Sirleaf served a few months in the Doe government, on detachment from the World Bank. Another minister was Charles Taylor, who served as director general of the General Services Agency (which procured goods for the government) until 1983, when he was fired for embezzling a million dollars and fled to the United States. After Sirleaf gave a speech about corruption at a local school, Doe became less pleased with having her on board, and in November 1980, Sirleaf also fled to the United States, with the help of the World Bank. Sirleaf spent a short time in Washington, DC, before moving to Nairobi, Kenya, where she worked as vice president of the African regional office of Citibank.
Both these appointments put her into conversation with people in international finance and development, which would prove pivotal for the success of her first term as president in Liberia over two decades later. In Washington, while still employed by the World Bank, she connected with leading politicians, including Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson, and head of the World Bank since 1968. In Nairobi, she was put in charge of making connections to countries that did not yet have a Citibank office. Thus she traveled in East Africa, particularly working in Uganda, where she became friends with Yoweri Museveni, now the long-lasting president of the country since 1986. While in Nairobi, Sirleaf also kept up with President Doe, visiting him when she went home to Liberia. The pull of politics was strong, and Sirleaf became involved in the Liberian election of 1985.
By the mid- 1980s, the US government was becoming embarrassed by the excesses of the Doe government. As a result, they pressured Doe to hold an election, which duly happened in January 1985. Doe created an interim National Assembly and had leaders with gravitas such as Dr. Amos Sawyer draft a new constitution for Liberia. Doe did not much care for this constitution as it stipulated that a president had to be thirty-five years old. Doe was only thirty-three, so he ignored that requirement. Believing some of the hype about the beginning of a new era, Sirleaf returned to Monrovia in 1984 and started the National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL). But she was soon disabused of Doe’s intentions to foster democracy. After giving another speech about corruption, Sirleaf found herself under house arrest and then in prison, and shortly thereafter charged with sedition. She was imprisoned with university students who had protested the arrest of their dear Professor Sawyer.
Now, Sirleaf’s connection with the world financial elite paid off: people at Citibank and the World Bank began to lobby for her release. And as she says in her autobiography, even the Reagan administration came to her aid,7 since the country to which they had already pledged millions was now looking more and more like a democratic basket case. It was also in this moment that Sirleaf began to realize the political power of Liberian women, a power that would later boost her to the presidency in 2005. Thousands of women lobbied for her release. However, they proved unable to alter the court’s verdict of guilty, with the sentence of ten years in prison. But in a life full of miracles, probably all helped by a history of working in powerful positions in powerful institutions around the world, another occurred: rather than being sent to the notorious Belle Yalla prison, Sirleaf was released, along with the students.
Instead of sinking into obscurity or leaving for overseas, Sirleaf then ran for senator with the Liberian Action Party. Although it seems that the LAP won the election, President Doe delayed results until his election commission stated that the presidential party had won, by a slim 50.9 percent. Although the United States said that the election was somewhat irregular, their interest in maintaining the balance of Cold War politics meant that they continued supporting Doe. He became increasingly authoritarian, and repression became worse after an attempted coup by Thomas Quiwonkpa, one of Doe’s former compatriots, in November of the same year.
Sirleaf was caught up in the aftermath of the coup, seen as a supporter of Quiwonkpa because she refused to take up her senate seat in protest of the rigged elections. Moved from one prison to another, she endured taunts and possible death, but her stature as a minister in the government and perhaps her earlier speeches against corruption in the Tolbert government seem to have saved her life. However, at the start of Doe’s new era as president he again had Sirleaf charged with sedition, and she remained in prison for some seven months, being released in July 1986.
In the first months after being elected president, Doe killed thousands of people, adding yet another ethnic dimension to Liberia’s woes by killing Gio people, of Quiwonkpa’s ethnic group in Nimba County. With President Doe continuing his pressure on Sirleaf to take up her seat in the senate, it became clear that she had to leave if she wanted to stay alive. With the help of dear friends and colleagues, as Sirleaf recalls in her autobiography, she made it out of Liberia in 1986 by private plane, to Abidjan and then to the United States.
