Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  “We deployed a large marine amphibious force near Liberia to evacuate U.S. citizens, an operation accomplished with great efficiency,” Herman Cohen, an assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, told the journalist Bill Berkeley, speaking with deep regret, albeit years later. “A modest intervention . . . could have avoided the prolonged conflict.” Cohen confessed, however, that throughout 1990 he had never once managed to speak to the president about the Liberian crisis.

  On the ground in Liberia, American officials rejected all requests to provide protection for the skeleton staff that had managed to keep the city’s main hospital functioning. In Washington, Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesperson, announced matter-of-factly in a statement read to reporters that “the U.S. military has no role to play in this conflict.” “Somewhere along the way,” an official told the Washington Post reporter in Liberia, “we just decided we weren’t going to get involved. Period. My impression is that Washington and Congress are absolutely fed up with Liberia.”

  It did not take long for Liberians to understand that Madeleine Albright had not come bearing much of anything new. The new American dispensation that Liberians dreamed of was not in the offing, not even any aid for a transitional government desperate to make its ceasefire hold. What the American diplomat did deliver was the kind of bullish tough-love speech that was her trademark, and boiled down to its essence, it said that Liberians should help themselves first, and only then could American help materialize.

  The weather may have bowed to an Imperial America, but in West Africa, Albright had decided to hold her news conference within the confines of tiny Spriggs Payne airfield, where the usual scrum of pick-pockets, touts and sleazy immigration officials gave way to a pushy, sweaty crowd of journalists, nervous State Department security agents and Nigerian soldiers wielding big automatic rifles. America might have its high-flying rhetoric about being the indispensable nation, but on Liberian soil day-to-day survival depended upon Nigeria. Reinforcing this notion none too subtly, a Nigerian airlift into Monrovia of fresh soldiers and supplies continued throughout Albright’s brief press conference, forcing the usually overpowering Albright to shout to be heard over the heavy drone of the Nigerian C-130s.

  In her speech and in her brief give-and-take with the press, Albright had unself-consciously laid bare the fault lines that undermined American policy toward West Africa. The region supplied an important and growing share of American oil imports. U.S. trade with the region surpassed trade with all of the countries of the former Soviet Union combined. And millions of Americans traced their ancestry to the region. Yet the fervently held bottom line, one that resounded throughout her comments, was that America had no vital or strategic interests in the region.

  The United States’ top priority in Liberia was to avoid any direct involvement in the country’s crises, and with the threat of an explosion ever present, it could pull this off only through moral compromises so ugly that they were better kept out of view. Washington rightly abhorred the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, but desperately needed his country to keep the lid on war-wracked Liberia and Sierra Leone. In Nigeria most citizens lacked electricity or safe drinking water, yet the country was propping up ECOMOG in these two countries at the reported cost of $10 million per month. Moreover, Nigeria was paying for relative peace in a currency that the United States had been unwilling to countenance in Africa since the 1993 debacle in Somalia: the lives of its soldiers.

  Extending ECOMOG’s writ beyond Monrovia’s modest perimeter, however, required heavy trucks and communications gear, help with things like airlifts and spare parts, and in such areas America was indeed indispensable. The only consistent feature of Washington’s policy toward Nigeria, whether we were censoring the country for its grave human rights abuses or cooperating in places like Liberia, however, was the emphasis on doing things cheaply. The United States had shown no stomach for serious human rights sanctions for fear of hurting American oil supplies or interests. At the same time, exhibiting a kind of hypocritical prudishness for which Liberians would pay the bill in lives lost, Washington was unwilling to work openly with Nigeria in regional peacekeeping efforts, even when they were well intended.

  From all evidence, America’s behavior was driven by appearances, not principle, and what counted most to the Africa policymakers was to avoid being seen to be cooperating with the Abacha regime. So in Liberia, a country desperately in need of international support for peacekeeping, the State Department devised a stingy bureaucratic solution that would satisfy no one. The idea was to hire American private contractors to perform essential tasks for ECOMOG, rather than to allow army-to-army cooperation with Nigeria’s military regime. Soon, Americans were flooding the streets of Monrovia, driving huge trucks laden with food aid and other supplies, and building the odd concrete pillboxes that bored-looking ECOMOG soldiers would man at every major intersection.

