American Warlord (10 page)

President Bush, ultimately, made the final decision about the U.S. role in the rapidly deteriorating situation. Initially, he supported sending Cohen to enable Doe’s departure, but then he began to waver. “After learning that the President might be having second thoughts about not sending Hank Cohen to Liberia, I spoke to [National Security Adviser] Brent [Scowcroft] and outlined the reasons why you and we thought it would be useful,” Baker wrote, outlining the need for Doe to “stand down peacefully” and the eagerness to avoid any sort of American military intervention.
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“While we cannot know whether Taylor will be better or worse than Doe in the long run, we can be sure that in the short run a bloody siege of Monrovia will not play well for Liberians or Americans.”

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Liberian opposition leaders in the diaspora gathered to take a position on the growing rebellion.
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Taylor did not belong to the opposition establishment—insofar as one existed—and as the distinct possibility of the government’s collapse loomed, expats in the United States organized to have a separate voice. The group, calling itself the Association for Constitutional Democracy in Liberia (ACDL), included Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Then living in Alexandria, Virginia, Johnson Sirleaf had met Taylor in Paris, months earlier, in a meeting brokered by a mutual friend who was active in diaspora politics, Tom Woewiyu.

Several differing accounts of this meeting have emerged, but none of the parties denies it occurred, in a hotel restaurant near Charles de Gaulle Airport.
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Taylor and Johnson Sirleaf had not seen each other since their first encounter nearly a decade earlier, at the Ministry of Finance. While she had not had time for him then, she was willing, on the prodding of Woewiyu, to meet with the man who was now poised to launch a revolution. Taylor testified that Johnson Sirleaf was an “old revolutionary” who’d had a direct hand in Quiwonkpa’s failed 1985 coup—a fact that she denied—and their meeting served to secure funding for Taylor’s trainees from the Liberian exiles. Taylor brought with him photographs of the recruits, as proof that he wasn’t simply a hustler. Johnson Sirleaf offered to raise money, according to Taylor, and to have Woewiyu act as a courier, bringing the funds from the United States to West Africa.

Johnson Sirleaf’s recollection differs. She wrote in her memoir that while she did meet with Taylor, he did not make a positive impression. As she tells it, when she was ordering breakfast, Taylor admonished her, “The money you spend to pay for breakfast you could just give to us.” She handed Taylor the money she had with her. “It was clear to me that whatever their plans, they were not going well at the moment,” she wrote. But Woewiyu prevailed upon her to reserve judgment. “I trusted him and felt I owed his passionate belief in Taylor at least the benefit of the doubt.”

While Johnson Sirleaf made no mention of it in her memoir, she eventually acknowledged to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that her support had been more substantial. She admitted to providing $10,000 to Taylor through the ACDL, but that figure too has been called into question. The third party at the meeting, Woewiyu, would eventually break his silence about Johnson Sirleaf’s early support for the NPFL and offer a “conservative estimate” of $500,000 raised through the ACDL.

Following the Christmas 1989 invasion, Johnson Sirleaf explained that the U.S. State Department had asked for her and the ACDL to contact Taylor and urge restraint. The group decided they would provide the rebels with a small sum of money to purchase food and relief supplies. (Taylor insists that Johnson Sirleaf’s role was not as limited as she has described, saying in testimony before the Special Court, “Ellen is lying, and she knows that she is lying, okay. Ellen was in America raising money.… Do you take a government by relief supplies? Nonsense.”)

In May 1990 Johnson Sirleaf crossed rebel lines to visit Taylor’s fighters in Gborplay, a town where the NPFL had set up its headquarters.
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She was one of the first opposition leaders to return to Liberia following the invasion. By her account, she was distressed by what she saw: hundreds of male and female soldiers “all with blank, bloodshot eyes,” “huge and frightening guns,” and a “heavily guarded Taylor.”
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“Charles Taylor knew that he was going to win,” she recalled. “And implicit in his confident, boasting rhetoric was the fact that he would do whatever it took to make his belief a reality.”