Once there, Sirleaf renewed her connections with the world of high finance, going to work as vice president and director of Equator Bank, of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, in the Washington office. Living in Virginia, she watched from afar as Doe continued Liberia’s slide into further disarray. This did not stop the Reagan government’s support, however, and Secretary of State George Shultz stopped in Liberia on his tour of Africa in 1987. Like administration officials before him, Shultz supported Doe, if in somewhat muted terms, saying that Liberia could expect continued support from the United States but only if “Liberia is willing to help itself.” Shultz ignored the fact that Doe arrested a group of protesters during Shultz’s visit and that widespread political repression continued. The New Liberian, the Liberian government newspaper, was happy to describe the visit as “a demonstration of Republican President Reagan’s reaffirmed commitment to support the Doe administration despite opposition in a Congress that is dominated by Democrats.”8 The New York Times, however, reported that “several Liberians, including a politician, a newspaper publisher and a human rights campaigner, said . . . that Mr. Shultz had made inaccurate statements . . . where he said Liberia had a free press, an elected Government and no political prisoners.” Sirleaf was one of the people quoted by the Times. It said she was “‘quite dismayed’ by Mr. Shultz’s portrayal of the Doe regime as an elected government and his appeal to opposition legislators. . . . And called Mr. Shultz’s statements ‘either deliberate misinformation or ignorance,’ saying, ‘The opposition stands by the position that the results of the 1985 election make the Government illegitimate.’”9
The end of the Cold War, signified by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, diminished Liberia’s importance to the United States. Doe thus became quite vulnerable. Charles Taylor had escaped from prison in the United States in 1985, perhaps with the help of the CIA.10 Testimony from Taylor’s trial by the Special Court of Sierra Leone revealed that he had been in the employ of the CIA. Rumors had long abounded that it helped Taylor escape from the Boston jail in 1985, and although the CIA would not provide details, it confirmed that it worked with Taylor from the 1980s. Since then, Taylor had been marshaling forces to overthrow Doe and now began amassing troops to launch a military assault on Doe’s government. Sirleaf had been working back in the States to garner opposition to Doe through founding the Association for Constitutional Democracy (ACDL) along with her colleague Professor Amos Sawyer and others. But in the face of a tyrant, simple politics was unlikely to work: Sirleaf turned to Charles Taylor.
As BBC correspondent Robin White says: “Charles Taylor’s appeal was obvious. He was the complete opposite of Doe: Flamboyant, clever and well educated. And, above all, he could talk. . . . He was the ‘Liberian Lip’; the ‘Monrovian Motormouth.’ He knew how to deal with the media.”11 Sirleaf claims that she had to at least try to work with the best available opponent of Doe, but Charles Taylor certainly came with lots of baggage. He had received military training as well as monetary backing from Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, who was spreading his money to develop his influence in North Africa and across the Sahara. On Christmas Eve 1989, Taylor declared war with an army of some 2
00 disaffected rebels. The war, now called the first Liberian Civil War, lasted from 1989 to 1996, and killed more than 200,000 people. About a million people became internally displaced within Liberia, and some 700,000 people fled to Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.12 Taylor started his push in Nimba County, the county where Doe had massacred people after the 1985 election. Taylor then took control of key mining towns, which would generate profit to wage the final stages of war. At first it was thought the war would be swift, since Taylor was well armed and people wanted salvation from Doe. But Doe sent his army to wage a scorched-earth policy in Nimba, again killing Gio and Mano people whom he associated with the earlier coup. This made them much more inclined to join Taylor’s army, which he called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL).
With encouragement from the US State Department, Sirleaf and her colleagues in the ACDL collected and sent Taylor some $10,000 to help support his troops and to feed people in Nimba County. Later, Sirleaf decided to meet with Taylor. Sirleaf recalls in her biography that in May 1990, when Taylor was clearly a viable force, Sirleaf visited Taylor at his camp across the border from Côte d’Ivoire. She states that she walked, escorted by soldiers, to his camp, where she met Taylor, who was surrounded by heavily armed guards. Sirleaf wrote that she came away from the meeting with great reservations about Taylor’s commitment to the good of Liberia. However, the next month, on June 19, 1990, Sirleaf gave a statement to the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa as an executive committee member of the Liberian Action Party (she was still employed as a vice president of Equator Bank). She talked of Doe’s regime as a “political system which is maintained through state terrorism.” She went on to say that the “uprising” (she did not mention Taylor by name in this context) should not be seen as a repeat of the coup of 1980 but rather as “an opportunity for creative transformation of the Liberian political landscape.” In addition, Sirleaf said, “People, many of them children, have joined this struggle for freedom with little more than courage and hope for the future.” And she continued, “The mandate must pass to Charles Taylor who must in turn commence the process toward democracy.”13 She pressured the US government to get Doe to resign and to make Taylor lay out a timetable for “free and fair elections.” Records of Sirleaf’s relationship with Taylor are contradictory and incomplete, but they raised enough questions that as we will see, she was later questioned by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
By July 1990, it had become clear that Taylor was no better than Doe, and possibly worse. Taylor killed people he considered a threat and coerced children to become killers, organizing a “Small Boys Unit.” Sexual violence was ubiquitous among his armed forces. In the course of that summer, Liberia unraveled. One of the most infamous massacres of the time took place on July 31. Troops loyal to Doe killed hundreds of people who had sought refuge in St. Peter’s Church in Sinkor, Monrovia. Doe’s ministers fled his government. Chaos descended on Liberia. A soldier, Prince Johnson, broke with Taylor and founded his own rebel movement, the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL). Different factions fought to gain access to natural resources to fuel their wars, while conflict exacerbated existing ethnic tensions and created new ones. People fled their homes in rural areas in the face of advancing armies, and people fled Monrovia from the shelling and violence. In early August, in response to statements by Prince Johnson that he would begin rounding up Americans and other foreigners to force outside powers to intervene, the United States sent some two hundred marines to the capital to evacuate American citizens and dependents.14
A daily news chalkboard in Monrovia displays the latest headlines on the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands. 2008. Photo by Lieutenant Colonel Terry VandenDolder, US AFRICOM.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) stepped in to the breach, forming a mediating committee to try to draw up a peace plan. In addition, they created a new military force called the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), which in late August 1990 sent some four thousand troops to Liberia to keep the peace. In the meantime the ECOWAS peace process (without Taylor’s attendance) elected Amos Sawyer as the interim president. Although perhaps ECOMOG helped initially, over time the troops began to behave like the other militias, looting and pillaging their way across Monrovia. ECOMOG took sides, helping Prince Johnson once he broke from Taylor. They helped facilitate Johnson’s capture of President Doe. Sirleaf was not in Monrovia when Prince Johnson’s men tortured and murdered Samuel Doe. For the next year Amos Sawyer tried to govern while Johnson terrorized Monrovia and Taylor ruled the rest of the country. By the mid-1990s, Liberia was divided between the INPFL of Johnson, based in Monrovia, and Charles Taylor’s “Greater Liberia” based in Gbarnga, in Bong County to the northwest.
