Bringing stability to Liberia

The arrival of the first wave of peacekeepers in war-ravaged Monrovia marked an important step in the effort of the international community to bring lasting peace to Liberia

After much wrangling and hesitation, the much-anticipated external intervention, in the form of 1,500 battle-hardened Nigerians finally became a reality on August 4. The arrival of the lightly-armed West Africans in United Nations' helicopters is indeed the best thing that has happened to that beleaguered country's peace process and to its traumatized populace since the latest round of hostilities engulfed the capital. It was not surprising therefore that Monrovians turned out in their thousands to shoulder-carry the bemused and peacekeeping-exhausted Nigerians who became the only glimmer of hope to a rather hopeless situation. With this emotional reception, war-weary Liberians are of the hope that the day will mark the beginning of the international community's long-term commitment to bring durable peace to their country. Sure enough, there are grounds for optimism. The much feared Charles Taylor is now in exile; LURD rebels who until a few weeks ago were pounding central Monrovia with reckless abandon, have surrendered the part of the city they controlled to West African (now UN) Peacekeepers and have retreated; a new leader, Gyude Bryant, is at the helm of the country's affairs; peacekeepers are taking the country inch by inch; food aid is once again reaching sections of the vulnerable population; most importantly perhaps, the United Nations has approved the world's largest peacekeeping force to sanitize Liberia. Judging from all these it will not be an exaggeration to state that within the last few months the political and security landscape in Monrovia at least, has undergone a radical positive transformation.

Challenges ahead

In spite of the positive developments however, it is crystal clear that the challenges of establishing peace and rebuilding Liberia are daunting. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, some 1.5 million people--nearly half of the country's population--are in dire need of food and shelter in Monrovia alone. Countrywide, the United Nations estimate the number of displaced at up to 450, 000. Creating the conditions for the repatriation and resettlement of this vast number of people is in itself a financial and logistical nightmare that can take months if not years to accomplish.

Charles Taylor's departure and the signing of a new peace deal in Accra (the 15th in the country's 14-year old conflict) have not stopped the fighting either. Whilst Monrovia appears calm, elsewhere in the country it's a totally different story. A day after Moses Blah took over the reins of government, rebels and pro-government forces clashed near the airport and in the southeast. On September 09, LURD rebels launched a fierce attack on the town of Kakata, 35 miles Northeast of Monrovia, driving away government forces and uprooting thousands of civilians in the process. The attack happened just as peacekeepers were about to deploy in the town. The situation is now so bad that starving internally displaced persons are pleading with aid agencies not to supply them with relief items for fear that the supplies will solicit rebel attacks. Because of such insecurity, large parts of the country are still inaccessible to aid agencies. The infrastructure is in ruins; the Taylor-appointed government lacks legitimacy as well as capacity to deliver; the factions are well armed and distrustful of one other.

Taylor's departure has left in its wake terrible legacies that will endure for a long time to come. The war-lord-turned-president-turned-war-criminal left behind a battered economy, a war-scarred populace, a divided society, and a drug-crazed, ill-disciplined but well-armed band of teenage followers. The government has no official budget and unemployment stands at 85%. The United Nations estimate that some 75% of the population lives below the poverty line. Managing such a situation will require resources and expertise well beyond what is currently available in the country or in the sub-region.

The genesis of the problem

Liberia is Africa's oldest republic. The country became independent more than 100 years before any other African country gained freedom from colonial rule. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to throw off the yoke of European rule, only succeeded in doing so in 1957. At a time when much of the continent was ruled by hereditary chiefs and Europeans, Liberia by 1848 had already had its first elected president as well as a senate.

In spite of its age and long history of experimenting with democratic institutions however, the country has never come of age politically. The Congos, descendants of the original founders, who form about 5% of the population, had a stranglehold on the political, economic and social life for 130 years. The Americo-Liberians, as these descendants are known, only extended the franchise to the indigenous people in 1946, nearly 100 years after the republic became independent in 1847. Through out the entire history of the country to present, no indigenous Liberian has ever been elected to the presidency. Samuel Doe, the first indigene to rule the country had to wrestle power with the aid of the gun's barrel.

Indeed Liberia's curse has had as much to do with the mediocrity of its political leadership as it have to do with western powers bent on pushing their selfish agendas down the country's throat. Samuel Doe's reign offers a classical example. The semiliterate staff sergeant was tribalistic, despotic, and kleptocratic. He appointed members of his Krahn tribe into strategic positions in the army and cabinet and ruled with an iron fist. When his former second-in-command Thomas Quiwonkpa, staged a coup in 1985, he (Doe) executed him in the most bizarre of manners and ordered punitive raids against the Gio and Mano people of the coup plotter's Nimba County.

