Abundance

by Fine, Michael;

  Taylor did everything he could to influence the October 2005 presidential election in Liberia, channeling money to nine of the eighteen parties, fielding candidates, and spreading yet more money around, but he apparently failed to be a major player in the face of huge international and UN supervision of that election. Taylor’s ex-wife, Jewel Taylor, who had divorced him earlier that year (leaving him with just two remaining wives, to say nothing of the twenty-seven female teenage orphans he was looking after out of the kindness of his heart) was elected a senator from Bong County—and many other associates were carefully being moved into positions of power and influence.

  At the same time Taylor sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to two loyal but small-time warlords, who used the money to train and equip small armies of several hundred combatants each; armies that would be in place and at Taylor’s beck and call to be used when the time was right. Taylor was involved in and likely funded a January 2005 failed assassination attempt on President Lansana Conté in Guinea. (Conté was one of the African presidents who had pressured him into leaving Liberia in 2003.) One can only wonder just how much more havoc Taylor would have created if President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf hadn’t requested Taylor’s extradition to Liberia in March of 2006, just three months after she was installed as Liberia’s new president.

  President Obasanjo of Nigeria declared he would allow Charles Taylor to be arrested only if Taylor’s arrest was requested by the new government of Liberia—a clever test of Taylor’s remaining power and influence in Liberia—and that he would extradite Taylor to Liberia in the event Liberia requested Taylor’s extradition, but he would not respond to the indictment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

  After her election and installation in January 2006, President Johnson Sirleaf, who had once been a supporter of Taylor’s (but later disavowed that support), declared that the extradition of Charles Taylor was “low priority”—that other national rebuilding work was much more urgent. There was then protest and an outcry from people in the international human rights community, and that outcry was heard in the U.S. Congress, where there were members who advocated cutting off aid to Liberia if Taylor was not brought before the Special Court in Sierra Leone.

  Lord only knows what strings were pulled behind the scenes in March 2006, how much telephone and satellite phone traffic the Liberian request to extradite Taylor generated, or how many private armies were moved from one place, one diamond field, and one border, to the next. Both Presidents Sirleaf Johnson of Liberia and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa visited President Olusẹgun Obasanjo in Nigeria in the two weeks leading up to the request for Taylor’s extradition.

  Reluctantly, but at last, the new government of Liberia requested Taylor’s extradition on March 17, 2006, two days after President Johnson Sirleaf addressed a joint session of Congress (and likely consulted with members of the Bush State Department and others in the U.S. government); two days before President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf visited Providence, Rhode Island, and four days before she addressed the UN Security Council.

  Nigeria announced it was “releasing” Taylor—but not arresting him—on Saturday, March 25, 2006, because the government of Nigeria had suddenly discovered that there was no extradition treaty between Liberia and Nigeria.

  On March 27, 2006, Taylor disappeared from the compound in Calabar.

  President Obasanjo left for Washington, DC, on March 28, 2006, on his way to see President George Bush in order to build support for a permanent seat for Nigeria on the UN Security Council and for his own attempt to rewrite the Nigerian constitution to allow him to run for a third term as president. By the time Obasanjo took off from Abuja, Taylor had disappeared from his compound and suddenly was nowhere to be found. Obasanjo’s plane landed at 9:30 p.m., March 28, 2006, U.S. time, which is 3:30 a.m., March 29 local time in Nigeria. The president of Nigeria was met in DC by representatives of the U.S. State Department, just as his foreign minister was meeting with Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley in what must have been a very interesting meeting indeed.

  Taylor and his retinue of three Land Rovers with diplomatic plates was cleared through Nigerian immigration at 7:30 a.m., March 29, 2006, at Gamboru-Ngala, on the Nigerian border with Cameroon. Taylor was traveling in a flowing white robe but on a fake passport. His retinue was held up at Nigerian customs, however, when a customs official noticed that there were several million dollars and euros in cash, all in two 110-pound sacks, as well as bricks of heroin and packets of diamonds and gold.