Other armed groups also began to enter the fray, all increasingly using child soldiers as a way of boosting recruitment. As so often in the past, the armies raped and pillaged their way across Liberia, killing thousands, forcibly recruiting young boys into their militias and raping girls and then often turning them into sex slaves or “bush wives.” The militias that emerged at this time included the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), based in Sierra Leone and Guinea and made up of ex-soldiers who had fled in 1990; the Lofa Defense Force; and the Liberian Peace Council. Various groups broke up, often along ethnic lines, since both Doe and Taylor had mobilized in part around ethnicity. ULIMO, for example, divided into ULIMO-K (Kromah faction) affiliated with Mandingo and ULIMO-J (Johnson faction), which was dominated by Krahn.
Various groups made attempts to bring about peace. The Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter and concerned with human rights and democracy, opened an office in Monrovia in 1992 in an attempt to move Liberia toward peace. In September 1993, the UN established a small observer mission. Slowly, with many fits and starts, Liberia moved toward some kind of stability. Finally, in September 1995, the National Transitional Government of Liberia (the second) took power. But again militias fought over territory, minerals, and control over people. American citizens were evacuated as chaos descended again on Monrovia. It was estimated that 50 percent of Monrovia’s population fled the capital looking for safety. Amos Sawyer, becoming an elder statesman for a constitutional vision, said, “The big three warlords . . . have decided they are going to crush whatever civilian opposition they can.”15
Sirleaf watched these developments from afar in Washington, and then from Africa, where she was appointed director of the Regional Bureau for Africa of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and thus assistant secretary-general of the United Nations. Thus as Taylor plundered the country’s mineral resources to finance his campaign, Sirleaf temporarily disentangled herself from Liberian politics. Instead, she became involved in the politics of Africa generally at the very time that civil conflicts were breaking out across Africa as the USSR and United States turned away with the end of the Cold War.
The UNDP appointment gave Sirleaf an opportunity to expand her network to include the large international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), which were increasingly dominating the world of development after the end of the Cold War. In her new role with UNDP, Sirleaf had the opportunity to work with people at the UN and to meet heads of state across the continent, including Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, whom she says she admired greatly, and Nelson Mandela, the newly elected president of a democratic South Africa and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Sirleaf chaired a number of big meetings, including one that tried to bring peace to Angola, which had been mired in civil war for many years.
Sirleaf was in charge of the Africa bureau when the Rwandan genocide occurred in the spring and summer of 1994. Eight hundred thousand people were killed in three months starting on April 4 as the Hutu Power government organized and facilitated the slaughter of people designated as Tutsis or Tutsi sympathizers.
Along with other UN officials such as Kofi Annan, then secretary-general, Sirleaf bore witness but did not intervene. Sirleaf involved herself in efforts to aid Rwanda in the aftermath. In 1995, she headed a conference that raised about $700 million to help reconstruct Rwanda. Later, in 1998, she was a member of a seven-member committee that the Organisation of African Unity charged to investigate the genocide. The resulting report, published only in 2000, “Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide,” took the international community to task for not getting involved and blamed France for standing by although they had thorough knowledge of everything.16
Monrovia. Map No. 3939, May 1996, United Nations.
In Liberia, major fighting had broken out again in April 1996, which caused various foreign organizations, including the Carter Center, to leave Liberia. As a result, however, more and more pressure was put on the country, and on ECOWAS, to actually hold elections, even though they could only be imperfect in the context of war. Peace talks led to the August 1996 Abuja I peace deal, which set the stage for special elections. In 1997, Liberia finally had elections, and Sirleaf decided to run against Taylor, as part of a coalition between her old Liberian Action Party and others. She did this against the wishes of her family and in some respects against the pull of her career, which had her well placed to move up the administrative ladder at the United Nations. The divisions within Liberia replicated themselves within the coalition, and on arriving in Monrovia, Sirleaf found that the coalition had already approved another candidate. She returned to the United States but received a call from the Unity Party, previously a member of the coalition, to stand as their independent candidate. Twelve candidates were in the race, but the election really came down to Sirleaf and Charles Taylor.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Page 4