The Liberian Civil War

Mark Huband

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135252212
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

The civil war in 1989 promised freedom from ten years of vicious dictatorship; instead the seeds of Liberia's devastation were sown. Mark Huband's account of the conflict is a portrayal of the war as it unfolded, drawing on the author's experience of living amongst the fighters.

1 Soldiers, Priests and Beer Money

M ONEY SLID. Notes or a few coins. It slowly made its way inside the passports, or more openly, straight from one hand into another. There was no money in my passport as I handed it to an enormous woman wearing a New York Police Department-style uniform, who sat, Buddhalike, inside a small cubicle five feet above floor level at one end of the airport terminal. My passport joined a small pile on the desk, and she took the next handsomely-loaded document from the person behind me and stamped it. Eventually I was the only person in front of her. I held out my hand. She looked me in the eye, then slowly began flicking through the pages of my passport.

‘You go’ nothin’ fo’ me?’ she said. I smiled. She did not.

‘Wha’ i’ the purpo’ o’ your mission?’ I told her I was there to visit Nimba. She shrugged, continuing to flick through the pages. After a few moments' pause the stamp thudded down onto an empty page where she scribbled some illegible instructions.

‘Repor’ to I’gration wi’in fordy-eigh’ hour,’ she said, thrusting the passport over the counter at me.

A man in a sports jacket and sunglasses took my passport from me when I walked behind the cubicle.

‘We have been expecting you,’ he said. Then he said I could go, handing me the passport without looking through it.

In the next room the customs officers rubbed their hands. ‘Wha’ i’ the purpo’ o’ your mission. D’ya have any gold, diamonds abou’ your person?‘ They told me I could go. Then, around the corner of the customs hall, one came after me.

‘You ha’n’t had your baggage marked. Now, that’ ain’t allowed. So, what d’ya ha’ fo’ me? Wha’ d’ya ha’ fo’ me? Just a small thing.’

‘No. Nothing,’ I mumbled nervously.

He shrugged and daubed my bag with pink chalk, then disappeared.

It was a hot morning in January 1990. This was Liberia.

On the flight from Abidjan I had met a reporter for Agence France Presse, an American living in Abidjan. He told me he was going to Monrovia to pay his correspondent. He was keeping two thousand dollars strapped tightly to his chest and was nervous about it. He would not be going to the north to where the rebels were. That was not the purpose of his visit. He was from the mid-west of America and he should have felt at home in Liberia. Liberia was just like America, I had been told. But I later realised this was a myth people used, to pretend that Liberia had been raised by a responsible godfather. It had not taken long before this American also sensed this was a myth. He wanted to pay his stringer and get out.

‘But you have to go to the north. That’s where the story is,’ I told him.

‘Well, sure. But that’s naat part of my mission.’ He was in his midtwenties, but had grown a beard because he looked so young. ‘I look about twelve without a beard,’ he told me. ‘But even with it I don’t look much older.’

Taxi-drivers descended on us outside the airport terminal, all wearing fake Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, stone-washed jeans, sneakers and an array of logo-daubed baseball shirts. They refused to fight for our custom, because to do so was clearly not cool. Eventually one of them deigned to take us.

‘This is the voice of E-L-W-A, broadcasting from Monrovia.’ The broadcaster’s voice rose smoothly out of the taxi radio. He played slow reggae tunes before the news came on. ‘And now E-L-W-A brings you the latest national and international news with our programme “Window on the World”,’ said the voice. The stories were about the finalising of the budget. Then came appeals from ‘prominent citizens’ for the rebels in the north to lay down their arms. The smooth voice never wavered. The national legislature had authorised President Doe to take whatever money he needed to finance the army campaign against the rebels, so he had diverted five million dollars from the voter registration fund, which was to have led to the creation of a register in the run-up to elections scheduled for 1991. The report continued:

In a statement, the nation’s legislators, and I quote: ‘categorically, unequivocally and emphatically deprecate, condemn and denounce the vicious, atrocious and seditious invasion by Charles Taylor and his cohorts on 24 December 1989’ …

Then Samuel Doe’s voice came on, saying that Liberia was one nation and that it should not be divided by ‘Charles Taylor and his clique of rebels’. Then there was more soft reggae.

