American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  The assault at Voinjama had been a shot across Charles Taylor’s bow. The perpetrators hadn’t stated any motivation or objective, but since the rebels had the unfettered ability to move across the border, Taylor saw the assault as Guinea’s first effort to put military pressure on his administration. Guinea’s tense relationship with Liberia predated Taylor.36 During the Rice Riots of 1979, Guinean troops had reinforced the Armed Forces of Liberia in Monrovia to ensure that the rioting didn’t devolve into a sustained crisis.37

  The Guinean detachment was limited to only seven hundred soldiers and departed Liberia after three weeks, but the incident lingered as an affront to Liberia’s sense of sovereignty. By the time Taylor won the 1997 election, Guinea had been ruled for more than a decade by President General Lansana Conté, a former French military officer who came to power in a 1984 coup. Guinean forces were among the first to arrive in Sierra Leone to stem the RUF advances in the mid-1990s, but they suffered extensive losses and had been restricted in their ability to fight back. Conté viewed Taylor as responsible for this and not worthy of his position as a head of state.38 In a meeting with Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, he called Taylor “a president of rebels.”

  “You can’t submit Taylor to established rules—he’s a mercenary and will stay one—he was a rebel attacking in Liberia and is now a rebel attacking the sub-region.”

  The Liberian government formally notified its Guinean counterpart, as well as the United Nations, of its concerns; the Guineans did not respond.39 President Conté of Guinea had forged a complicated and intimate alliance with the rebels who were coalescing in Guinean territory under the leadership of a Mandingo used-car dealer, Sekou Conneh, whose wife, Aisha, served as a spiritual adviser to the Guinean leader.40 Not only were they given access to the forest redoubt along the Liberian border, but Conté allowed his military to cultivate ties with the guerrillas.

  Taylor viewed the attack as an emerging national security threat. Shortly afterward he uncomfortably acknowledged the assault and that members of his own forces had later looted Voinjama after the rebels disappeared.41 He tried to calm nerves, stating that the fighting wouldn’t result in a clamping down on civil rights. He recognized that some of his security forces had crossed the line but promised those caught doing so would be punished. Should there be additional attacks, Taylor warned, “every inch of Liberian territory would be defended to the last man.”42

  That month reports of retaliation against Taylor’s ethnic rivals began to trickle into the U.S. embassy.43 Some speculated that government forces, frustrated that they had not been paid, had actually staged the attack on Voinjama as a pretext for a looting rampage. Other sources told embassy officials of revenge killings against tribes deemed to be rebel collaborators. “A Krahn source told an emboff [embassy officer] the security services (particularly the president son’s unit) had been killing Mandingos,” an April 30, 1999, State Department cable from Monrovia to Washington read.44

  This was one of the first direct references to Chucky’s unit, but the information carried no specific weight at that time. Chucky had become more of a known quantity over the course of the prior year, but his nationality wasn’t mentioned. That information may have been novel, but the interest in his unit’s conduct was part of standard State Department reporting on human rights abuses. Each year local embassies compiled human rights reports on host nations, in part to abide by the Foreign Assistance Act, which precluded the U.S. government from funding nations actively committing abuses. In 1999 there was no sign that the information on the ATU would inform a criminal investigation. The focus then was on whether the war in Sierra Leone was blowing back into Liberia.45

  A small convoy of jeeps and pickup trucks from Gbatala pulled to the front gates of White Flower on an evening in late April or early May 1999.46 In the back of one vehicle, bound, blindfolded, and gagged with tape, lay Jusu, Turay, and Foday Conteh. The journey had been long. At Gbatala, Turay’s arms had been bound so tightly together, he thought his chest would rip open. Before the vehicle started, he rolled himself out of the cab, hoping the fall, or an angry soldier, would kill him.