  On March 29, 2006, at 7:30 a.m. local time in Nigeria, 1:30 a.m. U.S. time, or about four hours after President Obasanjo’s plane landed in Washington, Charles Taylor was arrested by Nigerian police.

  It is very unusual for customs officials to inspect the luggage of vehicles bearing diplomatic plates, because such inspections represent a violation of international law.

  One never knows exactly what transpired in meetings like the one between Obasanjo and Bush. They met at about 10:00 a.m. on March 29, 2006, about seven hours after Taylor’s arrest. According to press releases and news reports they talked about West African politics, about Taylor and Liberia, about the discovery of oil in Guinea, about the situation in Darfur, and about political instability in the oil rich provinces of Nigeria, where U.S. and other foreign oil companies have major investments.

  U.S. aid to Nigeria in 2006 included $45 million in humanitarian and development aid from USAID, about $170 million in military aid, and some $19.2 billion of “exceptional debt relief” from the World Bank, which is technically not U.S. aid at all. Technically.

  A year later, U.S. military aid had grown to $330 million, almost doubling.

  President Obasanjo failed in his attempt to change Nigeria’s constitution and left office in 2008. Nigeria was unsuccessful in obtaining a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. No African country has ever held a permanent seat on the Security Council. The population of Africa is close to one billion people, or about one-seventh of the world’s population. The land mass of Africa is one-fifth of the total land mass of the earth.

  Charles Taylor was sent home to Liberia in chains, and then was shipped to Sierra Leone, and from Sierra Leone was shipped to The Hague to stand trial—the first head of state to be indicted while in office; the first former head of state to stand trial in an international court for his crimes but very likely far from the last head of state to have murdered and tortured his own people, driven by his own lust for money and power, and egged on by the lust and greed of people who lack the capacity for remorse.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Naomi Goldman, Yvonne Evans-Smith, and William Levin. Monrovia, Liberia. May, 2007

  THERE WAS NO JETWAY. THEY STUMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS OF THE HOT ALUMINUM GANGWAY into the blinding sun, stiff in their knees and shoulders and lower backs from sitting, despite having spent the night in the airport hotel in Accra.

  Everyone who came off the plane crowded into a room the size of a small post office. A woman in a green uniform stood at the door. Three immigration officers in blue uniforms sat in Plexiglas booths on the right wall. The passengers from the plane crowded around each booth, jostling for position. The immigration officers sat on tall stools and looked down on the people who jammed before them so that their voices were both amplified and muffled by the booths, which made the booths vibrate when the people inside spoke.

  Then suddenly the three friends were in the hot sunlight surrounded by thin dark men in torn tee shirts offering to carry their baggage. If Yvonne had not been there, they might have been swept away.

  Yvonne became their protector. Her back straightened, her voice hardened, and you could feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up as she snapped at the thin young men who clustered around each traveler, speaking harshly the way a school teacher addresses an unruly class, speaking in a guttural language that sounded like English but that neither Levin nor Naomi understood.

  “Ga wa! Na tou. Na carry,” she said. Go away!
Don’t touch. We don’t need help carrying the luggage.

  A woman in a brown and green lapa came from nowhere and threw her arms around Yvonne, who became herself again for a moment, and then she became someone Levin and Naomi had never met; someone with moist eyes and the excited voice of a young girl come home to her family. There was a man there too, and then two men in dark suits wearing shirts with open-necked collars, and then another woman. They had come together in two cars. Room for everybody.

