Abundance

by Fine, Michael;

  Julia sat and stared out the window most of the day for the first few months. People came to visit—mostly friends from the hospital and Levin, who brought his political people. Sometimes Julia went out for Levin’s demonstrations or to see a movie, but her heart wasn’t in any of it. She sat and looked out the window and, like Naomi, she was waiting for Carl to come home.

  Levin brought Julia’s car back, and she started to drive. One day in the early spring she said she was going to take a road trip and see family in California. Naomi knew she’d never be back.

  In a sense, Naomi was now alone. Her father was still alive, still in the lockup from which he would never emerge, but then he had been dead to her from the moment they had escaped him. Carl was gone. Her mother was gone. Her grandparents were gone.

  Naomi’s friends called her on the phone and stopped by the Institute, and they went for lunch, sometimes even to Sally’s. She would tell them about the trip, sometimes, and sometimes she would just listen to the stories of their lives. She talked about Carl when they asked, and she could now tell other people the truth about his strengths and weaknesses, about his brilliance and kindness and love, and also about his reckless abandon, about why he ran away, about the brave thing he tried to do and failed at, about the woman he loved who survived him, and about how strong he was to have cared for Naomi when they were children and what they endured together growing up.

  These were the stories she would tell her children. Her children would live in these stories, and through those stories Naomi hoped her children might be able to see through the racism and the lust and the greed and understand that they too are part of a people and part of a place that is great and pulsing, and through the stories she would tell them and the stories they would tell one another they would discover the freedom to find what is great and pulsing within themselves and their people and their world.

  America is freedom, she would tell them, despite the war and the madness. Sometimes America is the freedom to buy, the freedom to sell, and the freedom to bribe. But America is also the freedom for people to take care of one another, to listen, and the freedom to tell the difficult truth about who we have been and what we have done; about both the successes and the failures, about the strengths and the weaknesses, about the kindness and the greed. In America Naomi’s children would still perhaps have the freedom to experience the world in all its grandeur, the freedom to be together, the freedom to talk and listen, and the freedom to tell stories about who we are and who we can become.

  Perhaps they will be better people than we are, Naomi thought, though probably not. Perhaps our children will find the right balance, the right combination of kindness and striving, of selfishness and selflessness, of ego and humility, of lust and love, of freedom and democracy, of justice and of peace. Perhaps they will be better than we are and will succeed where we failed and find a way to move forward in the richness and abundance of the world, without stupidity, violence, war, and greed. Probably not. They are our children, the flesh of our flesh, the bone of our bone, and they will stumble forward in time the way we do, one step at a time, one step forward and two steps back; and then, sometimes, rarely, perhaps once in a generation or two but sometimes not for a thousand years, one step forward again.

  I miss him, Naomi thought. I miss Carl. I’ll always miss him.

  He’s gone now, she thought. But at least he taught me how to love.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Results

  ABOUT 2 PERCENT OF THE POPULATION, OR 618,000 AMERICANS, DIED IN THE U.S. CIVIL War, or War of Rebellion, or War of Northern Aggression, or War Between the States, at a time when the U.S. population was more than thirty-one million. About three hundred thousand Liberians, or 10 percent of the Liberian population, died in the long period of civil strife associated with the rebellion and then the reign of Charles Taylor, from 1989 to 2003, which occurred when the Liberian population was about three million people.

  Charles Taylor stood trial in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, but the trial was moved first to The Hague, and then to Leidschendam in The Netherlands, because everyone knew it was too dangerous to try Taylor in Sierra Leone itself. Too many of Taylor’s friends were still active in Liberia and Sierra Leone, places in which the rule of law is more hope than reality. The trial began in 2007 and judgment was rendered in 2012. The trial was conducted before the Special Court for Sierra Leone but under the auspices of the International Court of Justice, itself a court of the United Nations, which was created to hear accusations of crimes against humanity.

  The legal status of crimes against humanity is unclear and represents an evolving body of international law. Charles Taylor was charged only with his activities involving Sierra Leone. He could not be charged in an international court with crimes committed in Liberia while he was the head of state because of a principle called sovereign immunity, which means that a head of state cannot be charged with a crime in his or her own country while serving as head of state by anybody other than the country itself.

  Taylor is reputed to be a very wealthy man who still has considerable influence in Liberia, where it is claimed that he still has friends and associates in his employ. He is also reputed to control considerable assets in Liberia—timber, iron, and diamonds—through those friends and associates.

  Final arguments in the three-year trial were heard on March 11, 2011, almost eight years after Taylor fell from power and almost five years after he was turned over to the International Court of Justice and the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

  On April 26, 2012, the Court found Taylor guilty of aiding and abetting eleven crimes, including murder, rape, sexual slavery, and forced labor. He was also convicted of conspiring with the Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front to plan attacks in three different areas of the country, including the capital, Freetown, and diamond-rich district of Kono.

  The civil war in Sierra Leone claimed some fifty thousand lives. Thousands more Sierra Leoneans were forced to serve as child soldiers and sex slaves. Thousands more yet had limbs amputated.

