American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Since his son had been in Liberia, Taylor had posted one of his personal security guards to him. In many cases, these minders weren’t fighters but rather old-timers whom Chucky was less likely to order around, such as a jaundiced man in his forties named Ceasley Roberts or simply CR.34 He was a civilian, but he was always armed with a pistol. The guard and his weapon were not welcome at CWA, though the school administration could do little to forbid it. Taylor’s concerns for his son’s safety were inarguable, yet even in Monrovia, the presence of an armed figure in the classroom was disruptive.

  One day at school a classmate pointed this out. “Why do you have to bring your security on campus?” the student asked.

  This may have been an innocent question, but Chucky didn’t interpret it that way. He was the new kid at a new school—this might be a challenge to test him. Long before arriving in Liberia, he had had experience in tough neighborhoods where backing down from confrontations wasn’t an option. But politics also shaped his actions: his father was among the most feared men in the nation, and this high school student was taking a warlord’s son to task in public. Chucky’s response would reflect on his father, whether he shrank from the challenge or confronted it.

  “None of your business,” he shot back, slapping the student across the face.

  The administration immediately suspended Chucky. Typically students faced expulsion for fighting, but the school hesitated to go that far with Chucky. There was an inherent risk in confronting Taylor about the behavior of his child. Instead, the administration sent him a form letter detailing the incident, explaining that his son would be allowed to return to school after his suspension. Chucky’s father did not take issue with the suspension. In fact, the principal recalled, “he welcomed it.” The administrators were relieved that they hadn’t provoked Taylor. As for Chucky, the principal said, “he never came back.”

  Indeed, Chucky would never go to school again. He was restless to return to Orlando, though the possibility of doing so remained remote. He eventually called Lynn with an offer: he would fly her to visit him in Liberia.35 She was only seventeen and had never traveled farther than the Caribbean, but there was nothing stopping her. Monrovia was a world unknown to her, while Chucky was only beginning to find his place there.

  On the morning of Halloween 1996, Charles Taylor stepped out of his residence in Mamba Point to his waiting motorcade.36 The Council of State was set to meet later that morning, and he intended to arrive at his office in time to put in a few hours of work. As he prepared to depart, he noticed within the assembled convoy an armored Peugeot that he’d been given as a gift. The vehicle was designed for the charge to ride in the front, while the bodyguards sat in the rear, positioned to return fire in the event of an attack.

  “Listen,” he told his driver, “I want to ride the Peugeot today because we haven’t been using it.”

  Taylor’s aide-de-camp, Gen. Jackson Mani, a Gambian dressed in full military uniform, climbed into the rear, and the convoy set off toward the Executive Mansion, a secured area controlled by African peacekeepers. Any outside security forces entering the compound were required to surrender their weapons. After Doe’s capture and murder, which had taken place directly under the nose of the Nigerian peacekeepers, the members of the council had reason to be wary of this protocol but complied nonetheless.

  That morning Taylor’s convoy was tracked from the moment it pulled onto the mansion’s grounds. Assassins perched on the sixth floor watched his Peugeot drive up to the building’s entrance as they prepared their assault. Taylor and several members of his entourage, including General Mani, entered the building and rode the elevator to Taylor’s office.

  The moment the elevator’s doors opened, the group was met with an explosion. Gunfire rattled through the hallways as Mani shoved Taylor into a nearby doorway. Unarmed, the rest of the entourage fled in panic. Several were cut down by the gunfire. Others leaped the six stories to the pavement below, the impact snapping their legs. Taylor found himself in a bathroom, hiding inside a bathtub. He watched through the doorway as the gunmen descended on the general and opened fire, killing him.

  By the time Taylor’s security forces fought their way into the mansion to rescue him, five members of the entourage had been killed. The assassins had disappeared. The security forces found Taylor, holding a rifle, escorting a wounded Nigerian peacekeeper off the floor.

