American Warlord (14 page)

Eight years into the war, in 1997, Taylor finally achieved the nominal purpose of his revolution: to conduct a democratic election. The goal had seemed laudable in 1985, when General Quiwonkpa stormed over the border a month after Samuel Doe rigged the polls and stole the presidency, or even four years later, when Charles Taylor appeared in the bush as the new standard-bearer of Quiwonkpa’s revolution. But the path to the polls had been costly for Liberians. Conservative estimates placed the loss of life at 80,000, while the United Nations offered a broader estimate of 150,000 to 250,000 dead.
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Few survived without suffering. Of Liberia’s 2.3 million people, nearly one-third had fled the country for refuge, while 1.8 million had been displaced. The conflict had metastasized to nearly a half-dozen factions and subfactions fighting for dominance, while Liberia’s interim governments failed to secure anything approaching a monopoly on the use of force within its borders. Corruption, looting, and war profiteering among the Nigerian-backed peacekeeping forces only served to aggravate the conflict. Between 1990 and 1995, the combatants entered into ten separate peace agreements. The latest peace accord, the Abuja Agreement signed in August 1995, laid out a timetable for a cease-fire and demobilization program that would lead into elections. During that interim period, a five-member Council of State, a temporary ruling body meant to act as an executive branch representing all parties to the conflict, would govern the nation. The council had little mandate beyond holding the country together through the cease-fire and disarmament process leading into elections. Liberians danced in the streets to celebrate the inauguration of the council as a harbinger of the official end of the civil war, but the animus among warlords remained.

By October 1996, Chucky had moved with his father to the capital in preparation for the election. Charles Taylor had finally reached the Executive Mansion, but not on the terms he would have liked. Total control of the country still eluded him. He and five others—including politicians and his warlord rivals—had been chosen as members of the Council of State. The council was, effectively, a political Band-Aid, which the African powers prayed would not come off prior to the election scheduled for the summer of 1997. Taylor was assigned an office on the building’s sixth floor.
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Despite the cease-fire instituted at Abuja, the capital remained tense in October. Months earlier the city had erupted in a spasm of violence between Taylor’s forces and rival factions, referred to as the “April 6” war. The battle had left its mark throughout the capital and prompted the evacuation of the U.S. embassy. While Charles Taylor referred to the event as only a “fracas,” it had in fact been a humanitarian disaster that stunned the international community.
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More than half of the city’s 850,000 residents fled during the fighting, 3,000 people were killed over the course of one month, and thousands evacuated the country.

After the fighting wound down, the African peacekeeping force fanned out into the countryside to begin the delicate process of disarming the factions. It had little success, as the factions opted to hide their weapons rather than turn them over.
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Liberia’s experiment in power sharing had failed to stop the violence completely, but two of the most powerful faction leaders, Taylor and Alhaji Kromah, remained willing to stake their political futures on elections and hoped that they could persuade their militias to stand down.

Once Chucky moved to the capital with his father, he could no longer attend school at Cuttington. Taylor enrolled him at the College of West Africa, Monrovia’s top private high school.
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CWA, as students called it, was not a college but the nation’s oldest and most prestigious high school. It had been founded in 1839, eight years before Liberia declared its nationhood. The building stood on Ashmun Street, at the edge of a bluff overlooking Providence Island, where Liberia’s American settlers first encamped, and the green estuaries threaded into the Mesurado River. The school had educated presidents, chief justices, and leaders of industry. It was a fitting choice for the son of the political leader widely viewed as the most powerful man in Liberia. Whether it could educate a child with a past as troubled as Chucky’s was a separate question. At first glance Chucky was indistinguishable from many of the boy students arriving at school in pressed white short-sleeve oxfords and navy pants. Many who met him saw a natural intellect and curiosity. His father hoped he would focus and finally complete his education in Monrovia.