  The cars were small Japanese station wagons, one red and the other black, both dusty and dented. There were introductions: the men were called John and James; the women Gladys and Nowei; Gladys was Yvonne’s niece and was married to John; Nowei was John’s sister and was married to James; they were all Christians, and the men were deacons in a church in Monrovia. They had come to drive Yvonne and her friends to Buchanan and to find Terrance, because Terrance had disappeared without a trace. The story that Levin told—that Terrance had come back to Liberia, had died at the camp of a band of Charles Taylor’s men when MODEL moved on it in the middle of the night, attacking with night vision goggles and RPGs and destroying the clubhouse of the LAC—all that seemed too unbelievable to Yvonne’s sisters to be true. Even in Liberia. Even though Yvonne knew it was true after all.

  It was almost 3:00. The men packed the luggage as the women arranged themselves in the cars: Yvonne and Gladys in the back seat of John’s car, with Levin in the passenger seat; James driving Naomi in the second car, with Nowei behind. They would drive to Buchanan that night and go tomorrow to The Club, and then go to find this Dr. Richmond, once and for all.

  There were just three hours before dark. They needed to be in Buchanan before the sunset.

  The UN was all over the airport. They passed a white UN jet on the tarmac and four UN helicopters on the grass outside the passenger terminal. A fleet of white UN Land Cruisers were driving back and forth, buzzing around the airport like flies.

  The two cars headed south. Just past the airport there was a UN checkpoint, a guard post manned by Thais with two machine guns trained on the road from behind a wall of sandbags.

  They passed the Firestone plantation. Levin remembered the fields and cows and the row of big black tanks spelling out F-I-R-E-S-T-O-N-E.

  Suddenly Levin was short of breath, sweaty and nauseated at the same time. Suddenly he was in the back of the RAV, nosing through crowds of people. Suddenly he heard the blast and smelled the dust and gunpowder as MODEL moved in, destroying everything and everyone. Suddenly he was digging, his fingertips raw. He wasn’t listening. He was pale and sweating and his shoulders began to shake.

  They went over a rise, and the moment passed.

  The pavement was smooth in the plantation. They swept through the lines of pale green-barked rubber trees and through their thin shadows. Sunlight flickered in the cars in a way that, had it been sound, would have been the sound of a train, clattering and ticking over the rails, as the cars pierced the lines of light and dark, of sunlight and shadow, in a way that was mesmerizing and nauseating at once.

  Yvonne sat in the back seat of the first car. Gladys was a niece but was as good as a sister. She was the niece and sister and aunt who kept track of who was who, who was close, and who was having problems. They would to stop in St. John’s River. Two sisters and a brother there. Then they’d go on to Buchanan, where there was a hotel for Naomi and Levin. Three sisters in Buchanan. More nieces and nephews than you could count. Everyone was all stirred up. Everyone wanted to see Yvonne. She hadn’t been home in all these years. People would gather as soon as Yvonne came back from the bush. Everyone would come and visit and eat together. Everyone was talking about the big visit. There hadn’t been a big visit like this in years.

  Gladys had news. Gladys’s father, Yvonne’s sister’s man, same ma different pa, was safe in a village in Bong County, but three of her brothers had disappeared from Monrovia during the war, one into Sierra Leone. Yvonne had news one sister was in Ghana, and that sister had a daughter in Philadelphia and another daughter who was in college in St. Louis on a full scholarship and was headed to law school.

  Yvonne listened and found herself overwhelmingly proud of this land and her people. Her people had dignity. They fought, yes, and the fighting was terrible. But they didn’t complain. They fought, they loved, and they worked. Their faith was strong. God was everywhere in Liberia. Liberia was her home. She loved it here, and she felt kissed by the blood-soaked ground as they drove over it.

  Naomi sat in front in the second car, next to James.

  It had been a hard, sad year for Naomi. Her work at the Institute kept her sane. Levin was a good man who had been kind when he brought her the news, and then patient with her questions. The story was unbelievable at first, even absurd. Americans don’t leave the country in ships full of stolen cars bound for Africa. Or get themselves killed in other people’s civil wars. Naomi knew Levin was telling the truth, and that Carl was dead, but she also didn’t believe any of it—both at the same time.

