American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  More officers converged on the scene. Samuel Nimley, who had also received a call from Chucky, was incredulous to learn that someone so close to Chucky could be killed for such a trivial reason. Nimley had been part of the convoy when the accident occurred but had returned home rather than follow the unit to Chucky’s house. “Just the damn [head]light,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

  Like the killing of Justin Parker, the death of Isaac Gono became a mess for those around Chucky to clean up. When Gono’s brother-in-law, George Wortuah, went to claim the body at John F. Kennedy Hospital, he found that the driver had been trundled into a bag by the ATU officers and brought to the hospital morgue. When the officials showed him his brother-in-law’s body, he saw that Gono’s clothes had been shredded with the force of the beating.

  Soon afterward the family learned that it was Chucky who had given the order that resulted in Isaac’s death. They wanted everyone involved to be held accountable, including the president’s son. While Gono’s wife hoped for justice, his brother-in-law Wortuah privately contemplated retaliation. Eventually the family sought one of the few means of recourse available in Taylor’s Liberia: the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission (JPC), a human rights group connected to the Archdiocese of Monrovia. The JPC still enjoyed a degree of protection over its activities through its affiliation with the Catholic Church. Liberians victimized by the Taylor government often turned to the organization, which also served as a liaison to international human rights groups researching violations in Liberia.

  The JPC had continually received reports of ATU abuses ever since the unit’s creation. But the letter from Isaac Gono’s sister, which arrived a few days after the killing, was among the first complaints it had received about violence committed by the ATU against one of its own. The JPC issued a statement about the murder to the press. Taylor briefly succeeded in pressuring one paper to bury a story on the killing, but eventually the Monrovia dailies ran with the story, which quickly leaped to international wire services—some outlets erroneously reporting that Gono had been tortured to death.

  The press coverage forced the Ministry of Defense to issue a response. The ATU officers who had acted on Chucky’s orders were to blame, the ministry said, noting that they had killed the driver “during the process of interrogating 1st/Lt. Gono over the accident, used unusual harsh methods, rendering 1st/Lt. Gono unconscious,” and that Chucky “awoke and came downstairs to only find his chief driver lying unconscious. He immediately ordered an ambulance to rush the Lt. to the nearest hospital.”34

  President Taylor ordered a military commission to investigate the case. At a press conference, he distanced his son from direct involvement in the killing. He qualified that statement, saying, “in military term he’s responsible. As a General Officer commanding that unit he’s responsible for what his men do or fail to do; to that extent, he’s responsible.”

  The U.S. embassy monitored the situation from a remove. “Although there is clearly a bit of showmanship in these allegations,” a cable reported, “the fact is that a man is dead. The reason for the beating was trivial and the decision to do it capricious and egregious.… The incident shows how blatant disregard for human life is among the security thugs of the ATU. Meanwhile, given the personalities involved, the call for justice is a courageous one.”35

  The military commission never proceeded beyond charging the two ATU commanders who had carried out the beating. They were held for several days, then conveniently “escaped.” After the family stopped cooperating, the JPC abandoned its investigation.

  The police director eventually delivered a message to Gono’s family: Chucky wished to see them. “He was afraid,” Wortuah recalled of their meeting. “He assured us he ordered his bodyguard to punish Isaac, [but] he [didn’t] say you should beat him to kill him. And that was [a] mistake.”

  Before the meeting ended, Chucky gave the family $1,000. Eventually, the family received $16,000 to cover funeral expenses and to provide for Gono’s two children. “All the assistance was done through President Taylor,” Wortuah said.

  Charles Taylor’s government was struggling to defend itself against the most serious threat to its power that it had faced in five years, yet the president was reaching into his own pocket to pay for his son’s senseless excesses. If Taylor couldn’t count on the commanders closest to him to be disciplined enough not to kill their own men, he had little reason to hope that they could stop the rebel advance.

  Taylor began to fear that rebels were infiltrating the capital, stashing weapons and preparing for the assault. One of the men who came under his suspicion was a student and dockworker, Varmuyan Dulleh.