Up until that point, Chucky had never lived in Monrovia. The capital was significantly smaller than Orlando, or Accra for that matter, but compared to Gbarnga, it was a metropolis. At that time the city was a battle zone gone quiet. “In town,” as Liberians refer to the city’s central business district, bullet holes and blast burns decorated government buildings, many of which remained windowless and without power. Though the streets were paved, mounds of trash piled up along the gutters, rotting in the sun. Throughout the capital, residents were required to pass through barbed-wire and sandbagged checkpoints manned by peacekeeping soldiers who peered through makeshift fortifications, machine guns trained on the horizon. The family moved into a large home near the U.S. embassy in the Mamba Point neighborhood.
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It was the city’s most cloistered community, set out on a peninsula and divided from downtown by Monrovia’s highest hilltop.

Even as he arrived in the nation’s capital with his father, Chucky’s thoughts drifted back home to Orlando. He would disappear into his father’s office and use his satellite phone to dial the United States, often calling Lynn.
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Though they hadn’t seen each other for nearly two years, she still considered it a long-distance relationship. Her life had changed significantly since Chucky fled Orlando: her relationship with her parents had become strained, and she had left home to finish high school, attending the public Clarkstown South High School in West Nyack, New York. Their opinion of Chucky had not changed—Lynn later recalled that her mother would make a “Korean sound of disgust” at the mention of his name—and they didn’t support her continued interest in a boy whom it seemed unlikely she’d ever see again.

The secret phone calls continued for months. As complex as the circumstances surrounding their relationship were, for Lynn it was simple: they were high school sweethearts. Like any other teens, the hours they spent on the phone together disappeared. “I don’t know what we would talk about,” she said.

There was one topic they would always return to: when they could finally see each other again. Returning to the States was not an option for Chucky. The charges in Orlando continued to hang over his head. Lynn was focused on finishing high school—a trip to Africa seemed beyond the realm of possibility. And Monrovia, as much of an improvement as it was on Gbarnga, was far from the ideal backdrop for daydreams of their reunion.

Chucky faced his own challenge of fitting into a decidedly foreign environment. When he first arrived at CWA, the other students couldn’t help but notice him. It wasn’t simply his uncanny resemblance to his father or the fact that at nearly twenty, he was only entering the eleventh grade: unlike any of the other students, he arrived on campus with an armed security detail in tow.
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Since his son had been in Liberia, Taylor had posted one of his personal security guards to him. In many cases, these minders weren’t fighters but rather old-timers whom Chucky was less likely to order around, such as a jaundiced man in his forties named Ceasley Roberts or simply CR.
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He was a civilian, but he was always armed with a pistol. The guard and his weapon were not welcome at CWA, though the school administration could do little to forbid it. Taylor’s concerns for his son’s safety were inarguable, yet even in Monrovia, the presence of an armed figure in the classroom was disruptive.

One day at school a classmate pointed this out. “Why do you have to bring your security on campus?” the student asked.

This may have been an innocent question, but Chucky didn’t interpret it that way. He was the new kid at a new school—this might be a challenge to test him. Long before arriving in Liberia, he had had experience in tough neighborhoods where backing down from confrontations wasn’t an option. But politics also shaped his actions: his father was among the most feared men in the nation, and this high school student was taking a warlord’s son to task in public. Chucky’s response would reflect on his father, whether he shrank from the challenge or confronted it.

“None of your business,” he shot back, slapping the student across the face.

The administration immediately suspended Chucky. Typically students faced expulsion for fighting, but the school hesitated to go that far with Chucky. There was an inherent risk in confronting Taylor about the behavior of his child. Instead, the administration sent him a form letter detailing the incident, explaining that his son would be allowed to return to school after his suspension. Chucky’s father did not take issue with the suspension. In fact, the principal recalled, “he welcomed it.” The administrators were relieved that they hadn’t provoked Taylor. As for Chucky, the principal said, “he never came back.”