  “I want to die,” he muttered as he was pulled from the dirt and thrown into the vehicle.47

  Throughout the two-hour trip to Monrovia, ATU soldiers had continued to kick and beat them. Over the roar of the engine, Jusu could hear his friend Turay crying. The men did not know where they were headed or what would happen to them. After the trucks lurched to a stop, the prisoners noticed the bright lights glaring through their blindfolds. It was the glare of electric light; the men were no longer in the bush but in Monrovia.

  A short time later Chucky and Campari appeared, walking out of the compound, which the men would learn was White Flower. The defense minister, Daniel Chea, and a shorter man with a round face and salt-and-pepper beard followed. The latter approached the prisoners and asked that the tape be removed from their mouths.

  Are you the rebels who attacked Voinjama? the man asked. Jusu realized the man speaking was Charles Taylor.48

  The men insisted they were refugees, not fighters.

  Taylor then asked the men why they’d refused to fight in Sierra Leone when offered the chance to.

  Turay said, “We are just refugees. If you want to kill us, kill us.”49

  Jusu tried to explain this again but was struck across the mouth with a gun.

  Taylor grew frustrated, according to the men; he threatened to have them brought to the beach and buried alive.

  The defense minister interjected. “The killing should have been done where they’re coming from.”50 He suggested that the men be brought to Barclay Training Center (BTC), the military training ground along the coast in downtown Monrovia. The opportunity to conceal the killing of these men had passed.

  Indeed, an action they’d taken several months earlier—long before they ever encountered Chucky or his unit—would save the men’s lives: they had registered as refugees. This status provided them legal protections under the UN High Commission on Refugees that even the Taylor government was sensitive to—protections that they otherwise lacked as Sierra Leoneans in Liberia. UNHCR was a persistent presence in West Africa after the outbreak of fighting in Liberia and Sierra Leone, running camps, repatriating refugees, and processing asylum claims. Africa accounted for more than 3.2 million of the 11.5 million worldwide refugees that year, but unlike nearly every other region in the world, the population of refugees on the continent continued to grow at a rate of 7 percent each year.51 Liberia faced a twofold crisis of refugees: the 96,000 refugees flowing in from the fighting in Sierra Leone and the nearly 300,000 Liberian returnees arriving from exile in Ghana, Guinea, and Ivory Coast.

  These shifting populations gave the Taylor government reason to fear that combatants could slip in as refugees from Voinjama. In Turay and Jusu’s case, both were military-age males who had gunshot wounds from several years earlier, which could be read as evidence that they had fought at one point in their own country.52 But given their refugee status, they couldn’t simply be disappeared without leaving a record of their presence in Liberia. UNHCR closely monitored all the displaced populations along the frontier areas in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The commission had little power other than to report to the United Nations and donor governments, but the disappearance of refugees would potentially pose a political problem.

  After leaving President Taylor’s compound, Turay, Conteh, and Jusu were brought to the BTC. The base commander initially refused to accept the badly abused prisoners, but Campari and several ATU soldiers beat the commander bloody and dragged their prisoners to a shared cell. The other prisoners were horrified by the men. One told Jusu that he didn’t believe they had been at the ATU base for the simple fact that they survived. “No, nobody would go to Gbatala and come from there,” he said.53

  Conditions at the BTC were primitive and grim but nonetheless an improvement on Vietnam. The men’s wounds had begun to rot and stink, so they
were separated from the other prisoners and forced to sleep near the open bucket that served as the toilet. For several weeks, the men remained imprisoned, eventually able to walk and attend to themselves. But news of their presence spread out from the BTC. (Prisoners in Liberia are traditionally brought food by their family, so the existence of these new prisoners would be difficult to conceal in a small city like Monrovia.) Soon Jusu’s wife and brother learned that he was alive. Eventually, an official from UNHCR visited the men. He asked whether they had registered as refugees. When he learned that they had, he promised to return.

  The men heard nothing for weeks. Then one day the defense minister, Daniel Chea, arrived at their cell. They immediately recognized him as the man who—whether he’d intended to or not—had spared their lives. There was no reason for him to be there unless a decision had been made. Chea ordered their cell opened and demanded that Turay, Conteh, and Jusu be cleaned. The evidence of the abuse they had suffered was written across their bodies. Jusu and Turay refused—though it was unclear whether it was out of fear or out of understanding that the regime wanted to conceal their abuse.

