to meet with them. They wanted him to join peace negotiations with the rebels. There is no great question of government legitimacy--although Taylor was elected there wasn't really a lot of choice, and it didn't make much difference which bloody warlords you wound up with. He agreed.
The women went to Sierra Leone where several of the rebel warlords were living, and swarmed them demanding that they too join peace talks. They thought this a good idea.
In Ghana, the warring parties met at a nice hotel for talks. They argued a lot, and talked a lot, and had lovely dinners, and urged their respective armies to fight harder. And with imbecilic timing the ICC decided to indict Taylor for war crimes. He left for Liberia, of course.
So nobody had any reason to hurry. Except the women of Liberia. Thousands were refugees in Ghana, so some of the organizers collected money to go to Acra, where they organized a sit-in blockading the conference. (The Nigerian president, exasperated with the Liberian negotiators arguing over who was to get which lucrative government post, was sympathetic.) When the police promised to arrest them, they threatened to strip naked--and it is a curse to see your mother (by extension other old women) naked. The police warned them to blockade the window, since some delegates were getting ready to jump out.
This protest got more media attention, and the international groups funding the conference threatened to cut off the gravy train. The negotiators got to work and hammered out a deal: cease fire, interim government, new elections, etc. Taylor agreed to step down to take refuge in Nigeria. UN troops came in to do peacekeeping. And in the subsequent elections, Ellen Sirleaf won instead of one of the warlords.
That is the bare bones of the movie, but it is told from the point of view of the women who organized to demand peace. Their stories make the movie what it is--which is a moving documentary of the pains of war and the prayers for and demands for peace. And their victory. And their promise to come back if it isn't satisfactory.
They are courageous women. The movie may give some people nightmares, though. See it.
I fear the movie was too upbeat. The women berated the UN for an idiotic disarmament plan (have armed men wait in line for hours with nothing to do but drink and do drugs?!?), but I think they praised the final plan too much. The UN claimed 100,000 citizens turned in weapons, but this (by another report) only represented about 30,000 actual weapons (some turned in ammo, etc), with no breakdown of how many of these were military and how many were civilian (shotguns, machetes). Since other estimates (also UN) were that 60,000 fighters might turn in weapons and that there were 3 weapons per fighter, you can easily see that most stuff was cached somewhere. And contrary to some opinions, the military weapons are not at all equivalent to civilian tools: the attackers' tactics and villagers' responses are different. A small boys unit armed with single-shot shotguns wouldn't have gotten far, but with AK47s or AK74s they terrorized.
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