  While there had been several attempts on Taylor’s life, none had come so close to achieving its aim. Taylor believed he had survived only because the assassins had mistaken General Mani, who had departed the backseat of the Peugeot, for their target. Rattled but otherwise unharmed, Taylor drove directly to a nearby radio station to assure his followers that he was alive.

  The incident effectively put an end to the Council of State experiment. The group would never again convene at the mansion. Taylor suspected that George Boley, the leader of one the rival Krahn faction, was responsible. (Nearly fifteen years later American officials seeking to deport him from the United States would accuse Boley of General Mani’s killing in an American immigration court.37 At the time, however, the U.S. embassy suspected Alhaji Kromah.) The identity mattered little. Taylor could never feel safe with any power achieved through compromise.

  The attack also had implications for Chucky. If his father were killed and his security forces crumbled or defected, he too could be targeted. He drew his own lesson from the attack: the old-guard NPFL security forces were not up to the task of protecting his father. After eight years of fighting, more than a dozen peace accords, and the mantle of legitimacy that the Council of State provided, his father’s security detail appeared to have gone soft.

  “A lot of those guys I see around my father they smile too much,” he observed to his uncle Cindor Reeves.38 “I’ve been thinking that I want to organize a group that would be really mean.”

  Facing an indefinite future in Liberia, he looked to place himself within the closest ring of his father’s power. The stakes were different from anything he had previously known. The United States, and even Ghana, had rule of law; for the juvenile delinquent Chucky, that meant a navigable world of bail, court dates, and maybe jail time. Liberia had nothing resembling that. The only law was power, and the terms were simple: life and death. The only fact working in Chucky’s favor was that Charles Taylor remained the most powerful man in the country.

  “I will speak to my father,” Chucky told his uncle.

  In 1997 Monrovia was not the expected backdrop for a teenage romance. When Lynn arrived there, at the beginning of the rainy season in early summer, she’d graduated from high school only weeks earlier.39 Unlike her friends, she wasn’t searching out a summer job or preparing for college. She was acting on her feelings, which led her to a country that had little to offer her other than the boy with whom she’d fallen in love. Chucky’s mother and his half sister Maisha flew with her, acting as escorts on the array of connecting flights that linked Orlando and Robertsfield. Knowing that Chucky would be meeting her when she landed, Lynn was more excited than afraid. She had spent hours on the phone with him planning for this moment. Finally, with her parents’ reluctant blessing, it was happening.

  “I should’ve started college,” she later recalled, shaking her head. “But I didn’t because I wanted to go to Africa.”

  When she finally arrived, Chucky seemed much as she remembered him, though more a man than the boy from Orlando. Then as he addressed someone in passing, she noticed him speaking with a strange accent. This was Liberian English.

  As happy as she was, she was unprepared for the harsh reality of Monrovia. By American standards, the capital was a city only in name. “There was no running water, no electricity,” she recalled. “They had just gotten out of war.”

  Chucky had moved into his own place, a modest home set down a hillside behind White Flower, the mansion his father had settled in, along one of Monrovia’s main thoroughfares. When Lynn arrived at the house, she learned that she
would be bathing out of a bucket, as much of the country did. There was no functioning municipal plumbing system; the hydroelectric plant outside Monrovia had been sacked and disabled; basic utilities that much of the world took for granted had to be created ad hoc. Fresh water had to be trucked in. Even Charles Taylor relied on a generator to provide power to his home. Despite all this, Chucky was, by any comparison, privileged.

  The prospect of meeting Chucky’s father made Lynn nervous. She wasn’t concerned about Charles Taylor, the warlord-turned-president; she worried about how the African father of her boyfriend would view a girl of Asian descent. She also knew that Chucky and his father had clashed at times. “It was always a strange relationship,” she said. “He knew his dad loved him, and he knew he loved his dad. But his dad was really unemotional.” She also knew that many people feared Charles Taylor.

