Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

by Scully, Pamela;

  With the slogan “Vote for Change” Sirleaf campaigned throughout the country, including down roads that were so muddy that cars could not travel. This way she came to be known in areas far from Monrovia and was reminded of the rural life with which she had become somewhat familiar in her youth. The Carter Center returned to Liberia to monitor the elections and set up the Liberia Election Project, opening its Monrovia office in April 1997. The center coordinated a forty-member international delegation of election observers, which affirmed that the elections were fair, if imperfect. The election did not go in Sirleaf’s favor. The Carter Center’s final report noted that although “the elections had some serious problems, including overwhelming advantage enjoyed by Charles Taylor in terms of resources, access to media, and organization, they still marked a critical step forward in consolidating peace.” Sirleaf felt rather differently, because she saw that Taylor used various forms of intimidation, including having his helicopter flown low above the crowds that came to Unity Party rallies. Taylor’s election slogan also intimidated voters with its reminder of the kind of violence he visited on people: “You killed my ma, you killed my pa: I will vote for you.” Another voter reportedly said, “Charles Taylor spoiled this country, so he’s the best man to fix it.”17

  With the somewhat muted endorsement of the election monitoring team, Charles Taylor was elected president of Liberia in 1997 with 75 percent of the vote. The preliminary statement from the Carter Center said, “In the face of tremendous challenges, the Liberian people have conducted a peaceful and orderly election, and turned out in high numbers to vote, and the collection and reporting of returns should lead to an accurate count.” President Carter said that although the election was not exactly fair, since Taylor had so much more money and influence than his opponents, the election was not fraudulent. The preliminary statement from the center ended saying, “We hope the spirit of Election Day will guide Liberians in the days ahead.” But this was not to be, at least not from Charles Taylor’s perspective.

  Taylor’s rule, rather than ending the violence as people had hoped, only intensified the plunder of the country with the support of outside funders. According to Sirleaf, after the election, President Carter suggested it would be good if she were prepared to serve in Taylor’s government. However, she rejected this proposal and returned to New York. She also says that Taylor reached out to her through one of his colleagues to offer her the position of head of the social security agency. She declined.18 Taylor continued to try to silence opponents through assassinations and by accusing them of treason, a charge he also directed at Sirleaf in 1997. Nonetheless, Taylor received ongoing support from Gaddafi and from Pat Robertson, the American televangelist, who diverted planes meant for his humanitarian organization, Operation Blessing, to diamond mines in Liberia. In addition, in 1999 Taylor gave a government concession to Robertson’s gold mining company, Freedom Gold Ltd., allegedly in return for generating support from the United States for Taylor’s government.19

  Sirleaf stayed away from Liberia but close enough to be keep a watch on developments. She moved to Côte d’Ivoire, then a jewel of economic stability. She set up a financial office using her contacts with Equator Bank from her first job in Washington. She established a venture capital firm for African investors called Kormah Development and Investment Corporation (Kodic). In the early months of Taylor’s presidency, Sirleaf met with Taylor during visits back home. Answering the criticism that emerged during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, in her biography Sirleaf defends her meetings with Taylor, saying that she tried to offer him her experience, but that he was not open to her advice.20

  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, peace was very far away. In 1999, two years after Charles Taylor’s election as president of Liberia, civil war broke out again in Liberia, continuing to 2003, when warlords were forced to sign a peace agreement in Accra. Although there had been a brief lull in Liberia’s conflict around the time of the elections, in April 1999, war began again. With the support of neighboring Guinea, soldiers calling themselves at that time the Organization of Displaced Liberians, referencing the terrible plight of refugees, entered Liberia in the northeastern county of Lofa. By June 1999, various groups united under the movement Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). LURD soon proved to be the opposite of its name, and fighting renewed with Taylor’s NPFL. Things were further complicated by the arrival of Revolutionary United Front fighters from Sierra Leone in support of Taylor, who also was deeply implicated in that civil war.21

  Taylor accused Sirleaf of treason for supporting LURD because her name had been found on the body of a fighter. She rejected this angrily: “This is stupidity of the highest order. I have to conclude that the purpose of the accusation is a desperate attempt by Mr. Taylor to react to the report of his involvement in the Sierra Leone debacle and the fact that I have put out a press release on the 2nd of August calling for him to take action to clear his name and indicting him for his failure to respond to the needs of the Liberian people during the past three years.”22 Taylor’s accusation that she had committed treason indicated that he perceived her as a continued threat, beyond her running against him in the election of 1997. In 2001 when he pardoned her and other leaders, she was interviewed to learn her response. She said, “Let me just say that people should not think that these actions by Mr. Taylor are coming because he’s being magnanimous or he’s being conciliatory. There is serious pressure on Mr. Taylor to do all the things he is doing now and more. The second point is that yesterday [August 2, 2001] was the fourth anniversary of Taylor’s coming to power. He is in a big trouble and he put our country in big trouble—and he knows it. He knows that if he does not do something it is going to be worse for him.”23

