Taylor's Tempest

Last August, war-exhausted Liberia waited for the promised departure of its president, Charles Taylor, and the arrival of international peacekeepers. Savoy travels through a nation daring to hope.
By Stephan Faris
[November 2003]

The former president’s house overflowed with people fleeing the war. Car parts littered a concrete courtyard yielded a spray of corn stalks and plantain trees, and bullet holes, some as big as fists, marked the walls. The roof was missing. Most of the second floor had been blown off during the war in 1990 that saw its owner, Liberia’s then president, Samuel Doe, kidnapped, stripped of his uniform, carved up and according to some, shot in the head–although he was already dying from loss of blood. One roofless room upstairs, perhaps a master bedroom, sprouted thick with grass.

The residents tell a troubling tale. Some of them had fled as many as five times in three years, leaving their villages as rebels advanced, the young men sticking close to the women, hoping to avoid being drafted as soldiers or shot as rebels. As the front line pushed forward, these residents retreated from camp to camp until they landed, stranded, in downtown Monrovia with no place to go but a bombed out compound shared with more than 100 others.

One man showed me his room. Dripping water had strung the ceiling with stalactites of sticky, sodden paint. T-shirts and rags were spread to mop the floor. He shared the small guestroom with his common-law wife, a broad-shouldered woman with a deep cough. Ten children, including five of their own, slept with them. The dingy gray curtains let in little light, and the waterless bathroom was used for storage. Still, it was a home. The couple had found a full-length mirror and set a table with plates, silverware and two floral-print thermoses. Three dolls and a few stuffed animals were carefully arranged on the wide, low bed. On the headboard, some-one had pasted an "I [heart] Jesus" bumper sticker. Part of it was missing. It had been torn through the heart.

By early August, the city of Monrovia, Liberia's capital, had taken a deep breath, waiting for embattled President Charles Taylor to go. The rebels, mostly doped-up young men armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades, had entered Monrovia for the third time in two months. It had taken them less than a day to roll into Bushrod Island from the suburbs, scattering the government's ragtag militia ahead of them. Although they hadn't managed to push into the rest of the city, their position left them with the port, most of the city's warehouses and almost all of its food.

Three years of fighting had turned the capital into a giant refugee camp. Built to accommodate a population of around 300,000, it overflowed with far more than a million people. Churches, warehouses, schools, daycare centers, apartment and office buildings, factories–all were crowded with the poor and hungry. The largest camp had been a soccer stadium, but was now home to some 50,000 people who lived in and under the bleachers. Then came the push for the city. For weeks, mortar shells rained down on crowded city streets, and stray bullets whizzed to find targets far from the front. Those hunting for food huddled against walls where they could, and ran when they reached an intersection. Prices had soared; rice, cassava, cooking oil and gas, in some cases nearly doubling. Armed men looted the fuel for the city’s main pump, and people drew water from streams where others did their washing. The shooting stopped when Nigerian peacekeepers finally pulled in on August 4. But the rebels refused to relinquish the port as long as Taylor remained in the country.

In Doe's time, Taylor had been the rebel. In 1985, he had famously escaped from a Massachusetts prison, where he was awaiting extradition on charges of having embezzled $900,000 from the Liberian government. He spent the next four years intriguing in West Africa, finally securing the support of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, who saw a chance to strike at the United States by hitting Liberia, a staunch Cold War ally. On Christmas Eve, 1989, Taylor crossed into Liberia from Cote d'Ivoire with about 100 fighters. The “revolution," as Liberians still call it, quickly spread. Doe had ruled the country brutally. All the rebels had to do to get new recruits was to hand out arms. Within six months, they had surrounded the capital. By then however, the insurgents had split into two factions, and so it wasn't Taylor, but his rival, Prince Johnson, who captured and killed Doe, snatching him from the Nigerian peacekeepers who had come to protect Monrovia.
A charismatic, versatile man, Taylor has proved himself a master of Liberia's byzantine and violent politics. During my time in Monrovia, he was fighting hard. In June, while Taylor was attending peace talks in Ghana, a war crimes court backed by the United Nations had unsealed an indictment against him, accusing him of supporting brutal rebels in Sierra Leone's vicious 10-year civil war. Minutes earlier, Taylor had been applauded for announcing that he would step down from the presidency for the sake of the peace process. The indictment sent him scurrying to the safety of his own country.