  On May 30, 2012, Taylor was sentenced to serve fifty years in jail for his crimes. That sentence was appealed by both prosecution and defense and was affirmed by the International Court of Justice in 2013.

  Taylor was never indicted for his role in the rape and destruction of Liberia itself. If found innocent of charges in Sierra Leone, Taylor would have returned to Liberia a free man.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Summary and Conclusions

  WILLIAM LEVIN RETIRED FROM THE PRACTICE OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE AT THE END OF June 2008. He moved to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, where he lives near a beach. He is writing a memoir about his time in Liberia. He writes in the morning, works in the public clinic for a few hours in the afternoon, and then walks the beach each evening as the sun is going down.

  Yvonne Evans-Smith stayed in Liberia. She lives in Sinkor, teaches accounting at Cuthington College, and makes dinner for her brothers and sisters, her nieces and nephews and their children every Sunday afternoon.

  Ellen Johnson Sirleaf finished her second term as the president of the Republic of Liberia on January 18, 2018. George Weah, a former soccer star, was elected to replace her. His vice presidential running mate was Jewel Howard Taylor, senator form Bong County and the divorced wife of Charles Taylor.

  Julia Richmond lives in Bolinas, California, in a little walk-up apartment near the sea. She works at San Francisco General Hospital three days a week in the walk-in section of the pedi-ER. She sees coughs and colds and sore throats and kids with constipation, and she has all the Keflex and Betadine she needs. She’s trying to learn medical Spanish. There’s a psychologist she knows who writes poetry and who drives over the Golden Gate Bridge on a beautiful red 1964 BSA Lightning every other weekend, and who doesn’t need to crowd her space, and that is pretty good. But she knows and he knows that she is always looking for the brilliant eyes of someone else when she looks into his. And she knows and he knows
that the clock is ticking, and that before long she will have his child, and they will move in together and love the child and each other in a different way, and that she will always remember the time when she loved with all of herself, and not just with her daily routines, not just by being there in body. Then the man she is with will love her by being patient with her absences and will love her by being willing and able to find her in the places she is hiding. One day soon she will let that man come to find her more often when she is buried in her thoughts and memories, and she will let him bring her back to the present from time to time and throw her arms around him and feel the warmth of his body and feel him flow into the empty spaces inside her. And being back in the present with him will give her some pleasure and even a little joy.

  That time is coming. Just not quite yet.

  Appendix

  Charles Taylor. Rhode Island and Liberia—An Implausible but Real History, with a Little Conjecture Added

  PEOPLE IN RHODE ISLAND SAY THAT CHARLES TAYLOR ONCE LIVED IN PAWTUCKET, A working-class city just north of Providence, the state capitol, in a place then called Crook Manor. Crook Manor was a public housing development on Weeden Street, Pawtucket, and has been renamed Galego Court, although everyone in Pawtucket still calls it by its original name.

  There’s no proof that Charles Taylor ever really lived in or even visited Rhode Island. He lived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and attended a now defunct community college, and then Bentley College, now University, in Waltham, Massachusetts (also the home of Brandeis University), and graduated from Bentley with a BA in Economics in 1977. While he lived in Dorchester, Charles Taylor worked as a security guard, a truck driver, and a mechanic. He worked at Sears and Mutual of Omaha. Taylor was in Liberia from 1979 to 1983, as part of the government of two Liberian presidents, and then returned to the U.S. in a hurry once he was accused by then president Samuel Doe of having embezzled one million dollars.

  Taylor was arrested in Massachusetts after the U.S. received an extradition order from the Republic of Liberia. He was imprisoned in the Plymouth House of Corrections, a maximum security facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts, until 1985, when he escaped, though he now claims he was released by the CIA. Released or escaped, he is the only prisoner ever to have escaped from the Plymouth House of Corrections and remained at large.

  Although there is no evidence that Charles Taylor ever lived in Rhode Island, there is plenty of reason for thinking he spent time there and got to know the place pretty well. Rhode Island has the largest Liberian population per capita in the United States—some fifteen to seventeen thousand people—mostly Krahn, Bassa, and Gao people, some of whom lived in Crook Manor in the 1970s and 1980s and some who still live there now that it is Galego Court. Perhaps the existence of this population led people to speculate that Taylor likely visited Rhode Island now and then. Perhaps Taylor really lived at Crook Manor in the early 1980s when he was in the U.S. as a fugitive, fleeing Samuel Doe. No one—other than the people who lived in Crook Manor then, who either did or did not have Taylor as their neighbor, and Taylor himself—will ever know for sure.

  After Charles Taylor disappeared from the Plymouth House of Corrections, he found his way to Libya, where he was trained in guerilla warfare. With support from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, he went to Ivory Coast and founded the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. In 1989, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia fomented an armed rebellion in Liberia, aiming to overthrow then president Samuel Doe. Taylor invaded Nimbi County from Ivory Coast with a hundred armed fighters and quickly attracted the support of the local population, which had been brutally attacked by the Armed Forces of Liberia in 1985.