  The international community increasingly was realizing the horror of the Taylor regime. By 2001 Taylor had basically demobilized the army and instead relied on armed units that owed their allegiance to him. One of the most important was the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU) made up of Liberians but also people from Burkina Faso and Gambia. Liberia slid further into violence. LURD artillery pummeled Monrovia, and roving bands of militia terrorized communities. The population of Monrovia swelled as people fled from the interior into the city. People who could do so left Liberia. In the 1980s, Liberia had 400 doctors, but by 2002, only about 30 remained.24

  In Abidjan, Sirleaf continued practicing some of her key strengths: the desire and ability to network with people in positions of power to influence events in Liberia and to contribute to her standing. She met with leaders in the region to drum up support for peace and to isolate Taylor. In the early 2000s, Sirleaf became head of George Soros’s Open Society Initiative for West Africa, OSIWA, which is committed to advancing democracy and the rule of law in the region. She visited with heads of state in the region to pressure them to give Taylor the cold shoulder. Sirleaf thus continued to be an important voice in the move to oust Taylor. A crisis group report from 2002, however, showed that lingering questions remained about Sirleaf’s stature. It said that she was “one of the most prominent opposition figures” the West had supported in the election, but that she “finished second with a disappointingly low vote.” The report concluded that although Sirleaf enjoyed name recognition in Monrovia, rural chiefs did not support her, and she was “widely criticized among the opposition as an early Taylor supporter, a charge she denies.”25 As I discuss in the next chapter, her early work with Taylor continued to shadow her presidency.

  In the course of 2001, Taylor’s intransigence finally became clear to the international community. He refused to attend a reconciliation conference at the end of 2001. Fighting intensified. In 2002, fighting drove tens of thousands of Liberians out of the country and into other areas of Liberia, where they became internally displaced people, and Taylor declared a state of emergency in the country. In March of the following year, rebel groups came within six miles or so of Monrovia and launched rockets into the capital. Two groups, the ne
w Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) and LURD, now controlled much of the country. The ever-growing instability in Liberia, and anarchy in Monrovia, moved the United States also finally to distance itself from Taylor’s presidency. Although it would take many months for that to become a reality, Taylor’s time was coming to an end, and Sirleaf’s time in the political spotlight was about to begin.

  In June of 2003, President George W. Bush publicly stated that Taylor had to step down for the sake of peace. And to back up that statement, the United States sent over two thousand US Marines to wait off the Liberian coast. Taylor might have remained, but LURD was advancing on the capital. Nigeria offered Taylor asylum. Finally, both Taylor and the world began to move. On June 17 a ceasefire agreement was reached, and rebel leaders met in Ghana to begin peace talks, although hard fighting continued into July with rebels now in the capital and hundreds of people being killed. Negotiations to end the fighting started with ECOWAS agreeing to provide peacekeepers. On August 1, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1497 (2003), which authorized the establishment of a multinational force in Liberia and made provision for a “stabilization” force for Liberia to ensure peace. On August 11, 2003, Taylor resigned and left Liberia, handing over the government to a deputy, Moses Blah. Earlier that year, while still president, Taylor was indicted by the Sierra Leone special court. In 2012 he was found guilty in The Hague on eleven counts falling under war crimes, crimes against humanity, and recruiting child soldiers, a violation of international law. He was sentenced to fifty years in prison, an effective life sentence, which was upheld on appeal in September 2013. According to the New York Times, this made him the first head of state to be “convicted by an international court” since the Nuremberg trials after World War I.26

  Meanwhile, in 2003, peace talks continued between various rebel factions and the government in Ghana. Sirleaf represented the Unity Party at the peace talks. The Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed on August 18, 2003. The agreement inaugurated a transitional government led by Gyude Bryant, a leader recognized as neutral, who governed Liberia until the general election was held in 2005. Sirleaf had been considered a front-runner for that post, but people loyal to Taylor saw her as too compromised, given her history of opposing him in the 1997 election, so Bryant was chosen for that role.27 However, Sirleaf’s time would come.

  4

  Women and Postconflict Liberia

  The movement to peace was helped by the work of many Liberians working inside and outside Liberia. Liberian women’s organizations were an instrumental part of the peace movement and later of the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the presidency in 2005. As noted, the early 2000s was also a time in which international human rights organizations and international multilateral organizations such as the UN put women’s rights and women’s roles in peacemaking on the agenda. Recognizing the failure of the international system to address the widespread rape of women in Bosnia Herzegovina and the Rwandan genocide, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, the international community began to reassess its commitment to gender equality and women. Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, passed in 2000, was the first signal of this new awareness. It built on the work done by women in the 1990s in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from the Global South, and particularly Africa, to put women’s rights on the agenda of international human rights.

