A Non Profit Organization dedicated to Liberia
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A Non Profit Organization dedicated to Liberia |
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| The article below appeared in the Washington Post in August. This is
an unedited version. A week before the Liberian elections, a priest in the capital of Monrovia laid out his country's politics for me in terms as unshaded as the pure white of his vestment:  The city where I was going--Gbarnga, Charles Taylor's rebel headquarters--was
full of former National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fighters. They would
try to steal the vote. This could not be allowed. "Evil is evil," he
said. "Evil can never triumph over good".July 19, the impossible, according to the priest's reckoning, happened. Taylor, who started Liberia's civil war in 1989 with an invasion from Ivory Coast, was elected with 75 percent of the vote. A man whose fighters looted, raped and murdered took the presidency. And he did it freely and fairly, according to the judgment of international observer teams, including the 30-member Friends of Liberia delegation on which I served. Like the priest, I was unprepared for the outcome. In 1985, as a  Peace Corps Volunteer
in the West African nation, I had watched dictator Samuel Doe rig an election
and, when challenged, send his soldiers to massacre civilians. In 1994, I
had returned to the country as a journalist to find a new oppressor--fighters
from an ever-multiplying number of factions who waged war against the general
populace.In early July, I departed Washington naively believing that Liberians would reject the three faction leaders on the ballot as they had rejected Doe 12 years before. I did not understand the breadth of the changes wrought by seven years of suffering--200,000 dead, two-thirds of the population of 3 million driven from their homes--or the depth of the gulf between the educated elite and the illiterate masses. "Choose someone with clean hands," read a billboard in Monrovia for one of Taylor's opponents. In the eyes of the average Liberian it was not so clear. In early 1994, people in Belefanai, the town northwest of Gbarnga where I lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer, had told me how NPFL occupiers beat and robbed them, taking the little food farmers managed to grow as soon as it was harvested. I returned expecting to find people ready to cast their votes against Taylor, forgetting that in between Mandingo fighters of the United Liberation Movement for Democracy in Liberia (ULIMO) had visited, killing and burning.  All
around Belefanai, I saw the signs of ULIMO's occupation: squares of rubble
where mud and stick houses had stood, shattered walls of cement buildings abandoned
to the forest, the hearts of villages missing. Most of the townspeople escaped
the destruction along a safe corridor provided by Taylor's fighters. In the
process, their feeling about the faction leader changed into a strange kind
of affection. "The NPFL saved us," a woman told me. It was not just
in Belefanai. All over Bong County, those who had suffered at the hands of
ULIMO and the other factions that temporarily pushed back the NPFL viewed Taylor
as comparatively benign."The devil you know is better than the angel you do not," they said. Taylor's National Patriotic Party (NPP) turned the saying into a campaign slogan. To the outside world a warlord, Taylor was to those who lived under him "the papaye"--a respected, if not loved, father. Since his conquest of most of rural Liberia in 1990, Taylor had been running for president, with billboards in his Gbarnga stronghold and titles that seemed to indicate he'd already won. Radio equipment captured in a 1990 attack on Monrovia gave Taylor the only station capable of reaching the whole country. He also had the biggest campaign fund, financed by the sale of timber, rubber, and minerals during his years as unelected ruler of Greater Liberia. And he had an unmatched organization, built to run a rebel army and government, and in 1997 devoted fully to his campaign. Along the main paved road from Monrovia to Gbarnga every community, no matter how small, had an NPP office. Off the pavement, on roads barely passable by 4-wheel drive, every community had at least one Charles Taylor poster. For people who could not read or write--65 percent of Liberians nationwide and a higher percentage in rural areas--seeing a picture was the key to understanding a ballot on which candidate photos as well as names appeared. In the absence of other voter education, illiterate people looked to representatives from Taylor's party to show them how to cast ballots.  After the election, representatives of losing parties and some journalists charged
that illiterate people were herded through the polling sites by Taylor supporters
who made sure they cast votes for the NPP. On election day, I only saw poll workers
and soldiers of the West African peacekeeping help voters make marks next to
the candidate of their choice. Where such assistance was lacking, some people
stood confused in the cardboard booths, inked thumbs raised over upside-down
ballots, eyes searching in vain for someone to guide them. Others carefully counted
down the ballot--seven from the top or seven from the bottom--to Taylor's spot
in the middle of the list.Though they had trouble deciphering the ballot, the illiterate knew which candidate they wanted. On the edge of survival, they had a keen sense of self interest. "We want one leader," they had said, again and again in the week before the vote. "We want the war to end." Taylor, leader of the strongest faction, had the power to keep the peace if he won and the power to break it if he lost. Taylor, the wealthiest candidate, had the money to give them something tangible for their vote, like a bag of rice. Of the 12 other candidates, two were faction leaders, both weaker than Taylor. Others were former members of the hated Doe regime. Many Doe opponents had joined an alliance of seven parties, but that dwindled to two as each struggled for supremacy. The candidate of one of the breakaway parties, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who left her job as Africa director for the U.N. Development Program to run, was Taylor's strongest challenger. Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated banker and a dissident under Doe, backed the NPFL from abroad in the early stages of Taylor's invasion before withdrawing her support as the fight to topple the dictator degenerated into ethnic killing.  During the campaign she spoke of civilians taking back control of their country. "We