Not long afterward, in early July 1990, the war arrived in Monrovia, tearing at the very fabric of Liberian society.
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Thousands of refugees streamed out of the city to avoid the fighting. The civilians who remained found themselves caught between the two factions, Prince Johnson’s INPFL approaching the city from the north, Taylor’s NPFL from the south, and Doe’s ragged and hunted government force caught in between. Effectively under siege, the city became host to a humanitarian crisis. There was little food or protection from the fighting; Doe’s control over the capital—and country—shrank to a few blocks surrounding the Executive Mansion.

That month several hundred civilians sought refuge in St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, a large chapel along Monrovia’s main thoroughfare. The church, a short drive from the Executive Mansion, is located directly across the street from a popular hotel. According to witnesses, soldiers loyal to Doe entered the church’s compound and set upon the refugees with knives and machetes, then eventually opened fire into the crowd.
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While exact numbers of the dead are unverifiable, the U.S. embassy reported immediately afterward that “the 186 persons killed in the massacre at the Lutheran Church remain where they fell. After six days, the bodies can no longer be moved, and MSF [Médecins sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders] Belgian doctors hope to find means to blanket the place with a caustic solution or to burn the bodies which would probably entail burning the church itself.”
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U.S. policy had shifted to reflect the violence on the ground: the priority of the Bush administration was to now minimize bloodshed and damage to the nation’s infrastructure. The most direct path to this objective was not to throw more support behind Samuel Doe—who had demonstrated little regard for civilians—but to work with Charles Taylor. In the background, the administration negotiated a transfer of power to the rebel leader.

That summer, as rebels closed in on Doe, the United States took on the role of mediating the transfer of power. Herman Cohen had negotiated an exile agreement for Doe to receive political asylum in Togo, should he step down, but ensuring that Doe made it to Togo alive was not a priority for the Bush administration.
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One of the primary American negotiators, a political officer in the U.S. embassy to Ivory Coast, outlined in chilling terms Taylor’s seizure of power in Monrovia.
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In a transcript of the July 3, 1990, radio conversation between Taylor and an unidentified U.S. embassy official from Abidjan, which the Bush administration’s National Security Council declassified, the American made clear to Taylor that Doe’s personal safety did not have to be guaranteed should the rebels move on Monrovia: “We want to clarify a message we sent this morning. Doe’s spokesmen have asked for protection for Doe’s followers, not for Doe himself, as a condition for his resignation. Are you clear on that distinction?”
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Taylor responded, “That sounds reasonable.”

“If Doe resigns, would you be in a position to cease hostilities?” the official asked.

“Almost immediately,” Taylor replied. “If Doe resigns and names his speaker of the House of Representatives now to hold over for the next few hours, we will cease hostilities and set up an interim government. I even intend to have a surprise announcement for the world that we intend to stick to the process of free elections at the soonest possible time.”

None of this came to pass. The Bush administration scuttled it, believing that greater involvement would lead to greater responsibility. Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates saw little existing responsibility of the United States toward the Liberian people and “was adamantly against us doing anything in Liberia,” according to Cohen.

Taylor’s path to the presidency in Liberia was also obstructed by the army of his former commander Prince Yormie Johnson. Johnson hardly presented the image of a disciplined military leader: he entertained journalists and onlookers with renditions of the reggae spiritual “By the Rivers of Babylon,” complete with his own backing band; he also executed looters and fired into civilian vehicles with little warning.
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At an impromptu meeting with the commander of a newly arrived Nigerian peacekeeping force, he ambushed Doe’s security detail, capturing the president after his men had been gunned down. In one of the most macabre moments of the war, the gruesome torture of President Doe, in the hours leading up to his death, was chronicled on video.
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Johnson oversaw the episode, sitting by nonchalantly drinking a Budweiser and trying to raise the U.S. embassy on a radio, as a shirtless and bloodied Doe begged for his life.