  The three men were led from the cell to a nearby office. A protection officer from UNHCR named Caroline Van Buren sat in the room, waiting for them.54 When she took sight of the men, she couldn’t restrain her anger. The defense minister had no choice but to free the men and, with them, their stories from Gbatala.

  It was, perhaps, the most high-profile exposure of abuses carried out by Chucky’s unit at that point. Yet even as their story became public, those closest to Chucky found the accounts of killings difficult to believe. The former deputy ATU commander who had dealt with Chucky’s volatility (and was present for at least one journey with him to Gbalatuah) said of the April 1999 executions, “Chucky did not do anything ugly there.”55 For Lynn, it was even more difficult to reconcile the allegations.

  “I don’t think he did that,” she said.56 By that time she didn’t doubt that he was capable of other acts of violence. His personality exhibited traits that suggested a deeper origin to his behavior. While there is no clinical definition of a psychopath, the term is lumped into a broader diagnostic classification—antisocial behavior disorder. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders, it is characterized by “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”57 A derivative classification, narcissistic personality disorder, is further defined by “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.” The condition has a neurological foundation, according to Steven Pinker, psychologist and cognitive scientist, who writes, “The regions of the brain that handle social emotions, especially the amygdala and orbital cortex, are relatively shrunken or unresponsive in psychopaths.”58 The inclination toward revenge has been linked to a region of the brain called the rage circuit, which Pinker describes as “the midbrain-hypothalamus-amygdala pathway, which inclines an animal who has been hurt or frustrated to lash out at the nearest likely perpetrator.” In humans, he notes, the impulse for revenge is fueled by the perceived reward it offers—and it requires a lack of empathy.

  “I didn’t see him as a murderer,” Lynn recalled.59 “Did he do some of those things? I’m pretty sure he did. Did he do all of those things? No.”

  Meanwhile the ongoing violence demonstrated that the international community could do little more than monitor the excesses of the Taylor government. Washington was failing to achieve either of its primary policy goals: minimizing the violence in Sierra Leone and curbing the abuses of Taylor’s security forces within Liberia. The Clinton administration had charged Reverend Jesse Jackson and Ambassador Howard Jeter, special envoy to Liberia, with the task of bending Taylor to Washington’s will with the promise of aid dollars. Their efforts had little impact; instead the State Department was reduced to reporting the grim drama playing out in Monrovia and the Liberian countryside.60 “Human rights violations by the government persist. The security forces continue to be the worst offenders,” one such report from the Monrovia embassy relayed early in the summer of 1999.61 “Taylor’s son Chuckie [sic] is particularly vicious and is accountable to nobody.”

  8

  Danger

  I’m livin in a bubble, bound for insane pourin fucken lava out my brain father clear my path cause satan’s in my way.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-9

  Lynn Henderson pulled off of Tennessee State Route 18 later that summer. The car eased onto a private dirt road marked only by a handful of weathered fence posts. The closest town, a hamlet of five thousand named Bolivar, lay four miles down the road along the Hatchie River in the southwestern corner of the state. Her destination was set back at the far end of a mowed field: the house and barn that made up Rolling H Farm, a tiny breeder.1 This would be her last stop on a journey to find the perfect gift—something fit for a president—for the man who would be her father-in-law.

  A year earlier Lynn’s relationship with Chucky nearly came apart. Her visits were infrequent and brief, and when she arrived in Liberia on one trip, it became clear that he had been cheating on her.2 Fed up and disgusted, she confronted him.3 She was prepared to leave him and Liberia forever, but he wasn’t ready to give up the relationship. Before she could leave, he appeared at the Hotel Africa, on the far side of Monrovia, where she had holed up. She recognized that getting out of the country wouldn’t be easy—at least not without his help. As angry as she was, she agreed to take a drive with him to the beach. When he stopped the car, he presented her with a small, nondescript pouch. Inside was a piece of folded paper. Inside, she found a handful of dull, uncut diamonds.