  She finally met Taylor at White Flower, the sprawling residence he’d taken up in Congo Town, an oceanfront neighborhood several miles south of the city center. White Flower was an apt image of power in a country like Liberia. On Tubman Boulevard, one of the city’s main arteries, in a neighborhood several miles from downtown Monrovia, the building could be mistaken for a warehouse by passersby. The windowless concrete two-story facade hid the luxurious home inside. The building beveled down the hillside in a series of levels that terminated with an outdoor tennis court where Taylor liked to challenge visitors to matches. The interior reflected Taylor’s love for the garish. “House is not the right word, for with its opulent furnishings—expensive carpets, oil paintings, sculptures, and other objets d’art—palace is a more apt term,” wrote an American diplomat who visited shortly after the election.40

  Taylor met his son’s girlfriend with his famous charm: he was warm and articulate, immediately putting her at ease. “He welcomed me to his country. He was very good to me,” Lynn said. As to her ethnicity, she said, “he wasn’t embarrassed.”

  Monrovia had entered in the final stages of the presidential campaign when she arrived. The war had dragged on for so long, it was easy to forget that elections were what all the fighting had been about in the first place. Whatever hope Liberians carried with them into the 1997 elections had been tempered by the fear that Liberia could not exist in anything other than a permanent state of war.

  But for a society weary of broken peace accords, the path to the polls was laid out clearly. The August 1995 agreement negotiated in Abuja had called for a series of milestones: disarmament in January 1997, voter registration throughout the dry season, and finally an election in May.41 When Lynn arrived, the timetable had been pushed toward a July poll date, but Chucky’s father’s campaign was fully operational. Among the twelve candidates—including his warlord rivals, George Boley and Alhaji Kromah, and exiled opposition figures like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—Taylor remained the favorite.42

  Taylor’s popularity as a candidate perplexed Western observers. Much journalistic hash has been made of a popular chant among Taylor’s followers: “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I will vote for him.” This was interpreted to mean that the electorate was fearful he would reignite the civil war if he lost the election. But Taylor didn’t rely on his reputation as a warlord; unlike his competitors, he made the transition from warlord to candidate relatively smoothly.43 He was able to transform his armed faction into something resembling a political machine. His radio station, KISS-FM, dominated the media in the country, and despite his well-documented brutality as a warlord, the station ably amplified his credentials as a liberator and the administrator of Taylorland during the war’s early years. His party distributed bags of rice emblazoned with slogans. Taylor’s teenage daughters, Charen and Charlyne, even stumped for their father, proudly wearing T-shirts and hats that bore his photo and National Patriotic Party slogan “Vote NPP!” It made things easier that Taylor’s opposition was fractured and ineffective.

  Soon after Lynn arrived, Liberians went to the polls for the first time in twelve years. Around the country, civilians trudged to voting centers under bright clear skies. More than five hundred international observers oversaw the process—including former president Jimmy Carter, whose democracy organization, the Carter Center, later judged the proceedings to be “a uniformly excellent election process.”44 There had been irregularities, but none were significant enough to obviate the result: Taylor won 75 percent of the vote.

  For critics, the vote didn’t reflect the will of the Liberian people so much as the recognition of who—among the candidates—truly held the power in the country. As one commentator wrote, “Taylor’s overwhelming victory most likely derived from a heady brew of electoral rules and irregularities, a huge campaign, a backbone of support, a divided and weak opposition, and his apparent dominance over the security question.”45

  The day after the election Howard Jeter, a Clinton administration envoy and the chief of mission at the U.S. embassy, visited Taylor at White Flower.46 The American delegation walked into the middle of a party, where sixteen members of Taylor’s entourage surrounded the president-elect, sipping champagne. Taylor welcomed them in a “natty ‘swearing-in suit,’ ” greeting each man and boasting that he’d won even within the ethnic strongholds of his chief rivals.

