TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091090/0910007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.2 KB | 180 lines

                :çI
                                                          WORLD, Page 51

LIBERIA

In the Heart of Darkness


West African troops find there is no peace to keep where tribal
carnage masquerades as war

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS/MONROVIA


    The civil war in Liberia is about hatred: personal hatred
based on political rivalry, brutally used to turn tribe against
tribe. Charles Taylor, head of the rebel National Patriotic
Liberation Front, and President Samuel Doe, the harsh ruler of
the country's 2.5 million people for the past decade, loathe
each other. Says Taylor: "The only good Doe is a dead Doe." In
the past eight months Taylor's 10,000-member army has overrun
most of the country, leaving only small pieces of Monrovia, the
capital, in Doe's control and setting the Gio tribe, which
supports Taylor, against one of Liberia's smallest but most
powerful tribes, Doe's people, the Krahn.

    Few soldiers or rebels have died in battle, but thousands
of civilians have perished. Two weeks ago, two bodies lay by
the side of the road leading to a Monrovia airport, hands tied
behind their backs. A third man, denying he was a Krahn,
pleaded with the rebels for his life -- but to no avail.
Creating yet more violence, Prince Yormie Johnson, a Gio, split
away from Taylor last February. By the summer, Johnson and his
few hundred men had swept into the center of the capital,
taking on both Doe's and Taylor's forces.

    Last week, in an effort to halt the tribal carnage, 3,000
troops of a five-nation West African peacekeeping force began
to fan out in besieged Monrovia (pop. 500,000). Doe and Johnson
welcomed the troops, but Taylor, challenging their legitimacy,
vowed to kill them all. If the fighting cannot be stopped, the
attempted overthrow of Doe could threaten the stability of the
whole West Africa region. Already, the intervention has ignited
bitter controversy among Liberia's neighbors.

    Taylor is unimpressed by outside efforts to calm the civil
strife. "I am not going to roll over and play dead," he told
TIME. "This is an attempt to rescue Doe. A peacekeeping force
means all sides agree. We have not agreed. If we're attacked,
the price will be expensive. The world is going to remember."

    Most of the world has paid little attention to the war, and
Liberia's neighbors are only belatedly showing concern. When
the Economic Community of West African States, a 16-nation body
formed 15 years ago to promote regional cooperation, held an
emergency summit in early August, only seven members bothered
to attend. Determined to solve their problems without the help
of uninterested superpowers, they hastily decided that ECOWAS
should go into the peacekeeping business. To achieve a
cease-fire in Liberia and supervise free elections, they created
a West African force, the Economic Community Monitoring Group.
Yet when the time came to pass out white ECOMOG helmets, only
five countries sent troops: Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra
Leone and Gambia.

    Taylor does not trust any of them. "Peacekeeping?" he
scoffs. "We've arrested Guinean soldiers here in Liberia. How
can they come to keep the peace? We've captured Nigerian
weapons from Doe's soldiers. How can you bring a jaguar into
the house and say he has come to make the peace? ECOWAS is
going to make this another Vietnam -- a war that never ends."

    Whether Taylor has actually arrested Guinean soldiers or
captured Nigerian weapons, the neutrality of the peacekeeping
force is very much compromised by political friendships and
tribal affinities. The stated purpose may be to restore order,
but Liberia's rival leaders suspect that some peacekeepers are
actively supporting the other side. Nigerian President Ibrahim
Babangida has been a longtime ally of Doe's and has reportedly
offered him asylum. Guinea and Sierra Leone are home to a large
number of Mandingo, a tribe that has supported Doe and his
Krahns.

    The Ivory Coast, a supporter of Taylor's and one of West
Africa's dominant economies, did not bother to attend last
month's summit. When the peacekeeping forces were deployed last
week without having first achieved a cease-fire, Togo refused
to participate. President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso
promised to aid Taylor with his own troops if asked. Even the
U.S. withdrew its original approval of ECOMOG, saying that
without a cease-fire, there was no peace for any international
force to keep.

    Taylor dismisses all criticism of his refusal to accept a
cease-fire. "Why negotiate?" he says. "Is there any group that
has taken nine-tenths of a country and then negotiated? Who's
providing food to the people? Who's providing water? Who has
put drugs in the hospitals? Haven't you seen my soldiers
everywhere? We surround Monrovia. We are the government. Doe
is the rebel."

    Taylor is called the President by more than just his
followers and has named a cabinet of ministers. He travels in
a presidential-style convoy, riding in a bulletproof
taupe-colored Mercedes with the red flag of his army fluttering
on the left fender and the Liberian flag on the right. A white
police motorcycle stolen from Doe leads the motorcade, while
two or three cars stuffed with armed men trail Taylor's car.
Bringing up the rear is an antiaircraft gun balanced on the
back of a pickup truck.

    The "President" receives visitors in his "executive mansion"
-- the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Paynesville, a suburb east
of Monrovia -- wearing a bulletproof vest, surrounded by
gun-toting bodyguards garbed in strange, looted clothing.
Groups of soldiers await his bidding nearby in the garage; they
are mostly children in dirty T-shirts and ragged shorts, a
rifle in one hand, a bottle of Sprite in the other.

    The war has taken a heavy toll. In Nimba County the villages
were never heavily populated. Now they are deserted: some
people have joined Taylor, some are dead, most have fled in
fear. The county produces 25% of Liberia's rice, and a few
paddies along the road still flourish, but there is no one to
harvest the crop. The iron-ore mines at Yekepa once earned 70%
of Liberia's foreign currency, but work has been suspended
since late January. Whatever glory the war once held here has
dimmed. At checkpoints the youthful soldiers who jauntily
display human skulls with sunglasses perched over the empty eye
sockets are themselves dull-eyed with hunger. Before they let
a car pass through, they ask for bread.

    Taylor's so-called capital is Kakata, about 35 miles
northeast of Monrovia. He has distributed thousands of bags of
stolen Pakistani rice there, and the rebels say volunteer
doctors from the relief agency Medecins sans Frontieres are
working in the hospital.

    But Kakata is without almost everything else. At night,
lights burn in just three houses, powered by privately owned
generators. There is no water. The streets were once lively
with Mandingo shops; now much of Kakata is burned and looted.
Any Mandingo who did not manage to escape was "killed like a
chicken," boasts a rebel. Every morning hundreds of people
gather alongside the road, waiting for the occasional bus or
truck to take them east to safety. If they are lucky, they will
join 300,000 other refugees who have fled this war. "Doe started
the killing 10 years ago," says an old man waiting with his
family. "Who will stop it now?"

    Few think that ECOMOG can. While President Dawda Jawara of
Gambia played host at a meeting in the capital of Banjul to
choose an interim President for Liberia, men with guns were
very much in control. Taylor forcibly moved nearly 2,000
Nigerians and Guineans, mostly civilians seeking refuge in
their embassy compounds in Monrovia, south to the port city of
Buchanan, out of the reach of rescue. With Taylor's rebels
shooting at Nigerian soldiers and Burkina Faso sending in
troops to support Taylor, escalation of the war has already
begun.

    "Want a short-term worst-case scenario?" asked a Western
diplomat in the Ivory Coast. "Everyone divides into constituent
parts: Doe, Taylor and ECOMOG. Want a long-term worst-case
scenario? Doe goes back to his Krahn in Grand Gedeh County.
Taylor goes back to where he started in Nimba. And it's Doe
against Taylor." All over again.