  Dulleh lived in Paynesville, outside Monrovia, and worked for the National Port Authority while attending school at the University of Liberia. His uncle was Alhaji Kromah, the former leader of ULIMO-K—the faction that had nearly wiped out Taylor’s army during the war. Kromah, Taylor’s nemesis, now lived quietly in Arlington, Virginia, but Taylor feared that he and his young nephew were part of a plot involving the Americans and his neighbors in Guinea to remove him from power.

  That July, shortly after two a.m., Dulleh heard a familiar voice calling to him from the darkness outside his house.36 He recognized the voice—it belonged to a man named Abraham Kelleh. As strange as the request was, coming in the middle of the night, Kelleh asked Dulleh whether he could stay at his home. Annoyed, Dulleh opened his front door. The only light illuminating the night came from Dulleh’s neighbor’s home, across the swamp. Kelleh stood stock-still.

  Dulleh immediately sensed something was wrong. As he stepped out to ask his friend what had happened, he noticed several men bounding across the yard toward him. They were carrying weapons. He turned and bolted along the exterior of the house toward a mango tree at the edge of the property. He wore only his bedclothes and no shoes. Before he could make it any farther, soldiers surrounded him, training their weapons on him. He glanced over his property. There seemed to be more than one hundred soldiers, most wearing solid black uniforms bearing the distinct badge of a cobra and scorpion.

  “So you want to overthrow the papay?” one of the voices barked at him.

  The men set upon him and threw him into a vehicle, to be carried to the president’s residence. After a short drive to Congo Town, Dulleh was brought before the president at White Flower, wearing only the white T-shirt he had been sleeping in and a pair of black trousers.

  “Mr. President, we have got him. This is him,” the police director said.

  Taylor was seated in his office at his desk with two Liberian flags perched behind him, a Bible near his hand. A young man who bore a distinct resemblance to the president waited silently among the security personnel in the room.

  “I have a few questions to ask you,” Taylor said to him. “How many rebel soldiers have [you] been able to smuggle from the bush into the United States Embassy? Where do you have the arms?”

  “President Taylor, I have no idea what you are talking about. I have no idea absolutely,” Dulleh responded. He began to weep out of terror.

  Taylor continued questioning Dulleh. Had he ever been to Guinea?

  Dulleh had lived in Guinea, which was an unremarkable fact. Many Liberians, particularly Mandingos, had fled to Guinea at some point during the war. But the LURD rebels had enjoyed relatively free access to Guinean territory throughout the uprising and, presumably, military support from President Lansana Conté.

  Dulleh looked at the president and lied.

  President Taylor flipped through his passport and paged through the numbers on his cell phone. Then he looked up at the prisoner and said, “Look down that man.”

  Dulleh turned around and saw a slight, wan man with bloodshot, spectral eyes standing behind him.

  “That’s General Benjamin Yeaten,” Taylor said. “I’m going to turn you over to General Benjamin Yeaten, and he’s going to beat you until you tell the truth.”

  Dulleh had never seen Yeaten before that night, but h
e knew the man’s reputation as a murderer—he was one of the men Taylor turned to to carry out his execution orders. Yeaten reached down, yanked Dulleh to his feet, and dragged him from the room.

  Dulleh called from the hallway, “President Taylor, can I make a statement?”

  “Yes, come in,” the president said.

  “President Taylor, my life is in your hands—” he pleaded.

  The president cut Dulleh off. “No, your life is not in my hands. Your life is in God’s hands.”

  Dulleh was loaded into a jeep full of gunmen and driven down the darkened hillside to a single-story home with an adjoining wall. He was led inside by Yeaten, past a group of men dressed in civilian clothing. Yeaten then produced a small box.

  “This box you see is a box filled of money. We’re going to give you money and do nothing to you. Just tell us the truth,” he told Dulleh.

  He was presented with an impossible situation: confess to a crime he had not committed or face interrogation that wouldn’t end until a confession was reached.