want to carry the message to every county, every hamlet, every village that people
can be free from fear now," she said in an interview broadcast on one of
the FM stations heard only in Monrovia. "The greatest challenge is to build
the institutions to ensure that this will never happen again. I will do what
I have to to protect the rights and lives of the people." Words like that
sounded good to educated Liberians and the West. But they offered little assurance
to the uneducated masses who cared little and only wanted to be left alone to
eke out a living.On election day they rose before dawn and walked miles to vote for Taylor. Eberta Doegar was one of them. First in line among the voters in Zowienta, southeast of Gbarnga, she reached the polling site at midnight, seven hours before it opened. "We stay long running. We tired with it," she explained. "We want peace." Late on the afternoon of July 19, I stood in the Lutheran mission school auditorium in Belefanai where 12 years before I had watched townspeople cast the votes Doe would burn and dump as he manufactured a victory for himself. From the walls, Rambo-like figures drawn by the ULIMO fighters who had terrorized the town watched the proceedings. Slowly, reverently, the poll workers unsealed the ballot boxes and poured the marked papers onto tables. Slowly, reverently, they unfolded each ballot, examined it to see whether it was valid, and announced the vote, displaying the marked paper. They counted 590 valid ballots, most marked with the smudge of a thumb. All of them were for Taylor. On the road back to Gbarnga, the sun behind us lit the clouds in a deepening blue sky. All along the way, people walked, cutlasses in their hands, bags woven from raffia slung over their shoulders, loads balanced on their heads. Every few miles, a field burned into the forest showed a new growth of rice. In hamlets once deserted, people relaxed on bamboo benches outside whitewashed houses decorated with mud handprints and designs. The old pre-war rhythm of life had returned. Not so in Monrovia, about 140 miles to the south. There the streets were oddly quiet as people stayed home to listen to the election results on the radio. Long before the ballots were fully counted, it was clear that Taylor would win, and expatriates and the educated made grave predictions about the country's future. First, Johnson-Sirleaf's party, then the party of Alhaji Kromah, the leader of ULIMO, charged fraud. At the main checkpoint leading into the city, vehicles backed up as peacekeepers, aware that losers might resort to violence, searched for weapons.  It
was all too easy to believe the worst in a city of a million, most driven there
by fear, that had been overrun by fighters three times since 1989. At night
Monrovia, whose power plant had been destroyed, descended into near-complete
darkness. Daylight illuminated a scarred city sprinkled with ruined and roofless
buildings.For those who hadn't supported Taylor--a significant number of people in Monrovia--his victory was bitter. It was as if they had been in prison for seven years and then, on the day of their announced release had been sent back to their cells. "I refused to be a refugee. I waited for things to change," said a young man who had spent the war in the capital. "Now it hurts. I want to leave. I don't want to live under the leader of a warring faction." Journalists covering a press conference at which yet another international observer group gave its approval to the election expected the relative freedom they had enjoyed would soon come under attack: Hadn't the men Taylor appointed as justice minister and police director during the transitional government both intimidated the press? Less than two weeks before the election, Taylor himself had threatened the head of the Independent Elections Commission, warning Henry Andrews in radio broadcasts that if he postponed the vote "not even the angels from heaven will save him." "The people will go wild if these elections are postponed," he said. "God will strike anyone who tampers with these elections." However, the days following the announcement of Taylor's win brought conciliatory statements. The president-elect, inaugurated Aug. 2, spoke of reuniting the nation, including opposition parties in his government, and respecting human rights. Will President Taylor make good on his promises?  I
think of a young man I met in one of the town's gutted by ULIMO. He was too old
to be called a boy but his face still possessed a child's innocence. His shirt
was red--the NPFL's color--and around his neck he wore the tooth of a leopard
he said he had killed and carried to Taylor.He was an ex-fighter. Young men like him had cut babies from pregnant women's bellies, burned old people alive, and at a pre-election rally for Taylor in Monrovia chanted, "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, and I will vote for him!" The young man asked me to see how the townspeople suffered. He took me to his sister, a toddler wasted to nothing but a bloated belly and skin sunk over bones. When I left the money he knew I would give, he promised to take her to a doctor. Then he stared at me as if I had been sent to him with some kind of message. He asked for my address and said he wanted to go back to school. I want to believe that the young man used the money to get help for his sister. I want to believe that he will give up killing for school books. In the same way, I want to believe that under Taylor Liberians will live free. The Liberian people have voted this man their leader. It is a perilous choice, yet perhaps the only route to peace. Karen Lange klange@ngs.org |