Indeed, Chucky would never go to school again. He was restless to return to Orlando, though the possibility of doing so remained remote. He eventually called Lynn with an offer: he would fly her to visit him in Liberia.
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She was only seventeen and had never traveled farther than the Caribbean, but there was nothing stopping her. Monrovia was a world unknown to her, while Chucky was only beginning to find his place there.

On the morning of Halloween 1996, Charles Taylor stepped out of his residence in Mamba Point to his waiting motorcade.
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The Council of State was set to meet later that morning, and he intended to arrive at his office in time to put in a few hours of work. As he prepared to depart, he noticed within the assembled convoy an armored Peugeot that he’d been given as a gift. The vehicle was designed for the charge to ride in the front, while the bodyguards sat in the rear, positioned to return fire in the event of an attack.

“Listen,” he told his driver, “I want to ride the Peugeot today because we haven’t been using it.”

Taylor’s aide-de-camp, Gen. Jackson Mani, a Gambian dressed in full military uniform, climbed into the rear, and the convoy set off toward the Executive Mansion, a secured area controlled by African peacekeepers. Any outside security forces entering the compound were required to surrender their weapons. After Doe’s capture and murder, which had taken place directly under the nose of the Nigerian peacekeepers, the members of the council had reason to be wary of this protocol but complied nonetheless.

That morning Taylor’s convoy was tracked from the moment it pulled onto the mansion’s grounds. Assassins perched on the sixth floor watched his Peugeot drive up to the building’s entrance as they prepared their assault. Taylor and several members of his entourage, including General Mani, entered the building and rode the elevator to Taylor’s office.

The moment the elevator’s doors opened, the group was met with an explosion. Gunfire rattled through the hallways as Mani shoved Taylor into a nearby doorway. Unarmed, the rest of the entourage fled in panic. Several were cut down by the gunfire. Others leaped the six stories to the pavement below, the impact snapping their legs. Taylor found himself in a bathroom, hiding inside a bathtub. He watched through the doorway as the gunmen descended on the general and opened fire, killing him.

By the time Taylor’s security forces fought their way into the mansion to rescue him, five members of the entourage had been killed. The assassins had disappeared. The security forces found Taylor, holding a rifle, escorting a wounded Nigerian peacekeeper off the floor.

While there had been several attempts on Taylor’s life, none had come so close to achieving its aim. Taylor believed he had survived only because the assassins had mistaken General Mani, who had departed the backseat of the Peugeot, for their target. Rattled but otherwise unharmed, Taylor drove directly to a nearby radio station to assure his followers that he was alive.

The incident effectively put an end to the Council of State experiment. The group would never again convene at the mansion. Taylor suspected that George Boley, the leader of one the rival Krahn faction, was responsible. (Nearly fifteen years later American officials seeking to deport him from the United States would accuse Boley of General Mani’s killing in an American immigration court.
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At the time, however, the U.S. embassy suspected Alhaji Kromah.) The identity mattered little. Taylor could never feel safe with any power achieved through compromise.

The attack also had implications for Chucky. If his father were killed and his security forces crumbled or defected, he too could be targeted. He drew his own lesson from the attack: the old-guard NPFL security forces were not up to the task of protecting his father. After eight years of fighting, more than a dozen peace accords, and the mantle of legitimacy that the Council of State provided, his father’s security detail appeared to have gone soft.

“A lot of those guys I see around my father they smile too much,” he observed to his uncle Cindor Reeves.
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“I’ve been thinking that I want to organize a group that would be really mean.”

Facing an indefinite future in Liberia, he looked to place himself within the closest ring of his father’s power. The stakes were different from anything he had previously known. The United States, and even Ghana, had rule of law; for the juvenile delinquent Chucky, that meant a navigable world of bail, court dates, and maybe jail time. Liberia had nothing resembling that. The only law was power, and the terms were simple: life and death. The only fact working in Chucky’s favor was that Charles Taylor remained the most powerful man in the country.