  Chucky asked her to marry him.

  It was a decidedly unromantic moment; for Lynn, the raw gems only contributed to the unreality of it. (They “probably came right off the river,” she recalled.) She wasn’t holding a ring but instead artifacts emblematic of the dysfunction of the place and situation she found herself in. Lynn was eighteen years old, very far from home, and without Chucky, very much alone. Her emotions collided in waves of happiness and sadness. She wanted many things in life that she could not have in Liberia. But she also wanted Chucky. If her future in the United States was relatively predictable—she would go to college like her older sisters—Liberia was not. There was the promise of wealth—Chucky always talked about his plans—but also the real possibility that everything would fall apart. Lynn made the decision that she felt made the most sense: she said yes.

  So finding a gift for Charles Taylor carried new significance. She had flown in from Orlando to collect something unique, a purebred white German shepherd. Charles Taylor already had several dogs, but he had asked Lynn for the specific breed to complement his spotless white safari suits. A purebred was a sign of status, since the animals had to be imported; dingos and mutts could be found all over Monrovia and the countryside. Chucky had also asked for a dog—one more suited to his personality. Lynn found a pit bull puppy for him in Titusville, a city on the coast, an hour’s drive from Orlando.

  Even though she had not been back to Liberia in several months, Lynn felt closer to Chucky’s father with each visit. The more time she spent with him, the more she came to see him not as a warlord—or even necessarily the president of Liberia—but as a well-educated, well-spoken father figure.4 In moments of volatility and crisis with Chucky, she felt she could always turn to his father for comfort and support.

  “He really loved me,” she said. She began to feel the same toward him.

  Liberia remained far from the home she had once hoped it could be. There were some signs that Chucky’s station had improved—such as a Land Rover provided by prospective diamond miners who wished to curry favor with his father. Despite his growing responsibility with the ATU, however, Chucky hadn’t progressed significantly into building a life for himself there.

  His father had mad
e little headway on addressing the devastating problems most Liberians faced every day: the lack of clean water, electricity, medical care, educational opportunities, and jobs.5 The nation remained fragile. It was at peace, but the specter of war loomed large—and the donor states from the international community who had an interest in rebuilding postwar Liberia were wary of partnering with Charles Taylor, the man considered the author of much of the destruction in the first place. The only clear progress he had made was toward establishing Liberia as a security state—and positioning himself for the outbreak of another war.

  This was cause for increasing concern among American officials.6 On a Sunday afternoon in late June 1999, U.S. chargé d’affaires Donald Petterson arrived at White Flower to meet with Charles Taylor. The Liberian president’s relationship with the U.S. government remained cordial, despite increasing disgust from Washington over his role in the Sierra Leonean conflict. Taylor hoped to restore the political, economic, and military connections of his predecessor, Samuel K. Doe, and an opportunity had presented itself. President Clinton had named a new ambassador to Monrovia, Bismarck Myrick, a career Foreign Service officer who had done stints throughout Africa—Lesotho, Somalia, South Africa—even Liberia in the mid-1980s, where he served in Monrovia as a political officer.7 He, like Liberia’s first president, was an African-American, from Norfolk, Virginia.

  In the weeks following the August 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the embassy in Monrovia was one of several closed by the State Department out of security concerns—a fact that troubled Taylor.8 He told Petterson that the U.S. government should not be concerned about a similar incident in Monrovia, saying that “foreign experts had been training an antiterrorist unit in Ganta and that if in the future the embassy needed support, this unit would be available.” But these very forces were among the concerns Petterson wished to address. The embassy had been receiving reports about Taylor’s security forces being the source of insecurity—being attached to violence, looting, and intimidation on the border. Though Petterson already knew the answer to his question, he asked: is the unit under Chucky Taylor?