Doe’s murder threw the U.S. negotiation into disarray. Taylor believed the Americans—in particular Cohen—had misled him. As a Nigerian-backed peacekeeping force established control over the capital, Taylor found all his momentum squandered. Following Doe’s death, a joint offensive between Johnson’s forces and the African peacekeepers pushed Taylor’s army back into the interior. The war ground to a stalemate as his comparably ragtag force now faced off against conventional forces from Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal, including devastating airpower launched from an airfield in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
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Taylor had been reduced from the heir to executive power in Liberia to a warlord sidelined by history. He was forced to negotiate a peace between himself and Johnson, while the larger, better-equipped peacekeeping force chipped away at his ranks and territorial control. Taylor could not acknowledge to his remaining loyal fighters that he’d capitulated to their rivals.
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In the summer of 1992, when his son visited, he was preparing his defining offensive: Operation Octopus, an attack that would encircle Monrovia and drive out the international peacekeepers in hopes of finally seizing power over the country.
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Though Chucky was likely too young to realize it, he had arrived at a decisive moment in his father’s career. Taylor was powerful, yet he didn’t have the influence to force compliance among his own fighters. For one thing, his half-Americo identity remained a political liability. Furthermore, the commanders who had helped him win vast swaths of Liberian territory had their own economic interests and had used the lull in fighting to build their own small empires, trading in timber, diamonds, and coffee. This business model worked well in sustaining Taylor’s war machine, but it allowed him little flexibility to negotiate for anything other than total control of the country, since any compromise would likely threaten his loyalists’ economic interests. One commenter at the time called Taylor a “prisoner of his own dream.”
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As tenuous as Taylor’s hold on power was, he remained in control of Taylorland when his son arrived for the first time. Pine Hills was hardly Mayberry, but Chucky was clearly not accustomed to life in this new environment, where electricity and running water were luxuries rather than essentials. A cousin from Arthington who met Chucky for the first time that summer, Koisee Garmo, marveled at the bizarre contrast of this American boy staying with his father in this environment.
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Despite his surroundings, Chucky at first behaved very much like an American child. “The war was going,” Garmo said, but Chucky “was at home watching TV. Eating cornflakes.”

Eventually, Chucky began venturing beyond his father’s compound without his mother’s knowledge. One of Taylor’s confidants was given responsibility for the American child, and the two would drive into the bush outside Gbarnga. Later that summer Chucky ventured even farther from the interim capital, following his half sister Zoe and her boyfriend, a fighter named Bill Horace, to Bong Mines, an iron-oremining town halfway between Gbarnga and Monrovia, on the front lines where fighting flared in the spring and summer of 1992.
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Horace had a reputation for brutality that stood out even among Taylor’s rebels. He served as a commander of a contingent of Taylor fighters called the “Marine Division,” overseeing a sprawling area of operations in Grand Bassa and Maryland County surrounding the port city of Buchanan. In a civil war characterized by atrocities, the Marine Division carried a singular reputation for depredations. As one of Taylor’s generals would explain more than a decade later to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “If the Marine pass somewhere you will know … because of the flies.… the whole NPFL was afraid of them, even the Charles Taylor was afraid of them.… The Marine was the ones that brought the wickedness to the people.”
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Another member of the unit told the commission, “We don’t take prisoners for they instructed us not to do so.”
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The unit’s rules of engagement were less rules than a license “to kill anybody and destroy anything,” he testified. In the middle of all this violence, Horace became known for a signature act. “He was in the habit of killing the crucifix way,” one former fighter said, describing how Horace would mount victims on makeshift crosses.
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News filtered back to his father’s inner circle that Chucky had been venturing toward the edge of Taylor’s territory. As one frontline fighter recounted, these trips went beyond a teenage boy exploring the lurid world of violence on the fringe of his father’s area of control; he used the trips as an opportunity to join in on the action. “Chucky would get access to the front lines and use guns,” he said.

While Chucky will not acknowledge his experiences with Horace that summer, his appearance drew attention among Taylor’s fighters. A Marine Division fighter, Morris Padmore, who would later implicate himself in a series of massacres of civilians, testified to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the American boy. Chucky was naïve but fascinated. At one point he asked for the chance to kill a prisoner, Padmore said, and had his wish granted.