The road from the airport passed between fields and then along the perimeter of the Camp Schieffelin army base before approaching the suburbs of Monrovia at Red Light Junction. The taxi-driver told us these names as we drove towards the city

‘Schieffelin. Thaa the home o’ the Ar’ Force’ o’ Liber’a. Now we approachin’ Raa Laa Junctio’, whi’ mark’ city limi’,’ he told us, his shoulders and head swaying slightly from side to side with the music. Just before the junction the traffic was being directed off the road onto the verge, around a ceremonial arch which was being built to commemorate a planned visit by the Pope.

‘O’er there, Pres’ent Dorr buildin’ hisself noo house,’ said the taxi-driver. At the top of a long hill the president had flattened the ground to build a new home. The site had a commanding view over the city and was ideal for a siege. But as yet no building had begun. ‘JFK on thaa’ side,’ the taxi-driver told us, nodding his head towards the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Hospital. ‘Thi’ Sinkor distri’.’ The houses and buildings were smart. Palm trees swayed in the breeze as they rose out of the shrubberies of well-kept gardens.

And on the roadside were hundreds of advertising signs for airlines flying to Europe and the rest of the world, signs for car showrooms, signs for printing works, signs promoting the government’s environmental programme: ‘Support the Green Revolution’, they said, with an intricately painted illustration of farmers at work in a luxuriant tropical setting. Other large signs, similarly hand-painted, advertised the country’s national parks, with large animals prowling through jungle. Small cafés, workshops and restaurants stood beside the road or were signposted off it. And churches. Everywhere churches. Methodist, Unitarian, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, spiritualist, new churches of Africa, Pentecostal churches and Presbyterian churches — they all advertised their presence, alongside the signs for soap and toothpaste and menthol cigarettes, with arrows directing the faithful down small dirt tracks to chapels beside the beach or in amongst the palm-shadowed houses.

‘Pres’ly the Pres’dent live here. Thaa’ the Exec’tive Maansha. Ju’ pa’ the statue o’ thaa unknow’ sol’ja.’ We passed the statue of an African soldier dressed in a First World War uniform. ‘Yeah, thaa’s where the Pres’dent live now. Thaa’s the Exec’tive Maansha.’ Behind trees, down a road with a sign saying no entry, was the multi-storey office block occupied by Liberia’s heads of state since it was built by new-found Israeli friends in 1964. We took the public road past the national police headquarters and the law courts and drove down the hill into the city centre to the Holiday Inn Hotel.

‘The war can wait. There are always wars, anyway,’ said the Lebanese owner of the razor-blade shop. The banks had closed for the day, and I had asked somebody at the hotel where I could change money. Cadillacs prowled the streets between the razor-blade shop and the Holiday Inn, a hotel as gaudy and decadent as the hotel chain from which it had stolen its name was bland. Besides razor blades, the shop’s shelves groaned under the weight of rice sacks, chewing gum, buckets, packet mashed potato and, under the counter, black market money. Thousands of dollars. The new Liberian five-dollar note, crisp and green.

Until a few months previously the country had run on coins, or on American dollars. People used to help each other carry money in sacks from the banks. Then they began to complain about the weight and the security risk. So the government introduced the ‘J. J Roberts’, a fivedollar bill depicting the country’s first president as an upright, white Victorian in a wing collar and frock coat, who led the freed slaves of America into African nationhood. Now he was consigned to the clenched and sweaty fists of the buyers, sellers, officials, armed guards, customs officers, baggage checkers and civil servants slipping and sliding their share of the J. J. Roberts into the wallets, pockets, desk drawers, cubbyholes, dashboard ashtrays, grubby money-boxes and shirtfolds of liberal, libertarian, liberated Liberia’s economy.

I changed my money and returned to the Holiday Inn Hotel.

‘I think I’ll try the prawns,’ said the American correspondent with whom I had arrived. James, his stringer, had met him in the hotel room we were sharing. The American had handed over the two thousand dollars, but James had begun to moan that it was not enough. The discussion had gone on and on, until in the end James had been forced to accept that it was all there was. Eventually he had left, saying that he would meet us the following morning to arrange press passes with the Ministry of Information, to allow us to go to Nimba county.

By now the American had been convinced that a visit to the area of fighting might be a good idea. But he still had his doubts about his safety. Then it dawned on him that perhaps he should just tell everybody he was American and they would consequently treat him better. Convinced of the wisdom of this strategy, he relaxed over dinner and worked his way through prawns and fish and dessert and coffee, beneath the yellow and red light bulbs of the Holiday Inn’s dark, wood-panelled and windowless restaurant.

It was nearly seven o’clock. I had finished eating, so I left him sitting in the restaurant, saying I was going to go downstairs to watch the news.

