American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  The incident forced Charles Taylor to bring his son to Liberia despite the dangers. There was no functioning government in place, only an interim group of leaders cobbled together by the regional powers. By June 1994, peace talks among the three major rebels groups had broken down, devolving into skirmishes around the countryside as the factions regrouped and rearmed.14 The humanitarian situation grew bleaker as more than one million residents crowded into Monrovia, which had been a city of 300,000 just four years earlier. The U.S. government had given more than $326 million in relief, attempting to stave off disaster, while West African nations, including Nigeria, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, poured in military support, from ground troops to fighter-bombers, to prevent the conflict from breaching the borders and destabilizing surrounding countries.15

  The armed intervention did little to stem Taylor’s ambitions. The rebel leader often found himself outgunned and politically isolated, but he defended the territory he had gained in Liberia’s hinterland by striking alliances and sponsoring rebel groups in his neighbors’ countries.16 Taylor was developing a strategy that acknowledged the limitations of his military strength. The ill-disciplined and perpetual attenuation of his forces meant he could not muster a reliable border defense force. Instead he found that if he could bedevil his regional rivals with shadowy guerrilla attacks and campaigns of terror, they would be less capable of putting pressure on him.

  Chucky was receiving an on-the-ground education in West African politics simply by watching his father. He appeared at events and conferences alongside Taylor, looking sheepish and uncomfortable in a suit and tie. He opened a window into this world to Lynn, in a letter drafted on four sheets ripped from a legal pad.17 He had disappeared from Orlando without telling anyone, including her. It had been a silent, jarring conclusion to her first real romance. Her parents saw Chucky’s departure as a positive development, but Lynn couldn’t help but feel a small measure of heartbreak. As quickly as he had appeared, he was gone, and she had no way to reach him.

  “Surprise,” Chucky’s letter began, “it’s me the one you forgot about Chucky.” He offered no apology for disappearing, only a convoluted explanation:

  if somebody could stand all the bullshit i dished out, then i think i will try my hardest to stay with that person.

  Lynn, you have to realize it will be a long time before we see each other, he wrote.

  I’m in a place called Gbarnga, Bong County Liberia on the West African side of the continent. It’s hard to explain the situation over here.

  Chucky embellished on his experience in Accra, placing himself at the center of the political situation:

  I was in Ghana, not no more yea muthafuckers for no reason arrested me a locked my ass up for 5 days not knowing it was a plot to kill me for political reasons. When they set me free I bounced by the time I got to my father it was all over the world, B.B.C.… V.O.A.… I guess they thought I wanted to over through [sic] the country.

  The letter can be read as the swagger typical of a teenage boy trying to impress a girl. But it also reflects Chucky’s new view of himself as a central figure in the events around him. The letter went on to describe the civil war, the convoluted set of factions, and where he fit within all of it: “N.P.F.L. is our organization they brought the revolution 1989 December 25th … it’s a complex issue that needs a lot of research.… Look up L.I.B.E.R.I.A., and N.P.F.L leader Charles Ghankay Taylor my father,” Chucky continued. “It will shed light on what the fuck I’m going through.”

  “Everybody is scared of my father,” Chucky wrote. “They say he wants to de-stabilize the whole of West Africa.”

  West Africa was already destabilized. The region had evolved from early-twentieth-century colonialism to authoritarianism in the 1960s and 1970s and then to the revolutions of the 1980s. The groundwork had been laid for the 1990s, as Ghanaian political scientist Eboe Hutchful put it, to become “a decade of subaltern revolt.”18 It was the politically dispossessed—in particular, the youth—in nations like Liberia and Sierra Leone who gave force to revolutionary politics that found little traction in other African nations like Ghana.

  The violence was also unique to the era. Though regional conflicts had raged throughout the decade, there was a glaring paradox to the fighting in West Africa: the near complete absence of international war coupled with the fundamental lack of domestic peace.19 Arie M. Kacowicz, an international relations scholar, referred to this condition as “negative peace.” Cross-border conflict did occur, but it was not easily distinguished from indigenous conflicts. What dominated was a brand of civil war and “subaltern revolt” that did not take hold throughout the region and had limited geopolitical relevance. As horrifying as the fighting driven by leaders like Charles Taylor and Sierra Leone’s Foday Sankoh was, it was spurred only by domestic ambitions.

  While the war in Liberia had placed his father on the political map of West Africa, Chucky began to receive attention of his own. Soon after his arrest in Accra, the U.S. embassy began reporting on him, but with few details. “Taylor has a son, ‘Chucky, Junior,’ who is 19–20 years old we believe by an American citizen who is now resident in Florida,” a June 1995 cable from the U.S. embassy in Monrovia to Ouagadougou explained.20 This was the first mention of Chucky by the State Department, a single reference tucked at the end of a three-page cable entitled “Taylor’s Domestic Affairs,” which detailed the status and background of the NPFL leader’s wives, children, and grandchildren.

  On Chucky, the U.S. embassy had little to report other than the Accra incident, elaborating slightly on the political backdrop: “The story here is that he was subsequently released after the intervention of Rawling’s associate.… Chuckie [sic] Junior then apparently saw the attraction of a month’s sojourn in Gbarnga.”