  “I am not involved with anything. The information about me was not true,” he pleaded.

  Yeaten’s countenance shifted. The statement clearly enraged him. Armed guards then led Dulleh into a garage, where men stuffed a filthy rag into his mouth and forced him to the floor. Yeaten appeared, holding an electric iron. Behind him was the young man resembling the president—Chucky. Yeaten grabbed Dulleh’s right arm and pressed the hot iron into his flesh.

  The torture continued for some time. Several gunmen held Dulleh down as Yeaten seared the prisoner’s other arm, his stomach, his leg. Dulleh struggled to cry out, but the rag stuffed in his mouth muffled the sound. He was helpless.

  Yeaten yanked the rag from his mouth. “Are you ready to talk?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Dulleh responded.

  Yeaten stared at him. “So why you involved with the rebel movement to overthrow the president?” he asked.

  Dulleh could only say, “No.”

  A fighter appeared in the room with a pot of steaming water. Yeaten filled a cup and poured it over the prisoner’s head; he filled a second cup, dousing Dulleh’s back.

  The pain was unbearable for Dulleh. He heard Yeaten order him to cup his hands together. The general poured the scalding water into Dulleh’s hands. Dulleh began screaming so loud, he could hear nothing else.

  Yeaten raised a shotgun to the prisoner’s head and ordered him not to spill the water. Dulleh saw Chucky stand up and raise a gun to his head. He recognized him only as the young man he’d seen with President Taylor.

  Dulleh could think about little more than the pain. The burns on his hands, across his back, and on his leg throbbed excruciatingly.

  The young man addressed him. “Do you remember the man you talked to in the office not long ago?” Dulleh heard him say.

  Dulleh could only nod his head.

  “That man has the Holy Bible in his hands,” the young man said. “I don’t have it in my hands.”

  Dulleh finally realized who the man speaking to him was. He was the president’s son, Chucky.

  Several soldiers then forced Dulleh flat onto his stomach. He caught a glimpse of Chucky with a short, round object in his hand. Suddenly a jolt of electricity burst through Dulleh’s body. He had felt Chucky press the stick again to the back of his neck; the shocks continued across his back. The soldiers flipped Dulleh over and pulled his pants down. Dulleh looked down to see Chucky jabbing the stun gun at his penis.

  It was an image that would remain with Dulleh long after he was disappeared into state custody, without charge or trial, another victim of Charles Taylor’s paranoia and his son’s sadism.

  Despite Taylor’s fears about rebels in Monrovia, the real threat remained on the front lines. In July 2002 Chucky had sent Christopher Menephar to assess the fighting as it neared the capital.37 He was no longer a hardened child soldier but a lieutenant colonel in the ATU, a commander who took his responsibilities seriously. Menephar prepared a memo titled “General Front Line Report Bomi, Gbojay, Arthington Mont., Bomi Co. Liberia.”

  The report reflected the military formality as well as the lack of formal education among the elite ATU fighters: “On the 24th of July, I was mandated by GOC to assests [sic] the various front lines,” it began, then went on to describe the fighting in Bomi County, including assaults by small groups of lightly armed rebels and ambushes carried out by government troops. The report painted a positive picture of the counteroffensive by Taylor’s troops: “We observed that the enemy are on the run in Bomi” by a “joint” operation on the evening of July 19, 2002, involving the AFL and ATU.

  The rebels sought to establish a headquarters in Tubmanburg, an old mining town with a population of less than twelve thousand, that would put them within striking distance of Monrovia. The memo reported five men wounded, one hundred fifty enemy dead. The numbers were impossible to verify—whether the count was accurate and whether the dead were, in fact, the enemy. Menephar’s report noted that the ATU was fighting alongside militias throughout Bomi County and that there was a “good working relationship between the local pop and government.”

  It is unlikely that Menephar was completely candid or accurate in his account of what happened in Bomi. He had little incentive to provide a leader as volatile and ill equipped as Chucky with any information that would reflect badly on him or his father.