  Liberia was a country flat on its back, with unemployment high beyond measure and treasury reserves too meager to warrant counting. Washington’s policy, though, would see to it that almost no jobs were created and that negligible funds were injected into the economy. For the cash-strapped Liberian Council of State, there was no alternative source of funds to the wildcat mining and marauding of the countryside that had been the main feature of the civil war in the first place. Those who knew the country best, from the senior Nigerian officials to the American ambassador, William B. Milam, understood implicitly that this situation could not hold. With occasional skirmishes in the bush over rich diamond fields, and lots of prickly jockeying for position among the warlords in the capital, it was only a question of time before Liberia’s unstable concoction of an interim government would explode.

  None of this dampened Albright’s blustery oratory, though, as she gamely shouted to be heard over the droning engines of Nigeria’s huge, camouflage-painted transport planes. “I can confirm to you that the president and his advisors are deeply committed to the future of this country and its people,” she said. “The United States should take a risk for peace when we have the means to make a difference. The civil war is your war. The peace of Abuja is your peace. Either you take the courageous steps needed to secure it now or Liberia will again experience tragedy. The future is yours alone to determine.”

  The next time I witnessed an American official holding forth in Liberia was barely three months later. Without warning, fierce fighting broke out in Monrovia over Easter weekend, when a large squad of men loyal to Charles Taylor had been sent to arrest his most voluble rival, Roosevelt Johnson, or better yet, to kill him should he resist. The undisputed kingpin of Liberia’s warlords clearly thought he was applying overwhelming force, but Johnson, a stubby, fast-talking man endowed with sleepy eyes and a preternatural cockiness, was blessed with another attribute that Taylor had not reckoned with: the kind of eel-like slipperiness in tight spots that feeds myths throughout this region about supernatural powers.

  The tensions between the two men had been mounting powerfully for weeks, and after the civil war’s seven years of attrition, Johnson was just about the only person left in Liberia who dared to match Taylor boast for boast and threat for threat. Although there was nothing in his background to recommend him for the title, Johnson had won a seat as minister for reconstruction in the country’s volatile unity government. With members of his Krahn ethnic group approaching him constantly to solicit jobs that he had no power to grant, Johnson spent his days fuming in his third-floor walk-up office over not having been named one of Taylor’s co-presidents on the Council of State. Still, Johnson compensated for his limited book knowledge with rare energy and cunning, and ever since his men attacked an ECOMOG position near Tubmanville earlier in the year, taking over the nearby diamond mines, his star had been rising among the idle and disgruntled boy soldiers for whom the war had long ceased being a matter of identifiable causes.

  Johnson’s men had been expecting an attack from Tay
lor’s militia that Easter weekend and managed to slip out of the neighborhood unscathed. Heading northwest toward downtown Monrovia, they remained undetected by steering clear of the main boulevard that passes in front of the executive mansion and the gutted Foreign Ministry, home to hundreds of squatters. Instead, Johnson led his men stealthily through the narrow, fetid byways until they had wended their way toward their only possible redoubt in the city, the Barclay Training Center, or BTC, the headquarters of the mostly Krahn rump national army left behind by Samuel Doe.

  The fog of war blew in on gale-force winds over the next few hours as rumors spread of an ethnic cleansing of the city aimed at eliminating the Krahn. In Monrovia, memories of the final days of Doe’s rule, when the president’s Krahn kinsmen were hunted down in the street and shot or dismembered, were still fresh. Indeed, Taylor’s periodic sacks of the capital had only fed fears of renewed horrors. His two previous sieges had each been called “battles for Monrovia,” which gave them more honor than they deserved. They had been horrific affairs, unencumbered by any rules of warfare, with civilians slaughtered, heavy weapons fired at close quarter, and rape and looting on a grand scale. No one could have known that battle number three was beginning in earnest, and that it would be the worst of all, but from the panic that coursed through the streets on this day, it was clear that no one was taking any chances.