In this penchance for violence Doe was not much different from his predecessors or successors. Between 1989 and 2003 Charles Taylor perfected the art of terrorizing and silencing critics. The gruesome murder of Samuel Dokie, a former Taylor-supporter-turned-opponent, along with his entire family in November 1997, and the abduction and mysterious disappearance in July 1998 of Nowai Flomo, a market woman and government critic, are all pointers to Taylor's bloodthirsty nature. When one adds to this his unflinching support for the limb-chopping Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels of Sierra Leone, it's easy to understand why the United Nations indicted him for war crimes.

Taylor's reign of terror also brought him immense economic gains. He raked millions from Liberia's timber and Sierra Leone's diamonds whilst the average Liberian wallowed in grinding poverty. Some scholars of the Liberian civil war have estimated that the gangster president personally earned up to US $400 million between 1990 and 1997. So intense was the plunder by Taylor and preceding Liberian leaders that by the mid-1990s the country had become the first in West Africa to qualify for description as a 'collapsed' or 'failed' state on the same level as Somalia.

Doe, Taylor and the like were able to wreck the country and shoot opponents willy-nilly partly because of western support. The largesse from the US in particular was crucial. Between 1962 and 1980, the White House dished out $280 million in aid, the highest level of assistance to any African country per capita at the time. During the Cold War, (in the first half of the 1980's, to be specific), another aid record was set when the Reagan administration poured over US $500 million into this Tennessee-sized country, the largest amount given to any African country The support helped to keep afloat the incompetent regime of William Tolbert and the brutal rule of Samuel Doe which set the stage for the current crisis.

The United States is not the only villain in this regard; France too has played a very unhelpful role in destabilizing Liberia. A report by a panel of experts presented to the Security Council in December 2000 highlighted the role of the Liberian timber industry in the regional conflict, but the Security Council rejected a proposal to include the timber trade in the sanctions introduced in May because of objections from France in particular. At the height of the conflict, Paris became the largest importer of Liberian timber even though numerous reports pointed out the link between these resources and the escalation of the conflict. It was to Paris that Charles Taylor headed for regular medical check-ups in spite of a UN traveling ban.

Judging from all these complexities and numerous actors, what then will it take to establish sanity to Liberia? This is the key question that is now plaguing the minds of those engaged in the complex and often dangerous job of bringing peace to a war-torn society. In this essay I will argue that establishing peace in Liberia will require bold and decisive international action involving foresight, resources, and staying power. The main argument here is that the prospect for durable peace will be dim if the exercise does not benefit from a strong proactive leadership role from the United States.

Strengthen the peacekeeping mission

A starting point for the international community would be to give adequate financial and logistical support to enable the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) monitor the ceasefire, provide security for aid agencies and lay the grounds for the eventual disarmament of the factions. This will prevent a repeat of the Sierra Leone scenario in which the poorly-armed peacekeeping forces were first disarmed by the rebels before they in turn eventually disarmed the rebels. Despite harsh media criticisms about its past activities in Liberia, the lightly-armed Nigerian-led ECOMIL force did a fantastic job in bringing tranquility to Monrovia and elsewhere. UNMIL should be able to build on this effort and stabilize the country. Sierra Leone has shown that with the right kind of support the United Nations is up to the task of bringing peace to war-ravaged societies such as Liberia.

Curtail source of factional support

The strengthening of the peacekeeping force should be carried out in tandem with the diplomatic effort of curbing the source/s of support for the various factions. Both Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) are external creations. LURD was formed in Sierra Leone but nurtured and coordinated in Guinea, whilst MODEL was born and bankrolled from the Ivory Coast. LURD is the most powerful faction in the Liberian conflict, thanks in no small measure to the support it receives from neighboring Guinea. Despite repeated denials from President Lansana Conte, several reports have fished him out as the rebel group's main military and financial backer.

A Report published by the London-based International Crisis Group pointed out that: "Basic Weaponry, military supplies and food are all supplied at the orders of President Conte. LURD wounded are treated free of charge in Guinea military hospitals. Key LURD figures live in government housing and drive Guinea government vehicles...". Guinea is in a position to provide such support partly because of the favored status it has been enjoying from the United States since the early 1990s. In May 2002, the US government provided the Guinean armed forces with US $3 million in nonlethal training and equipment. Certainly there has been no evidence of pressure from Washington on Conakry to discontinue support to the rebels, in spite of numerous reports chronicling Guinea's destabilizing role. There is no way peace can hold in Liberia if such blatant external support is not curtailed or discontinued.