  Taylor and his followers were ecstatic at the result, but the U.S. government was in a tough position. Its distanced approach to the crisis had resulted in a semblance of stability and political process but not a desirable outcome. After making elections its continuous diplomatic refrain for more than fifteen years, Washington would now have to live with the Liberians’ choice. Taylor made it clear that he intended to use the mandate to seek the sort of economic assistance his predecessors had enjoyed. Despite Liberia’s desperate need, officials in the Monrovia embassy knew that Washington was not planning on rewarding Taylor’s victory with increased aid.

  Taylor likely understood this, so he issued a warning. “If Liberia does not get international economic assistance quickly, it will descend into chaos,” he told the diplomats. He pressed for a state visit to Washington, and briefly the Monrovia embassy advocated his position—even receiving assurances from the Department of Justice that Taylor faced no actions related to his escape from Plymouth twelve years earlier. When it became clear that local authorities in Massachusetts would offer no such guarantees, however, the new president scrapped the request.

  But for a moment, Monrovia seemed euphoric.47 Chucky and Lynn drove through the city in awe of the adoring crowds lining the streets, celebrating his father’s victory. The long war had yielded not only the office Taylor desired but also his legitimacy as a politician. His inauguration conjured a splendor that many Monrovians had long forgotten. Heads of state from Nigeria and Ghana traveled to the broken capital to see Taylor take the oath of office. He stood at the lectern clad in immaculate white flowing robes, a matching skullcap sitting atop his head.

  “We are one people, one blood, one nation, with one common destiny indivisible by God,” he told the crowd. “Let us never, ever permit ourselves to be divided again by anyone, either from within or from without.”48 It was a remarkable statement from a man who had fashioned his career around exploiting the divisions within Liberian society. His regalia and oratory played to his indigenous audience, but his enemies and critics saw him not only as a warlord but also as the continuance of the tradition of rule by the Congo elite that had been interrupted by Samuel Doe. For all the bloodshed, the nation was stepping backward to the settler hegemony.

  Taylor’s victory meant a personal victory for Lynn. Her parents looked at Chucky differently now, and Lynn was grateful to be with the man she loved, halfway across the world, without feeling the disapproval of her family. Although they were still very young, life seemed to be taking shape. The war was over, and Chucky had the sort of vague, hopeful plans for their future expected of a young man his age. The difference was that he had the opportunity to bring his ideas to life. The couple celebrated Lynn’s birthday in Monrovia in late summer, when she turned ei
ghteen.

  Chucky introduced Lynn to his extended family in the capital. Charles Taylor had nine children—by several wives—including a younger son, Philip, with whom Lynn would eventually become very close. With such a large crowd, much of the socializing occurred at White Flower, where Taylor lived and also conducted his official business.

  Oftentimes the women and children would spend their days there waiting for their moment with the new president. Taylor’s daughters, from his wives Tupee and Agnes, adored him, and he did not spare them affection or generosity.49 But outside the occasional birthday party, the family didn’t sit for daily meals or meetings.50 If anything, Charles Taylor typically ate upstairs in his meeting room, alone or with the small children, rather than with his wives and girlfriends.

  One thing that struck Lynn was the absence of animosity or jealousy among Taylor’s women. Despite their shared histories with this man, they seemed to get along fine. “They would just all vie for his attention, so whenever you could get to him was when you would get to him,” she said. “It wasn’t a typical family environment.”

  Meanwhile the distance between Taylor and Chucky was palpable; they rarely ate together or spent time together outside official functions. “[Chucky] always felt that he had to always impress him, you know, or make him proud,” Lynn said. He would talk to Lynn constantly about his father; he confided in her his fear that his father didn’t love him. But as Lynn began to spend more time with Taylor, she saw how he felt about his firstborn son.

  Chucky’s growing interest in his father’s affairs dovetailed with Taylor’s primary concern as a new president: his personal security. National security remained an important but secondary consideration. The existing government forces were structured accordingly. When Taylor came into office, he had an array of security forces at his disposal: the Special Security Service (SSS), the Special Operations Division (SOD), the Liberian National Police (LNP), and the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL). These forces remained riddled with members of rival factions and vestiges of Doe’s regime. Taylor had reason to view them as a threat.