  It is said that forest fires start because of an abundance of dry brush lying around beneath the canopy. When the conditions are right, all it takes is a spark. Monrovia, too, was a blaze waiting to happen, and the fuel that ignited with a boom that day and burned fiercely for days had been blowing in from the countryside like tumbleweed for weeks— boys as young as eight or ten years addicted to drugs and armed with machine guns and rocket launchers. Years of rampaging by child soldiers had picked the countryside bare of everything it had to offer, and they were itching to use the blood feud between Taylor and Johnson as cover to relieve Monrovia’s residents of whatever fancy, store-bought goods—or values, as they called stolen merchandise—they could snatch up.

  Ever since the Abuja truce had gone into effect, seating their warlord bosses together in uneasy coalition, the boy soldiers, gaunt and hungry-eyed, their skin scabbed and scarred by every manner of wound and parasite, had been steadily filtering into the city to claim some kind of material reward. On my last trip to Liberia, I had spent several days interviewing the raggedy, atrocity-hardened country boys who had begun gathering on street corners, occasionally brandishing their rifles in broad daylight. To a Westerner, Monrovia may not have looked like much of a city, but to these hungry veterans of countless bush skirmishes and village looting raids, it must have looked like a huge, open-air shopping mall.

  One of the boys I met, a gangly fifteen-year-old named Lawrence Moore, had forlorn eyes and gestures, full of flinches and false starts that bespoke both pain and guilt in quantities far beyond my grasp. Tentatively, he began telling me his story downtown on the median strip of Broad Street, where he had been loitering aimlessly on a hot Saturday morning. Lawrence’s dream, now that he had reached Monrovia, was to work in Charles Taylor’s personal entourage. Only those “lucky” few, he explained, could be sure of receiving any kind of payment at all, and it was usually in rice, not cash.

  Lawrence had grown up near Kakata, a forgotten little town on the edge of the Firestone estate, and when he was eleven or twelve—he wasn’t too sure—he ran off to join the infamous Small Boys Unit (SBU) of Taylor’s Patriotic Front, following in the wake of an older brother and lots of other boys his age. There had been a few weeks of rudimentary training, and then, suddenly, it wasn’t a fun child’s game anymore. Lawrence said he had received a bullet wound to his foot in his very first firefight. Taylor’s recruitment and indoctrination of young boy soldiers had rested on a few psychological keys, replacing the often missing father in the fighters’ lives with a tough, mature commander, someone stern but caring, and Taylor himself loomed atop this guerrilla pyramid scheme as the über–father figure. Indeed, the boys were encouraged to call him Pappy, and most of them eagerly complied.

  Lawrence’s attachment to the Patriotic Front was sealed when he was evacuated from the front and treated in a bush clinic, given better care than he had ever known before and allowed to recover fully before being sent back into action. For most boys, though, other balms were required, and they were kept loyal and inoculated against fear through the copious supplies of drugs. “They were always feeding us opium, ganja and crack,” Lawrence told me. “At first, I didn’t want to smoke, but there was no way that you could refuse. We were forced to smoke those things, and after a while there was no way you could stop.”

  Soon enough, devotion to Pappy and the craving and fury induced by drugs had become life’s two remaining motivations. “While we were fighting, there was plenty of food for all of us, there was opium and there was medicine if we got sick,” Lawrence said. “When we weren’t fighting, we had to fend for ourselves. So all we wanted to do was fight.”

  On two occasions, Lawrence said, his company was ordered to overrun his own village, and only much later did he bother to return to see whether his mother was alive and help move her to a safer place. “Our job was killing, and I’ve killed a lot of people . . . plenty,” he added, stretching the word out for emphasis, like an exclamation point, as Liberians often did. “I’ve had lots of friends die right in front of my eyes, but I never felt bad. I said to myself, this is what war is, so I never stopped.”