Preventing fragmentation of factions

Choking off the military and financial base of the factions can also help to prevent their fragmentation. The Liberian conflict has been awash with factions. The early and mid-1990 witnessed an implosion of armed groups, formed mainly around ethnic and local interests, which complicated earlier peace efforts. At the start of the war in 1989, it was a straight fight between the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL). These soon fragmented into sub-groups, based either on tribe (Congo Defense Forces); or leadership (United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy-Kromah (ULIMO-K); or region (Lofa Defense Forces, LDF). Countless others, some with clearly misleading names, such as Liberian Peace Council, Justice Coalition of Liberia and the Organization of Displaced Liberians, came and went, mainly through mergers or renaming. Loyalty in these groups is extremely fluid and fickle.

All current warring factions: pro-government forces, LURD and MODEL, consist of a diverse coalition of former factions, political figures and organizations. The rebel groups are (were) held together by their intense hatred for anything Charles Taylor. Now that the common enemy is gone it remains to be seen whether the political and military leadership in these groups can hold together. None of these factions should be allowed to take control of the state by force. The rivalry and animosity is so intense that if any group is allowed to implant itself in the Executive Mansion, the country will be plunged into another cycle of bloodletting. Apart from the fact that they loathe Charles Taylor, both LURD and MODEL have not articulated any political agenda.

Reducing the number of armed actors at this stage of the peace process will be in the interest of lasting peace. Past efforts to stabilize Liberia failed largely because the myriad armed factions all wanted an equal share of the political pie for their military efforts.

Stabilizing the revolving door politics

Bringing stability to the Liberian political system is another key challenge any long term peace plan will come up against. Gyude Bryant (never mind his chairmanship title) is his country's 7th president in a 13 year period. Since Samuel Doe's brutal murder in September 1990, the country has been ruled by a string of interim presidents: Amos Sawyer (1990-1994); Wilton Sankawulo (1995) Ruth Perry (1996); Moses Blah (2003); Gyude Bryant (present). Even Charles Taylor, who served the longest (six years), did not complete his first term of office. The revolving-door manner in which presidents have come and gone, some serving for no more than a year, indicates how unstable the country's political landscape has been in the course of the war.

The surprised selection of the politically green Gyude Bryant is the right step in the right direction. The country needs fresh faces with new ideas devoid of the poli-tricking of the past. This is important because Liberia's civilian politicians, who tend to have a longer life span than their counter parts elsewhere on the continent, never retire from politics. Having spent nearly thirty years on the Liberian political scene, Bacchus Matthews, Amos Sawyer, Togbah-Nah Tipotheh, Ellen Sirleaf, to name a few, are still around, still active in politics, and still interested in the presidency. The problem however is that many of these old guards have either run out of ideas or in the eyes of the Liberian public, are too tainted to be able to steer the country in a new direction. To move in a new direction the country needs to break from the past.

Civil society

Successive Liberian leaders were always aware of the potentials of a popular broad based movement for change, so they did everything they could to weaken and divide the country's civil society. Taylor, for example, co-opted some civil society leaders and forced into exile those who did not bootlick. In spite of this divide-and-rule tactics however a small but well networked civil society survived his reign of terror. Composed mainly of lawyers, students, women, clergy and a few journalists, this small group now offers the best platforms for pursuing constructive change in the country. The Catholic Church, headed by Bishop Michael Francis, is a very powerful institution. It is the only civil society organization that operates throughout the country.

In recent years Liberia's women, who make up fifty-one percent of the population, have also shaped the course of the country's peace process. In 1997 Mrs. Ruth Sando Perry became the first woman head of state in modern Africa. In her short stint in office, she successfully steered the country on a course towards peace and reconciliation. The women's movement has been very vocal and has provided an alternative critical voice to the misrule that has come to circumscribe Liberian politics. At great personal risks, they organized peaceful demonstrations and picketed strategic locations so as to get their message across to the warlords and politicians. The key challenge for the women's groups, as well as for the rest of Liberia's civil society is to remain united, non-partisan and non-violent.

Strong international leadership: United States?

Stabilizing Liberia will take strong international leadership. The United States is the natural choice for this role. This is not only for historical reasons, but also because current happenings in West Africa and around the globe warrant such an involvement. Contrary to popular notion the US has never really washed its hands off Liberia's crisis. In sheer monetary terms Uncle Sam has doled out more assistance than any other Western country. Between 1990 and 1995 Washington provided US$425 million in humanitarian relief and peacekeeping assistance. Most of the achievements of ECOMOG in the 1990's would not have been possible without US support. In 1996 for example, the Clinton administration provided ECOMOG with US $40 million In spite of this positive record however, close observers of the Liberian scene concur that the world's lone superpower could have done more to prevent or minimize the bloodshed. As stated elsewhere in the essay, it was US policies in the 1980's that helped create the conditions for the current crisis.

