A Parting Gift for President Taylor
By Tarty Teh

The way we lost the 1989 Liberian civil war with rebel leader Charles Taylor is that the removal of Samuel Doe as President of Liberia was the only issue on which the elements consisting of the resistance had anything approaching unanimity. When Doe was disposed of, motives promptly began to vary from group to group, and there were devious and vicious subplots among the originators of the idea of getting rid of President Doe.

The originators were Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer and Mrs. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The two created an organization called the Association for Constitutional Democracy in Liberia (ACDL) through which they raised the seed money for launching Charles Taylor on his mission of shocking the Liberian population with death and destruction.

The originators of the Liberian civil war still remain within striking distance of the center of power in Liberia while we search for ways to undo their creation. They have like-minded collaborators anchored permanently in Monrovia in case a president drops dead. But we cannot kill President Charles Taylor with wishes, and I am not even sure what problem killing him would solve.

My fear, however, is that – as in the case of President Doe – we may make the removal of Taylor our preoccupation only to find ourselves without a plan beyond Taylor, as was the case in post-Doe Liberia. In fact, after Doe, one person – from among those who engineered the civil war – saw his own plans bear fruit. That person was Dr. Amos Sawyer. He wanted to be President of Liberia. He became president of Liberia.

A pattern became obvious when Taylor became the next president of Liberia from the ranks of those who planned the civil war as a means of supplanting Doe with themselves. And so even the slow learners among us can now figure out that Mrs. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is the next logical person to be president of Liberia, if we choose to let this bizarre logic run its course.

Changing the course of history is a new course in civic awareness for the majority of Liberians who avoided conflict by remaining docile for 130 years of our nationhood. But this time around the Liberian people seem willing not only to learn from history but to change its course. Still, it is quite a leap – from docility to aggressive pursuit of guaranteed rights. And no one knows this more than those who consider the leadership of Liberia as their birthright.

This, at least partly, explains why the leaders of ACDL have easily shaken off the loss of 220,000 Liberian lives as inconsequential. That loss may seem monumental to the average Liberian, but to people like Amos Sawyer and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, this level of destruction of lives is only incidental to the attainment of their goal of ruling Liberia. Of course Amos Sawyer and Ellen Johson-Sirleaf are not the immediate danger we face – they are a distant threat, but threat all the same. We have yet to deal with what they created – Charles Taylor. How can we fear the creature but take no caution against its creators?

When we have weakened President Charles Taylor sufficiently, negotiations will be offered as a means of de-escalation of the crisis. That will not be an unreasonable request of us. But negotiations naturally entail concessions. We ourselves once proposed negotiations only because our fear of death was greater than Taylor’s fear of adding to the toll.

Perhaps Taylor draws comfort from the fact that we have yet to convict him of a single crime. For all the crimes that we have charged Taylor with, we have not proved our case in court, let alone found him guilty. So, if we expect to negotiate with President Taylor, we must have a deal in mind. If, for instance, we agree to his conditional departure but leave the rest of his government intact, then he may be able to exercise just enough influence from his next address to thwart our recovery efforts.

After seven years of destruction and three years of economic and social regression, what else can we give Taylor in the name of concession? And what more can he possibly want from us? What he may want from us is something he already has, our money which he will easily cash into mischief over our recovery drive. In other words, a Taylor who is not in prison as result of due process will always pose a threat to Liberia and Sierra Leone. This is my proof that there is no room for negotiations. However, the situation we find ourselves in is not entirely Taylor’s creation. But we must resolve it by giving Taylor the one thing he has not had, legal due process.

Copyrighted © Tarty Teh 2000
Washington, D.C., August 29, 2000

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