He spent the next two months retrenching as his options kept shrinking. George W. Bush, President of the United States, weighed in against him, hinting that he would send American peacekeepers, but only after Taylor left Liberia. The rebels laid siege to the capital, and Nigerian peacekeepers spread into Monrovia. Taylor stuck to his message. He would leave, not because he was a war criminal, but because as a senior African statesman he was sacrificing for his people. The problems in Liberia were not his fault, but the result of Western political forces beyond his control.

Over and over, I heard him say the same thing in different ways. He was a party leader addressing the faithful; a wartime general rallying his troops in a radio address; a penitent at a religious service; a relaxed politician with Bill-Clinton smoothness, repudiating the unfairness of accusations against him, from brutality against his people to embezzlement.

It wasn't the first time Taylor had been in a tight spot. After Doe's murder riled the Nigerians, they pushed the rebels from Monrovia. Taylor, left with most of the rest of the country, used the next two years to build up arms and money before launching another attack on the capital in 1992. The Nigerian-led force beat him back, but took hundreds of casualties. Nearly eight months of combat resulted in a quickly broken cease-fire that gave Taylor an official stake in the Liberian government for the first time. Three years of factional fighting later, Taylor had secured sufficient military backing against his rival warlords. In 1997, a population desperate for peace and stability overwhelmingly voted him into office. "He killed my Pa. He killed my Ma. I'll vote for him," went one of his supporters’ slogans.

Before I left Liberia, I took a trip to another former president's house. William Tolbert had governed from 1971 until 1980, when a young master sergeant named Samuel Doe was among 17 coup plotters who broke into the executive mansion and eviscerated him in his bed. His country estate lay a short distance outside Monrovia, through tree-flecked hills that had once been rich with farms. John Tolbert, the murdered man's middle-aged son, met me. It was 11 a.m., and I could smell the homemade rum from five feet away. In a rambling tour of the compound, he showed me his home and some flowers he had planted, then led me to his father's mansion where a stylized concrete lion and three barren flagpoles lined the lawn. The house was gutted; the walls covered in graffiti. Only one back room, where a laundry line hung from wall to wall, seemed to be in use. I stepped onto what had once been an upstairs floorboard to walk over a pool of water and looked up through two shattered stories at the punctured tin roof. "Can you imagine how it looks?" Tolbert asked me. "A man like me? An ex-president's son? I have lots of dependents. How do I live? How do I feed them? How do we survive?"

Liberia hasn't been good to its presidents, and they haven't been good to Liberia. The country had once been the envy of Africa. As independence struggles swept the continent during the 1960s, Liberia had been a model to aspire to, a country founded by freed slaves in 1847, one of a handful of independent black republics. But in actuality, it differed little from the colonial states. The descendents of the former slaves were presiding over the indigenous Africans just as their neighbors did. It was a black colony, sure, but it was still a colony. The rulers wore morning coats and top hats to formal functions and dominated the economy. Some ran vast plantations and, like the slave owners in America, passed down their family name to those who worked for them.

Doe overturned all that. But he centered his big-man rule on self-enrichment and ethnic patronage at the expense of the country. Then came Taylor, and Liberia sunk further through continued mismanagement and civil war into something modeled on the nightmares of Hollywood scriptwriters. The economy has collapsed, and the state has all but crumpled. Liberians looking for services like water or health care turn not to the government, but to the international aid groups. Taylor's saddest legacy will be the child militia he depended on during his revolution. Most Liberian soldiers–on either side of the lines–are untrained kids, doped up and sent raging to the front line. In a war where style trumps discipline, the fighters mix ghetto-cool with traditional African beliefs: wigs, bandannas, leather charms, jaguar's tooth necklaces. The gun is almost an accessory–unless it's being used to intimidate a civilian. Most run away when the shooting starts.

By the time Taylor was ready to step down from the presidency, the siege of Monrovia had entered its fourth week. Once again, the people were desperate for peace and they were cautiously calling for him to go. The day before his departure, I recall a farewell radio address had to be cancelled; the broadcasters had no fuel for their generators. But a journalist taped him recording the announcement and brought it back to the hotel. I had heard most of it before. Again, Taylor played up his sacrifice and blamed his troubles on outsiders. Only one thing was new: He seemed to be setting the stage for a return. He told the Liberian people: "And I say to you, God willing, I will ... be back." For millions, his words echoed across this war-torn country like a threat.

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