In the entrance hall, beside a trickling fountain in a grotto illuminated with blue lights beneath the stairs, the Lebanese owner of the hotel, Mr Gawhary, sat with his children watching television. He was vast. His children made lots of noise. On the screen President Doe, squeezed into a shiny grey double-breasted suit, looked straight past the camera and made the speech I had heard earlier on the radio:

‘We have a nation. We will not be divided by Charles Taylor and his clique of rebels.’ The newsreader said that a group of Taylor’s rebels had secretly arrived in Monrovia the day before, armed and planning to launch the second prong of a two-pronged offensive. But they had got drunk in a city bar and bragged that they were going to overthrow Doe. Then they had been arrested. They would be paraded on television the next day, the report said.

Doe finished his speech. His audience clapped. The people watching in the hotel lobby had listened silently. They didn’t talk even after Doe had finished. Doe claimed, some months later, that he had been victim of 38 attempts to overthrow him, and that he would diffuse this attempt as he had done all the others. I wondered whether the people in the hotel were asking themselves if this was any different from the previous attempts to get rid of the government. They didn’t say. Mr Gawhary went on meeting the needs of his customers, introducing himself to his guests as if they were all old friends.

Later, the lobby became the prostitutes’ catwalk. They wore tight vests and skin-tight trousers or satin shorts and high-heeled stilettos. Their hair, make-up and bright lipstick, and the way they carried their gold-strapped patent leather shoulder bags, gave them the appearance of overdone male transvestites. They wandered up and down, grimacing in the blue light of the fountain grotto, until the elegance of their parade was undermined by a power cut. Candles were lit, but the aura of Caesar’s Palace had been lost, so they sat down and smoked with everybody else.

I went up to the room I was sharing with the American. The air conditioning had stopped with the lack of power and the heat had risen. I lay on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. The telephone rang and a woman’s voice said: ‘Are you coming round then. I’m in room 305.’ I put the phone down. It rang again almost immediately, just as my room-mate came through the door. I told her to stop ringing, and put the phone down.

‘You must have pretty good contacts, if y’already got people ringing you up,’ he said, concerned about the competition from another reporter.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The phone rang a third time.

‘I’d really like to see you. I’m waiting in room 305.’ I put the phone down without saying anything.

‘You must have real good contacts,’ he repeated.

‘Actually, that time it was a prostitute from down the corridor. Fancy a night with her?’

‘Gaad no. What would my wife say? I don’t do that kind of thing. I hope you don’t either. After all, we are sharing a room.’

‘No. It’s okay.’ I lay on my bed as the room grew hotter and steamier.

Early next morning James arrived and we went to the Ministry of Information, where two plaster lions stood sentry on either side of the entrance. An official in a shiny brown suit said that the documents necessary to take us to Nimba would take a while. The minister had to sign them. At one o’clock he had still not arrived. The official took us to the ministry office from where the Liberian News Agency, LINA, operated, churning out government propaganda using equipment supplied by the German government.

At four o’clock a gleaming white Mercedes pulled up in front of the two plaster lions. The minister, Mr J. Emmanuel Bouwier, alighted and swaggered up the stairs. The brown-suited official told us the minister was coming. We followed the man and his entourage along a corridor to a double door at the end, where we were swept aside and had the door closed in our faces. The brown suit went in, then emerged. The minister would not sign until we had another signature from the chairman of the Press Union of Liberia. The shiny brown suit hung around. We went through town to the offices of the press union, and had the document signed just before dusk. The Ministry of Information, when we returned to it, was about to close. The white Mercedes was still there. Inside the brown suit told us to wait in his office while he took the forms into the minister. He then returned five minutes later with the forms signed.

‘Now,’ he said, peering over his desk. ‘For me?’ He patted the forms on his desk, right there, within sight of the Executive Mansion, down the corridor from the minister. He took five dollars, handed over the forms. Now we could go to Nimba.

The following morning James, the correspondent, was late. The city was humming with life before he arrived at the hotel. We followed him through the streets down towards the waterfront, along a road which looked over a wide sweep of grey-brown water and mangrove. This was where the slaves had come to be free. In 1822 they had landed on Providence Island, which stands in the centre of the sweep of water. A road bridge soars over the island where there are small buildings and some trees. People know it is where the slaves from America first landed. It is a kind of birthplace for the country. A site. But one which nobody ever goes to. I wanted it to be something special; but it is just an island with a small, brick house at its centre, under the bridge.

James argued with some taxi-drivers who, from behind their imitat...