  This armed rebellion marked the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War, which would degenerate into a brutal ethnic conflict among seven different armed camps, first leading to Doe’s overthrow and televised brutal murder, and then to five more years of murder, rape, dismemberments, and chaos. More than three hundred thousand people were killed and more than a million became refugees, as whole populations were raped and savagely murdered, often by child soldiers who were drugged and forced to commit atrocities, and who were ordered to rape and kill their own families and communities. After five years of fighting, Taylor, backed by Gaddafi and other international friends and coconspirators, emerged as the strongest and most brutal of the warlords. The war lasted until 1995, when a peace agreement brokered by the president of Ghana and facilitated by other African states, the UN, the U.S., and the European Union led first to an uneasy cease-fire, and then to elections.

  In 1997, in an election most people thought was free and fair, Charles Taylor was elected president by the people of Liberia, with 75 percent of the vote. Many people voted for Taylor because he appeared strong enough to stop the bloodshed that had been ravaging the country and had wrecked its fragile institutions. Many more voted for him because they feared he would continue the war and bloodshed if he lost. His supporters ran through the streets, singing, “He shot my ma, he shot my pa, I will vote for him.”

  The Second Liberian Civil War began in 1999, when a group called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, supported by the governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone, invaded Liberia from Guinea. To be fair (if that word is relevant at all here) there is evidence that Taylor was involved with rebel groups or parties in both countries and so the governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone might be thought of as trying to keep the playing field level, although it is not possible to know who did what to whom first and when.

  Sierra Leone, Liberia’s neighbor to the west, had its own history of civil strife and bloody, maniacal civil war. Sierra Leona was a British colony until 1961 and was partially populated by a group of imported ex-slaves from Britain and the U.S. who turned themselves into a ruling class, very much like Liberia, though Liberia became independent more than a hundred years earlier. Sierra Leone’s politics are made more complex by the existence of diamond mines near its border with Liberia, which produce over three hundred million dollars worth of diamonds a year.

  The Special Court for Sierra Leone where Charles Taylor would be tried and eventually convicted was established in 2002. Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, the president of Sierra Leone, wrote United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in July 2000 asking for UN help prosecute those responsible for war crimes during the ten-year civil war in Sierra Leone. Many of those atrocities had been committed by the Revolutionary United Front, the Sierra Leonean rebels and Charles Taylor’s allies—an organization known for using child soldiers as young as five, ordering children to kill their parents, practicing cannibalism, using rape, and amputating the limbs of people who were going to vote as routine methods of instilling the fear and obedience of the population. The government of Sierra Leone asked for UN help, because it was not strong enough on its own to hold and try Sierra Leoneans in its own court in a region where Charles Taylor, the president of the nation that comprised Sierra Leone’s eastern border, held sway and was thought to control militias and armies inside Sierra Leone. And Sierra Leone was certainly not strong enough on its own to bring Charles Taylor to justice.

  The president of Sierra Leone’s letter was quite specific, proposing clearly delineated powers, many of which are contained in the final agreement creating the court, suggesting that much of the text of that letter was prenegotiated. UN Security Council Resolution 1315 of August 14, 2000, directed the Secretary General of the UN to negotiate with the government of Sierra Leone to create the requested Special Court. The Special Court came into being two long years later, in late 2002, after countless more atrocities were committed by all parties involved. The Special Court was a judicial body established by the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations to “prosecute persons who bear the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law” committed after November 30, 1996, during the Sierra Leone Civil War, with which Taylor was deeply involved (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Court_for_Sierra_Le
one-cite_note-2).

  The Special Court for Sierra Leone had no real precedent in international law. It was not a Sierra Leone court. It was not a United Nations court or part of the International Criminal Court, the usual tribunal for acts committed in violation of international law. The Special Court for Sierra Leone had both international and Sierra Leonean judges but did not have the power to oblige the extradition of accused persons from another nation. It was a compromise, made in a dangerous, difficult time, and was the best the international community could scrape together in a difficult and dangerous part of the world without committing much in terms of resources or political capital. But it was a pathway to end the war and bloodshed in that region, and, however incomplete, and however hypocritical (because it did not hold the U.S or Britain to the same standards of accountability for atrocities and war crimes), it was a pathway that worked.

  Security Council resolution 1315 was a complete reversal of resolution 1260, from August 20, 1999, which was strongly supported by the U.S. and Britain and committed the involved nations to amnesty for all military combatants. Now, no more amnesty.

  Something had changed between 2000 and 2002, and that something was 9/11.

  For a decade, the U.S., Britain, and the world had responded slowly to the war and atrocity that reigned in West Africa, to the extent it responded at all, and as it responded slowly to genocide in Rwanda.

  But after al-Qaeda attacked us in 1998 and 2001, and after we realized how al-Qaeda and others were using diamonds to fund terrorism in a way that could evade detection, we acted. Finally, greed and mayhem are like infectious diseases. They spread. We acted when the greed and mayhem that have been destroying West Africa was infecting us as well. And only then.