  In fact, a few old men would emerge from Tubmanburg to tell a different story. According to that account, government fighters did “liberate” the town.38 Rather than fight, the rebels disappeared into the bush, leaving little sign of their presence. The government commander then assembled the civilians and explained to them that they would be evacuated to Monrovia. A truck carried away one group of men, women, and children. When it returned to Tubmanburg a short time later, the residents noticed that the vehicle’s cab was soaked in blood. The remaining civilians who could not fit on the first journey were forced into the truck and driven to a bridge overlooking the Mahel River.

  The ground there was littered with bodies. Babies with their skulls bashed in. Women with their bellies slit open. The fighters were busily dumping the dead into the river. When the truck stopped, the soldiers forced the civilians out. One fighter pulled a man’s wife aside, shot her, then set upon mutilating her body. The fighter then turned to the husband. All the man could do was beg to say a final prayer.

  “We are not here for God business,” the fighter said.

  War as Taylor knew it best had returned to Liberia. He had entrusted Benjamin Yeaten, his most relied-upon enforcer, to confront the threat. The methods were familiar to those who had survived the civil war. Terror stood in for military might. Rebels were the enemies, but too often civilians were the targets. As long as foreign powers supplied weapons—as Guinea did to the rebels—the underequipped and ill-trained government forces could do little to maintain their monopoly on the use of force and defeat their enemies.

  12

  ABT

  Real as chrome, march and we hone, hand to hand, man they no, flip at the birth of a fight.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4

  In October 2002, Charles Taylor granted the new American ambassador, John W. Blaney, a rare private audience.1 Exhausted by the sanctions and the fighting over the summer, the Taylor government was left with very few resources. His inner circle was collapsing in on itself. Isaac Gono’s gratuitous murder was only the latest symptom of the decline, but the problems ran far deeper than indiscipline in his security forces or his murderous son.

  For months the Taylor government had been screaming itself hoarse to the international community over the growing insurgency. The West’s covert support for the rebels was growing clearer: white helicopters with no official markings were reportedly seen transporting and resupplying the rebels near the front, and captured enemy fighters reported that they had been trained by U.S. Special Forces. Meanwhile, the rebels’ public relations arm operated freely in t
he United States. Whatever support the rebels enjoyed in Washington, covert or otherwise, ran contrary to the State Department’s objective of stopping the violence in West Africa. In the background, American diplomats lobbied the government in Conakry to close the border to Liberia and cease the traffic of fighters into Liberia. Publicly State Department officials made a clear distinction: they did not back the rebels, but they did support the opposition. This policy was summed up as “ABT”—Anyone But Taylor.2

  The ATU continued to be a menacing presence near the U.S. embassy compound. In one incident, heavily armed fighters carrying AKs, RPKs, and RPGs appeared along the compound’s northern perimeter.3 When confronted, the fighters explained that they were “conducting a routine weapons search of the area,” despite the proximity to the diplomatic compound. With increasing frequency, dismounted ATU patrols appeared on Mamba Point, approaching the embassy gates to berate the local guards. At one point a disoriented civilian attempted to climb onto the embassy property.4 The local guards who detained him noticed that he had been severely beaten. The man told them, “ATU commander Chucky Taylor and associates were chasing him.”

  Charles Taylor’s behavior had taken a turn for the strange over the course of the year. Despite the fact that he was already married, he was rumored to have wed a recent high school graduate who was seven months pregnant in a tribal ceremony.5 The rumor infuriated the first lady, Jewel Howard Taylor, and drew questions from the press. Taylor said that he was entitled to four wives and that it was his wife’s responsibility to help find appropriate matches.

  If Taylor was comfortable or calm, given the tumult of the year, he didn’t show it when he met with Ambassador Blaney. Sitting alone with the ambassador, Taylor fidgeted noticeably. His relationship with the United States had grown so tense and distrustful that the ambassador found it necessary to assure Taylor that the United States did not seek to physically harm him.