1. Taylor Out
2. More on Liberia
3. Liberia has a Date

Nothing exemplifies Liberia's collapse better than the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The decaying lime-green building now houses 1,600 displaced people.

In the minister's office, wet clothes dry by the windows. Water from a leaky roof covers the floor. The stench of urine wafts through the dark hallway.

After emancipation, the immigration of free Africans from the USA shrank. The Americo-Liberians became an insular caste, a tiny minority within the country they ruled (5% as of 1980). In 1929, for example, an international commission found evidence of forced labor in Liberia from which government officials profited. In 1949, the right to vote was finally extended to the indigenous population of the country. This probably did not have much effect, since then-Pres. William Tubman was to be re-elected six times.

His successor, William Tolbert, was ousted in a coup (12 Apr. 1980) led by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe (Pres. Tolbert was shot and disemboweled by one of the NCOs who led the coup in the wake of bloody food riots in Monrovia). Then, it had been the indigenous Liberians rising up against the alien aristocracy. Doe was a very violent, vindictive man who waged a campaign of arbitrary executions and violence against the old regime, masking his abject corruption and incompetence as an administrator.

The NCOs who led the coup were all from the underdeveloped eastern part of Liberia; they began to fall out soon after, with the "leftist faction" of the revolutionary faction being purged in April 1981. The Doe reign of terror was also accompanied by wholesale plunder of US foreign aid. Readers might be amused to note that accountants from Arthur Anderson were sent to audit Liberia's aid disbursements and returned without cooperation from Doe's government (1987). By this time Doe had managed to eliminate most of his opponents by execution of exile.

The eruption of civil war in December 1989 was accompanied by retaliatory massacres by the Armed Forces of Liberia in Monrovia. There are extremely large numbers of different tribal groupings in Liberia, and the factions there seemed to have been opportunistic, concentrated around warlords whose followers tended to be motivated in large measure by fear of reprisal. The number of rival factions multiplied, partly fueled by the looting of foreign aid that entered Liberia. In 1997 the largest rebel faction left was that of Charles Taylor; in the final agreement he was made provisional head of state and confirmed in elections.

Although Taylor has accepted political asylum in Nigeria, forces loyal to him and his bureaucracy are still holding out and the rebels insist that are shelling only to repulse government attacks on their positions. So far, shelling is reported to have killed about a hundred Monrovians. The Monrovians and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan have called upon other nations—principally the USA, which has historic ties to Liberia—to intervene.

While the White House has declared it will deploy 4,500 US troops, it also insists it is waiting for West African nations such as Nigeria to actually do the heavy lifting. In the meantime, there are several dimensions to the present Liberian Civil War.

One element is the lingering rivalry between the Americo-Liberians and everybody else. The Americo-Liberians and their close associates, the "Congoes" (humans seized as "contraband" by American and British frigates suppressing the slave trade, and stranded in Liberia) comprised something like 5% of the population in 1980 when Samuel K. Doe and others from the underdeveloped Eastern counties seized power. The Americo-Liberian president, William Tolbert, was shot and disemboweled, and rivals to Doe within the "nativist" junta were purged (usually by firing squad, but often by exile). Doe also used these purges to ingratiate himself as an anti-Communist with the Reagan Administration. Subsequently, a "Congo" exile named Charles Taylor took power after a gruesome eight-year war (1989-1997) in which some 200,000 Liberians were butchered to death.

(For an alternative view of the founding of Liberia, here is one that attacks the claim that Americo-Liberians and Congoes created the republic. The site is maintained by a political rival of Taylor, TQ Harris.)

Liberia has one neighbor, Sierra Leone, with a very similar history (but with ties to the UK) and another, Guinea-Conakry; Guinea is a large, sparsely-populated country with a strong government, and it is alleged to have played a role in seeking the ouster of Doe and Taylor. The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) represent a range of indigenous Liberian interests; it has been armed at least in part by Conakry. This is in retaliation for opportunistic (?) arming of insurgents in Guinea and Sierra Leone. While the violence in Sierra Leone has subsided, Taylor has also been implicated in the rebel violence in Côte d'Ivoire.

An additional dimension of the Liberian Civil War has been the conflict between Mandingoes (who are usually Muslim) and Krahns. Initially Taylor attacked both because Doe was a Krahn (animist) and the Mandingoes were the most intractably opposed to the centuries-old Americo-Liberian (Christian) hegemony. Later, after 1991, Taylor and a Muslim warlord named Alhaji Kromah joined forces and campaigned against the "pagan" Krahn. (Curiously, Kromah is married to a Christian and lives in exile in the USA).

Yet it would be inaccurate to see this as a jihad; the LURD, which has been fighting for five years, has no evident sectarian affiliation. There are in fact three rival rebel groups (MODEL and GDF are the others; they are presently fighting each other in the southeast of the country). The GRE are narrowly dedicated to defending one particular animist group and MODEL—united tenuously with LURD—represents rival animist groups. There has been massive involvement in the Ivoirian Civil War, motivated mainly by opportunities to loot the unarmed population. The Muslims usually represent a larger, poorer opposition to the mostly-Christian elites of West Africa; the animists are more likely to be disorganized and a little frightened of the Muslims, but sectarian affinity is a hazy matter here since all denominations have animist elements. The network of rebel or junta militia in Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Liberia obviously transcends sectarian issues, with animist anti-Taylor forces backing the Catholic Gbagbo against a coalition of tribal factions; Pres. Lansana Conté of Guinea-Conakry, a Muslim, backed opposition to Taylor, thereby putting himself in alliance with the Catholic Gbagbo. Taylor, moreover, depended on militia of many different nationalities and plunder in order to stay in power.

The factions battling for power in the region are acutely opportunistic, and are fueled by the trade in diamonds, lumber, and so forth. The population of the region has been growing rapidly, as indeed have settlements of displaced persons. Guinea and Ghana remain firewalls to the conflict for now; the war seems to oscillate among these three coastal states in between, with cease-fires in one being succeeded by fresh fighting in another. This seems to be an endgame for the sovereign nation in West Africa, with no potential state strong enough to overcome its allegiance to any one faction. Is this region doomed to become an international protectorate?