  That “sojourn” lasted much longer than the month the embassy reported. Once Chucky arrived in West Africa, his father struggled to not only control his son’s behavior but also to mitigate the embarrassment he could cause. In the fraught political environment, Chucky’s behavior threatened to complicate Charles’s already tenuous relationships between leaders—in Ghana, his activities had drawn the attention not only of local authorities but also of the country’s leadership. Taylor had dealt with disobedient soldiers, traitorous commanders, and double-crossing foreign governments, but the insouciance of his teenage son was a new challenge for him.

  Despite the chaos in Liberia, Chucky’s father was intent on his completing high school. Taylor placed his son in Cuttington University, an Episcopal college founded in 1889 that was not far from the NPFL headquarters.21 The school had educated members of the political class for more than a century, but the campus became a battlefield that year. A joint attack in September 1994 conducted by ECOMOG, the peacekeeping force, and two rival factions flushed Taylor and his forces from his stronghold, temporarily pushing the NPFL into disarray; rebels took over the school’s campus.22 Charles Taylor’s militias eventually retook Gbarnga, and while fighting persisted throughout Liberia, Taylor maintained reliable control over the center of the country.

  But that control was fiercely contested, and it wasn’t long before Chucky was again caught in the crossfire. On November 6, 1995, forces from Alhaji Kromah’s largely Mandingo and Krahn militia attacked Gbarnga while Chucky was staying with his father. The assault came in three waves, the last hitting Taylor’s stronghold at two a.m.23 If the compound was overrun and Chucky was captured, he could expect no mercy from his father’s enemies. As the fighting raged, Chucky snapped a photograph of one of his guards crouching in olive fatigues and a ballistic vest, clutching an AK-47, a cigarette dangling from his lips, wearing a sly smile.

  The attack illustrated the paradox of Bernice’s choice. She had traded the dangers of life on the streets of Orlando—and potentially in prison—for those of Liberia’s civil war. Chucky, for his part, had not completely abandoned his Americanness. When he wasn’t appearing publicly with his father, he dressed like a gangsta, twisting his hair
into cornrows, carrying a red bandanna, and wearing sparkling Nikes. Before long he found access to guns, sporting body armor and a pistol. He nonetheless made some effort to fit in by learning to affect Liberian English, the distinct English creole spoken in the country, often in addition to one or more tribal languages. Like Trinidadian English, which Chucky grew up hearing, the Liberian vernacular shared much vocabulary with American English, but the grammar, syntax, and pronunciation were fundamentally different: syllables dropped off of the end of words; the phrase a little bit became small-small, and bribe or payment became white heart or cold water. There were also highly formal remnants of late-nineteenth-century American English: things were not weird or strange, they were peculiar; people were not beaten or assaulted—they were flogged or abused. Mastering the language was important, not just to blend in but also to be intelligible to Liberians who had little exposure to the dialect of American English that Chucky spoke.

  But Chucky also began to adopt another, more select vernacular: his father’s distinct brand of warlordese. Charles Taylor had a gift for oration that few warlords in Liberia shared. His chief adversaries, Alhaji Kromah and George Boley, rivaled his intellect and education but not his charm or self-awareness. Kromah was a former journalist and professor with a power base in the predominantly Muslim Mandingo community; Boley, a member of the Krahn tribe, like Taylor had been educated in the United States and returned to Liberia as a bureaucrat. Each man had emerged as the leader of a faction that competed against Taylor for power: Kromah with United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy, and Boley with the Liberia Peace Council. Taylor could harangue these enemies over radio broadcasts throughout his territory, then shift to the coded language of peace and stability at negotiations with emissaries and diplomats.24 He considered himself a revolutionary, but publicly he held himself accountable to the law—reminding interlocutors when necessary that his struggle was for elections and the sanctity of the Liberian constitution. He promised that if the people voted against him in an election, “we will surrender to their will.”25 It was an unbelievable statement from a man who had overtaken much of the nation by force. Taylor had grown enormously wealthy and powerful in the absence of elections. Like the man he had launched his revolution to depose, he wanted only an election he would win.

  Eight years into the war, in 1997, Taylor finally achieved the nominal purpose of his revolution: to conduct a democratic election. The goal had seemed laudable in 1985, when General Quiwonkpa stormed over the border a month after Samuel Doe rigged the polls and stole the presidency, or even four years later, when Charles Taylor appeared in the bush as the new standard-bearer of Quiwonkpa’s revolution. But the path to the polls had been costly for Liberians. Conservative estimates placed the loss of life at 80,000, while the United Nations offered a broader estimate of 150,000 to 250,000 dead.26 Few survived without suffering. Of Liberia’s 2.3 million people, nearly one-third had fled the country for refuge, while 1.8 million had been displaced. The conflict had metastasized to nearly a half-dozen factions and subfactions fighting for dominance, while Liberia’s interim governments failed to secure anything approaching a monopoly on the use of force within its borders. Corruption, looting, and war profiteering among the Nigerian-backed peacekeeping forces only served to aggravate the conflict. Between 1990 and 1995, the combatants entered into ten separate peace agreements. The latest peace accord, the Abuja Agreement signed in August 1995, laid out a timetable for a cease-fire and demobilization program that would lead into elections. During that interim period, a five-member Council of State, a temporary ruling body meant to act as an executive branch representing all parties to the conflict, would govern the nation. The council had little mandate beyond holding the country together through the cease-fire and disarmament process leading into elections. Liberians danced in the streets to celebrate the inauguration of the council as a harbinger of the official end of the civil war, but the animus among warlords remained.