  Sirleaf was a key participant and shaper in this movement in the 2000s. In 2002 she coauthored with Elizabeth Rehn the document titled “Women, War, and Peace: The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace,” which established much of the framework for future discussions and policy about including women in peacebuilding. The authors traveled in 2001 and 2002 to fourteen countries around the world affected by conflict. They said, “In retrospect, we realize how little prepared we were for the enormity of it all: the staggering numbers of women in war who survived the brutality of rape, sexual exploitation, mutilation, torture and displacement. The unconscionable acts of depravity. And the wholesale exclusion of women from peace processes.”1 Many of the recommendations of the report have been implemented, if not always with the financial investment that would make them really powerful. In the years since, we have seen the creation of UN Women, the focus on gender equity in peacebuilding, and the development of indicators to assess the progress of gender mainstreaming.

  In Liberia, as the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell and Leymah Gbowee’s autobiography Mighty Be Our Powers document, women were deeply involved in the moves toward peace. As was her wont, Sirleaf worked within the system, sitting with the men at the table for peace negotiations. Other women helped in different and important ways to move Liberia toward peace. Key organizations included Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) and Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace (WLMAP), which met with Taylor and secured his promise to go to the peace talks. Gbowee, a leading voice in Liberia’s WIPNET group and the leader of WLMAP, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Sirleaf and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, in 2011 as a result of her work with that group.

  WIPNET and others organized protests in Monrovia to show the rebels and the government that citizens were tired of war and desperate for peace. Supporters wore white to show their desire for peace. Women of different faiths and ethnicity united in the common cause for peace. With peace signed, the women of WIPNET became involved in demobilization. But as Gbowee writes: “A war of fourteen years doesn’t just go away. . . . We had to confront the magnitude of what had happened to Liberia. Two hundred and fifty thousand people were dead, a quarter of them children. One in three were displaced. . . . One million people, mostly women and children, were at risk of malnutrition. . . . More than 75 percent of the country’s physical infrastructure, our roads, hospitals and schools, had been destroyed.”2 Liberia faced a challenge indeed.

  In August 2003, Sirleaf returned to Liberia after Charles Taylor was forced to leave the country. She came to participate in rebuilding the country. In the wake of her experience documenting the horrors experienced by women in war and their almost utter exclusion from postwar reconstruction, she was determined to put women’s rights on the Liberian agenda. Sirleaf returned with so much expertise and so many international connections that she seemed almost predestined to be a leader of a post-Taylor Liberia. Marquette University gave Sirleaf an honorary degree in 2006, and the award notice succinctly summarized her deep connections to international finance as well as organizations working in development and for peace across Africa and beyond:

  Prior to her service as President, she served as Minister of Finance, President of the Liberia Bank for Economic Development and Investment, Vice President of Citicorp, Vice President of the HSBC Equator Bank, Senior Loan Officer of the World Bank, and founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kormah Development Corporation. She is also the founder of Measuagoon, a nonprofit organization that supports community development and education for girls. . . .

  Her Excellency was one of seven internationally eminent persons designated by the Organisation of African Unity to investigate the Rwanda genocide in 1999, one of five Commission Chairs for the Inter-Congolese Dialogue in 2002, one of the two international experts selected by the United Nations Development Fund for Women to investigate and report on the effect of conflict on women and women’s roles in peace building in 2002, and Chairperson of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa from 2000 to 2003. She is a member of the Soros Foundation Network and is also a Visiting Professor of Governance at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration.3

  Sirleaf’s expertise in management, her connections to leading international organizations, and her history as an outspoken, if complicated, opponent of Taylor, made her an excellent candidate to work for the transition to peace. Acting president Bryant appointed her to head the Commission on Good Governance, a commission established by the Accra Peace Accord. The role of the commission was to
create a climate of stability and transparency in government and “enable an environment which will attract private sector direct investment.” The peace accord required that women be on the seven-member commission. This insistence that women be actual partners in peacemaking was in accordance with the mandate of Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000. Liberia’s transition to peace was thus one of the first peace processes to actively bring women into building the postconflict society.

  Sirleaf’s work with the commission and her goal of bringing professionalism to a decimated civil service, gave a hint of the style of her later presidency. Sirleaf is above all a bureaucrat who concentrates on management and structure. Grassroots organizing was the province of others, such as the women of the Women’s NGO Secretariat of Liberia (WONGOSOL)—the grouping of NGOs focused on women’s rights and experiences. Many of these women were also instrumental in the peace process and continued to work for women’s rights after the ending of the war. Sirleaf recognized the organizational excellence of the wider women’s movement and the way that the movement had been able to reach new constituencies. Sirleaf held hearings around the country to alert people to the need for transparency in government. One of her accomplishments from that era, as she mentions in her autobiography, was to have the General Auditing Commission report to the legislature rather than to the president.4