In President Bush’s other military rescue operation — sending in U.S. Marines last week to evacuate American civilians from war-ravaged Liberia — the best news was that the Marines encountered no opposition as they ferried out more than 160 people. Rebel leader Prince Yormie Johnson, whose threat to take Westerners captive provoked the Marine intervention, did seize 16 hostages from seven countries, but soon released them all.
More promising was the unprecedented decision by Nigeria and four other West African nations to send a peacekeeping force of 2,700 troops into Liberia. The plan: to impose a cease-fire and establish a provisional government that would not include either beleaguered President Samuel Doe or his two rivals, Charles Taylor and Johnson.
But Taylor, who commands the main rebel force and controls most of the Liberian countryside, vowed to resist the West Africans’ intervention. He started by launching a new offensive last week to seize control of the divided capital, Monrovia. “We will use guns, machetes, knives,” he cried. “We will kill all of them.”
The only player unheard from during the week’s alarms was Doe, still holed up with a few hundred loyalist troops inside the executive mansion. Looking back over the disastrous war, which has now cost some 5,000 lives in the past seven months, U.S. officials could only wonder how their $500 million in a decade of generous aid had ended like this.
Liberia had always seemed a comfortably quiescent sort of backwater. Founded by freed American slaves in 1822, it had been ruled until Doe by an elite of their descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, who ran everything. The U.S., in turn, used Liberia as a major outpost, building some $500 million worth of facilities, Voice of America transmitters for all of Africa, plus a navigational system and communications station.
One day in 1980, Master Sergeant Doe led a band of soldiers into the executive mansion, shot down President William Tolbert and later executed 13 of Tolbert’s associates on the beach. High school dropout Doe thereupon became President, the first from one of the indigenous tribes, the Krahns. He accused his predecessors of corruption, but his main goal was the end of Americo- Liberian rule. “The choice we faced,” recalls Richard Moose, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, “was either to move into the situation, which was universally considered out of the question, and take control — or live with what confronted us.”
So U.S. officials took hopeful stock of Doe, who had been trained by U.S. special forces. Compared with Tolbert, Doe seemed refreshingly simple; he abandoned the presidential limousine for a Chevette. Officials also worried a lot in those days about the subversive efforts of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. When Doe let it be known that Gaddafi had made overtures, the U.S. hastened to increase its aid, from $19 million in 1979 to $72 million in 1983. The U.S. theory was that Doe could be surrounded by technical experts who would educate him and keep him in line. “He was just a young soldier who was willing to listen and who could have gone either way,” says an observer.
U.S. officials put a good deal of pressure on Doe to go through the motions of democracy. They financed a commission to write a constitution for a return to civilian rule in 1985. They urged Doe to let opposition parties campaign against him in elections. But when early returns showed Doe losing heavily, he seized all the ballots and announced, two weeks later, that he had won 50.5% of the vote.
Reagan Administration conservatives argued that any move against Doe might lead him to seize the American installations. And this was the heyday of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s theory that traditional dictatorships of the Third World were more amenable to democratization than totalitarian regimes of the left. Washington endorsed Doe’s election. “To withdraw support for Liberia’s economic development,” explained Chester Crocker, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, “would sacrifice the tentative steps taken toward representative government.”
That was about the last time the U.S. had any control over Doe. When Thomas Quiwonkpa, a Gio and former army commander, tried to overthrow him, Doe had Quiwonkpa killed and eviscerated. Worse yet, Doe turned his soldiers loose on Gio tribal villages in Nimba County. Until then, Liberia had been relatively free of such hostilities, but the massacres started a tribal war that is still raging today.
Congressional indignation at the worsening corruption and repression led to substantial aid cuts, from $76 million in 1985 to $11 million this year. But Doe seemed indifferent to his country’s growing bankruptcy. U.S. officials still urged reform, but Doe, who often consults a shaman, responded to one overture from CIA director William Webster by offering him a magic powder.
Last December Taylor, a former official in the government whom Doe had wanted to prosecute for allegedly embezzling nearly $1 million in government funds, led an army of some 170 guerrillas across the border from the Ivory Coast and gradually advanced to the outskirts of Monrovia. But the rebels split when Prince Johnson, a Gio, began accusing Taylor of criminality. U.S. officials say that Taylor is just about as bad as Doe, and Johnson is no savior either. “If we had nudged Doe earlier and harder toward an open society and a free market, it might have made a difference,” says an official, but as he surveys the dismal prospects, he sums them up in three words: “A bloody mess.”