  The battles that raged back and forth across the Liberian countryside became hallucinogenic blurs, of kids sky-high on drugs convinced they were shielded by amulets against enemy bullets, and getting ripped to shreds all the while. Fronts were ill defined and ground was rarely held for long, unless, that is, diamonds or iron ore or another rich source of a fungible commodity was at hand. For the boy soldiers, it was not readily apparent, but for their commanders, and for the warlords whose groups had splintered into a score of factions, this was a war of spoils, and spoils alone.

  Lawrence eventually tired of the war, and had come to detest the killing. Nowadays, he longed for his mother and sister, and as he weaned himself from the drugs during the recent ceasefire, he had begun to feel a crushing sense of remorse about his past. He had no notion of political science and could not read well enough to get through a newspaper, not even one of the skimpy and ink-smudged four-page broadsheets that circulated in Monrovia. For him, Pappy was still Pappy, though, and he remained loyal to him; the law of the jungle remained intuitive and natural. As the strongest, most feared and ruthless warlord, Taylor was Liberia’s Little Caesar, and the only route to peace that Lawrence could conceive was that the country would render itself unto him. “If Pappy doesn’t become president,” Lawrence told me in his simple, heavily accented speech, “the situation in Liberia won’t never be any good.”

  I heard the news of the Easter fighting in Monrovia on the BBC, and caught the next flight from Abidjan to Freetown, an even more war-wearied West African city and the capital of Liberia’s neighbor, Sierra Leone. It was reported on the radio that the United States was planning yet another evacuation in Liberia, and by the time I got to the Mammy Yoko Hotel, a decrepit though once elegant resort complex built on a sweeping half-moon bay just outside Freetown, hordes of reporters had already gathered there.

  I quickly learned that the marines, who had been sent to extract people from Liberia, were reluctantly planning to ferry into the country only a select few of us. Gathered with the other reporters who were to fly into Liberia with the marines, we chartered a rickety helicopter owned by Ukrainian mercenaries to fly us to Lungi, the mildewed, dilapidated airport located across the bay, on the far outskirts of Freetown, where the U.S. evacuation effort was already gearing up.

  The Ukrainians had been hired by the Sierra Leone government to do battle against that country’s own Taylor-style insurgency. With its thousands of loose rivets, their helicopter gunship sizzled frighteningly thro
ughout our short ride across the bay, and the marines at Lungi watched with bemusement as the Soviet-vintage clunker landed. Later, as we prepared for takeoff in an American Huey, a marine expressed surprise that we would have risked flying in the Ukrainians’ metal. “When you get in one of our birds, at least you know that the only thing that can bring you down by surprise is a direct hit,” he said.

  We were airborne again in a matter of minutes, and with our ears stoppered with plugs against the noise, the best we could do for communication was the hand signals we made in appreciation of the American bird’s maneuvers as it swooped and wheeled, hugging the lush coast. We sped east by southeast for nearly two hours, zipping past abandoned lumber mills and mines, and the occasional forlorn village, usually little more than a modest clearing of red earth amid a sea of leafy green. The entire time, gunners peered out the bay doors, ready to reply with their impressively large mounted machine gun, in case anyone fired on us from below.

  We landed in a huge open field, across the Mesurado River, a good ways from downtown Monrovia, which we were informed was entirely engulfed in combat and thievery. We were told to duck as we were hustled off the helicopter and quickly herded into a corner behind a high concrete wall.

  Directing things on the ground was Ambassador Milam, a diplomat I had met many times before who had always impressed me with his hail-fellow decency. As he ministered busily to groups of people who had gathered here to await their evacuation, though, the relaxed smile that usually played on his open face was replaced with a look of deadly seriousness. The small crowd that had assembled on the grassy field that blistering afternoon contained a sampling of just about all the foreign residents who made up Liberia’s heterogeneous international community.