  By October 1996, Chucky had moved with his father to the capital in preparation for the election. Charles Taylor had finally reached the Executive Mansion, but not on the terms he would have liked. Total control of the country still eluded him. He and five others—including politicians and his warlord rivals—had been chosen as members of the Council of State. The council was, effectively, a political Band-Aid, which the African powers prayed would not come off prior to the election scheduled for the summer of 1997. Taylor was assigned an office on the building’s sixth floor.27

  Despite the cease-fire instituted at Abuja, the capital remained tense in October. Months earlier the city had erupted in a spasm of violence between Taylor’s forces and rival factions, referred to as the “April 6” war. The battle had left its mark throughout the capital and prompted the evacuation of the U.S. embassy. While Charles Taylor referred to the event as only a “fracas,” it had in fact been a humanitarian disaster that stunned the international community.28 More than half of the city’s 850,000 residents fled during the fighting, 3,000 people were killed over the course of one month, and thousands evacuated the country.

  After the fighting wound down, the African peacekeeping force fanned out into the countryside to begin the delicate process of disarming the factions. It had little success, as the factions opted to hide their weapons rather than turn them over.29 Liberia’s experiment in power sharing had failed to stop the violence completely, but two of the most powerful faction leaders, Taylor and Alhaji Kromah, remained willing to stake their political futures on elections and hoped that they could persuade their militias to stand down.

  Once Chucky moved to the capital with his father, he could no longer attend school at Cuttington. Taylor enrolled him at the College of West Africa, Monrovia’s top private high school.30 CWA, as students called it, was not a college but the nation’s oldest and most prestigious high school. It had been founded in 1839, eight years before Liberia declared its nationhood. The building stood on Ashmun Street, at the edge of a bluff overlooking Providence Island, where Liberia’s American settlers first encamped, and the green estuaries threaded into the Mesurado River. The school had educated presidents, chief justices, and leaders of industry. It was a fitting choice for the son of the political leader widely viewed as the most powerful man in Liberia. Whether it could educate a child with a past as troubled as Chucky’s was a separate question. At first glance Chucky was indistinguishable from many of the boy students arriving at school in pressed white short-sleeve oxfords and navy pants. Many who met him saw a natural intellect and curiosity. His father hoped he would focus and finally complete his education in Monrovia.

  Up until that point, Chucky had never lived in Monrovia. The capital was significantly smaller than Orlando, or Accra for that matter, but compared to Gbarnga, it was a metropolis. At that time the city was a battle zone gone quiet. “In town,” as Liberians refer to the city’s central business district, bullet holes and blast burns decorated government buildings, many of which remained windowless and without power. Though the streets were paved, mounds of trash piled up along the gutters, rotting in the sun. Throughout the capital, residents were required to pass through barbed-wire and sandbagged checkpoints manned by peacekeeping soldiers who peered through makeshift fortifications, machine guns trained on the horizon. The family moved into a large home near the U.S. embassy in the Mamba Point neighborhood.31 It was the city’s most cloistered community, set out on a peninsula and divided from downtown by Monrovia’s highest hilltop.

  Even as he arrived in the nation’s capital with his father, Chucky’s thoughts drifted back home to Orlando. He would disappear into his father’s office and use his satellite phone to dial the United States, often calling Lynn.32 Though they hadn’t seen each other for nearly two years, she still considered it a long-distance relationship. Her life had changed significantly since Chucky fled Orlando: her relationship with her parents had become strained, and she had left home to finish high school, attending the public Clarkstown South H
igh School in West Nyack, New York. Their opinion of Chucky had not changed—Lynn later recalled that her mother would make a “Korean sound of disgust” at the mention of his name—and they didn’t support her continued interest in a boy whom it seemed unlikely she’d ever see again.

  The secret phone calls continued for months. As complex as the circumstances surrounding their relationship were, for Lynn it was simple: they were high school sweethearts. Like any other teens, the hours they spent on the phone together disappeared. “I don’t know what we would talk about,” she said.

  There was one topic they would always return to: when they could finally see each other again. Returning to the States was not an option for Chucky. The charges in Orlando continued to hang over his head. Lynn was focused on finishing high school—a trip to Africa seemed beyond the realm of possibility. And Monrovia, as much of an improvement as it was on Gbarnga, was far from the ideal backdrop for daydreams of their reunion.

  Chucky faced his own challenge of fitting into a decidedly foreign environment. When he first arrived at CWA, the other students couldn’t help but notice him. It wasn’t simply his uncanny resemblance to his father or the fact that at nearly twenty, he was only entering the eleventh grade: unlike any of the other students, he arrived on campus with an armed security detail in tow.33