The Victims Billed
By Tarty Teh

The Liberian government says its current domestic debt stands at over 120 million US dollars. The finance ministry’s annual report says more than 26 million US dollars of this amount represents debt government owed the defunct NPRAG. NPRAG is the National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government established by the defunct National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). The report said government owes private businesses a little over 42 million US dollars. It said government owes commercial banks over 24 million US dollars . . .

As citizens, our level of perceived ineptitude and perhaps stupidity makes all this possible. Okay, for the sake of argument, let us suppose that we owe 26 million US dollars to the organization that killed 220,000 of us in seven years of war that netted Charles Taylor the presidency of Liberia. If we make that payment, then from whom do we get a receipt which would prove that we satisfied our obligation? Would we get that receipt from President Charles Taylor as head of that outfit that killed us and now terrorizes the rest?

How did we incur this debt? Well, that question was very much on the mind of the finance ministry when it inserted the following line it its annual report, which the Star Radio picked up as "The [Finance] Ministry’s annual report said most of its domestic debt files were destroyed during the civil conflict." There, again, we can’t be sure who destroyed the files. But that’s not even the issue as far as the Taylor government is concerned.

For an outfit that never admitted defeat in any battle throughout the seven-year campaign it waged against the citizens of Liberia for power, saying ULIMO or any of the other groups that took up arms against the NPFL or the NPRAG destroyed its filing system would be Taylor’s equivalent of surrender. And so the source of the destruction of the debt files remains nebulous and treated with the equally ambiguous passive verb construction – "were destroyed" – without seeking to place blames.

In a ransom situation, you are promised something precious that was yours to begin with, but was taken away from you by force. And so you pay whatever the criminals ask for, and hope that they will do as they promised you. With extortion, there is no immediate end in sight while you are threatened by revelation of some indiscretion you still want to keep secret. You buy time by paying the extortionist. So how do we file what the Taylor government is doing to us? We are promised nothing for the 26 million US dollars we are told we owe an organization that technically does not exist.

These people don’t even bother to make sense. Making valid arguments seems like too much trouble when dealing with the stupid people they know we are. So how are we going to raise the 26 million US dollars? And can we get some guarantee that this will truly settle whatever the non-existent NPFL and NPRAG deem as our obligation to it from the war that took 220,000 mostly innocent lives? And can we at least insist on a receipt this time? We will keep the receipt this time; so it won’t get "destroyed" in any future conflict.

Or, can we get rid of President Charles Taylor and save at least 26 million US dollars? We can even give him the 26 million US dollars, if that’s what it will take for him to leave us alone. We can pay him by installments. Say in eight years at three million US dollars a year.

A great many Liberians are worried and angered by these ceaseless insults. But we are not completely together about what to do about the criminals who continue to insult us. One thing is for sure. President Taylor has united Liberians more than any president in our history. We are united in anger and frustration. We only need to unite in action. – Tarty Teh [Washington, D.C., March 6, 2000]