Victims, witnesses and perpetrators of atrocities committed during Liberia's 14-year-civil war began recounting their experiences to a team from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Tuesday.

"We have deployed 192 statement-takers to all 15 counties and at the end of the process the commission will have a database of information as to the kinds of atrocities committed, who were the victims and the perpetrators. Afterwards, a formal hearing process would begin in January 2007," James Verdier, who heads the commission, told IRIN on Tuesday.

The commission is probing events from the start of the civil war in December 1989 until a power-sharing, transitional government was installed in October 2003. The team will also hear testimony as far back as January 1979, just prior to riots over the high cost of rice and against the government of President William Tolbert. He was assassinated the following year.

Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the truth commission is important because it will identify which issues triggered armed conflict in Liberia and it will promote reconciliation among victims and perpetrators.

Significantly, she said, the commission is empowered to recommend for prosecution those individuals who are responsible for the most serious rights violations - a fairly strong mandate in terms of truth commissions.

“A few key elements are necessary to solidifying stability in Liberia,” Dufka said. “One is reconciliation but the other is justice for the horrific crimes that happened there. It will be a very painful process but a very important one for Liberia.”

The TRC was created under a peace agreement signed in August 2003 as opposed to having a war crimes tribunal as was established in neighbouring Sierra Leone. That conflict spilled over from Liberia in 1991.

The truth commission’s mandate is to "investigate gross human rights violations and war crimes, including massacres, sexual violations, murder, extra-judicial killings and economic crimes (such as the exploitation of natural or public resources to perpetuate the armed conflict),” according to the Liberian law enacted on the TRC.

The commission is also intended to provide “an opportunity for victims and perpetrators of human rights violations to share their experiences, in order to create a record of the past and facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation".

But a group of youths under the banner of the Forum for the Establishment of a War Crimes Court in Liberia wants all former warlords and commanders of armed factions during the civil war to appear before the commission.

"Those former warlords should not be immune. They must appear in the TRC forum, so we Liberians who had been victimised by their actions would listen to them," said Boakai Jaleiba, the group’s secretary general.

Since the end of the war in 2003, key figures in the conflict have been elected to parliament, including Prince Yeaduo Johnson, a former warlord in the early days of the civil war and two other former commanders of armed groups.

Except for former President Charles Taylor, all former warlords and some commanders are still in the country. Taylor, whose rebel group started the civil war in 1989, is now in jail in the Netherlands awaiting trial on war crimes charges linked to the conflict in Sierra Leone.