  But Yvonne, the woman with Levin, had been Naomi’s salvation. Yvonne took over Naomi’s life while Naomi grieved. She cooked for Naomi and filled her freezer with food. She came by the Institute when Naomi was teaching at night. She taught Liberian children’s songs to the kids of Naomi’s students and finger painted with them as their parents learned. You do not see Yvonne’s inner life. They walked out of the Institute together every night but rarely spoke.

  “It is better than it was,” Yvonne said one evening, when they were alone. “Not good yet but better. Okay to travel in the day. Women back in the markets. Dried fish coming from the river again. Schools opening.”

  “Safe enough to go?” Naomi asked.

  “If you wish,” Yvonne said.

  “Will you come?” Naomi said.

  “I will. I’m not sure I should have ever left,” Yvonne said.

  “Dr. Levin?” Naomi said.

  “Dr. Levin will come. We need him to show us the places and he needs us to hold him up,” Yvonne said. “We will go together, the three of us.”

  The road swung past a cluster of buildings: the plantation store, the plantation school, and the plantation hospital. Then they passed the houses of the rubber workers—neat lines of square four-room concrete houses, with metal roofs that looked like the little green houses from the game of Monopoly.

  But here the rows of little houses suggested liberation, light, order, and progress. The rubber workers’ houses, each with a green lawn out front and a banana tree in the back yard, were a huge step up from what Carl had described when he talked or wrote about life in the bush. Naomi imagined that all the houses had running water, neat little white enamel electric stoves, and flush toilets. Carl had said people lived in huts made of mud and sticks with hard dirt floors, wooden sleeping benches, and a cooking fire outside. This was different from what Carl described and different from home as well.

  The road left the plantation, and they entered the real Liberia for the first time.

  On the side of the road were market stalls and a gaggle of the mud houses Carl had written about; mud houses framed by wooden poles, which had roofs thatched with leaves from the forest. The air was hazy with smoke from cooking fires. The roadbed disintegrated. They were driving on broken pavement now, with patches of road that were just red dirt, rutted and uneven. The car bottomed out and jolted as they drove, its old suspension unable to support the weight of the people inside on the uneven ground.

  In the next village there were people everywhere. People in the market stalls, sitting on the ground or on low benches, people next to the village pump, which was set in concrete—a pump like the pictures Carl had sent her after each was finished. People, mostly women, walked next to the road, carrying bundles or baskets or those multicolored bright green and red and purple plastic tubs on their heads.

  But what Naomi saw in the villages was life and dignity, not poverty or squalor, and she began to understand Carl, perhaps for the firs
t time. When Carl had told her about the complex and beautiful world of the country people in the bush, Naomi imagined a world that was primitive, that was dirty and diseased. When she heard stories about the headmen and their wives, she imagined a place where people were downtrodden and suffering. When Carl had talked about the elegant way people lived and died, how people appeared to live without fear until the wars came, about how their lives were transformed by something as simple as a village pump, Naomi imagined that Carl was their savior and not the other way around. He had tried to tell her. She had listened, but she hadn’t really heard.

  Naomi had her own beliefs about what was ordered, stable, and good. But as she looked at these people and their villages, everything she thought she believed about Liberia and its people changed. There was order here. Dignity, but different dignity. A different order. A different way to think.

  It didn’t matter much. Because Naomi was still alone. More alone now than ever.

  The huts and people disappeared. The road got worse. It was pockmarked by potholes that looked like small lakes and creased by ruts that were as deep as a strong man’s arm and ten car lengths long.

  The evening rain was short that day. Just enough to moisten the dust. Not enough to send rivulets across the road.

  The two cars pulled over next to a market and across the road from a field ringed by mango trees that looked down on a broad river crossed by a thin iron bridge. The sun found its way out between the clouds just over the horizon. They were beginning to lose the light, which cast long shadows. One of the stalls had tables piled high with dried fish. Another had a table covered with withered green oranges.