Why Liberia matters (to the United States)

Liberia has strong historical connections to the United States. The country's first president, J. J. Roberts, and his entire cabinet were American citizens, having been born and educated in the United States. Liberia's government structure, constitution, and flag, to name a few, are US institutions writ small. The link is even more revealing when one looks at the military and economic relations that have governed the two countries. During the First World War, in order to appease the United States, Liberia declared war on Germany even though the latter was a major trading partner. As a consequence Monrovia was shelled by a German U-boat. In World War II Liberia became a military base for the refueling and maintaining of US military aircraft carrying out bombing raids in North Africa and Europe. On the economic front, the sale of the country's rubber plantation to the Firestone Tire and Rubber Plantation of Ohio helped the United States break the British near dominance of this industry in the 1920's As a result the US poured millions of dollars into the country in order to shore up successive loyal regimes many of which, as has already been pointed out elsewhere in this essay, turned out to be corrupt and brutal.

Apart from the past, present global trends, such as the presence of Al-Qaeda in West Africa and US economic interests, also warrants the presence of American boots on the ground in Liberia. Al-Qaeda, America's arch enemy, has manifested an interest in the country. According to European and American investigators, the terror network in 2001 and 2002, paid Charles Taylor US $1 million to harbor senior terrorist operatives who oversaw a US $20 million diamond buying spree. The details of this link were published in an article by the Washington Post in December 2002. Also with the perennial instability in the Middle East reaching new heights, West Africa, because of its oil reserves, is increasingly becoming important to the United States. It is not surprising therefore that the Bush administration has decided to establish a naval base on Sao Tome to patrol the Gulf of Guinea. But as pointed out by the International Crisis Group in their April 2002 Report, Liberia holds the key to regional stability. The US attempt to extract oil and leave the sub-region to burn will backfire if the Liberian fire is not extinguished. In other words, it is also in America's short and long term security and economic interest to help solve the Liberian problem.

Redressing human right violations

The war in Liberia has been described as a war against civilians. All the factions have committed war crimes and other serious human rights abuses, including summary executions of scores of civilians, widespread rape of girls and women, and looting and burning of villages. A quick glance at the figures confirms the gravity of the impact of the carnage on the unarmed populace: 250,000 dead and 1.3 million displaced. The United Nations Geneva-based Commission on Human rights in an emergency report earlier this year estimates that at least half of the dead have been civilian non-combatants. Countless others have been subjected to various forms of degrading treatments.

Peace will not hold in Liberia until and unless justice is made an integral part of the process. A framework for accountability for violations of human rights and humanitarian law should be instituted with the aim of bringing to book the main culprits of the carnage. To this effect the UN indictment of Charles Taylor should not be dropped. As soon as possible, Taylor (who by the way is still meddling in Liberian politics in violation of his asylum terms) should be whisked to the Sierra Leone Special Court to answer to his war crimes charges. Letting him and his cohorts off the hook will surely set a bad precedence for international humanitarian and human rights law.

Conclusion

In this piece I have highlighted some key issues that I consider crucial to the Liberian peace process. Choking off the sources of support to the warring parties, dismantling the fighting machines, sanitizing the political system, revamping civil society, redressing human rights abuses, as well as the pro-active support of the US, are all key to the elusive Liberian peace. This list is by no means exhaustive, others such as: revamping the economy, rebuilding (or in some cases building) the infrastructure, creating job opportunities, rural development, reorganizing government bureaucracy to enhance efficiency and productivity, redressing the imbalance between rural Liberia and elitist Monrovia, bridging the gap between the rulers and the ruled, are no less important to establishing peace.

The deployment of the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world is a major step. Fresh from neighboring Sierra Leone where it successfully disarmed more than 42,000 combatants in record time, the world body should be able to bring some valuable lessons to bear on Liberia. The harsh reality however is that without the military muscle of the United States, and without the full support of the factions, the Mission will struggle.

Liberia's decent into chaos has been phenomenal. In 1978, the country was noted in the Guinness Book of World Records, as the most stable in Sub-Sahara Africa. Barely twenty years later, it is now one of the most unstable in the world, attracting arms, terrorists, and mercenaries from far and near. But as the Sierra Leone example has shown, every dark cloud has a silver lining. Raising Liberia out of the abyss is not impossible. With foresight, resources, and commitment, Africa's oldest democracy is capable of shedding its pariah status and once again occupying its rightful place amongst civilized nations.

Bibliography

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