A week and a half ago, on Martin Luther King day here in the US, Liberia's 24th president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was sworn in for her second term in office. Like Dr. King, President Johnson Sirleaf was a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She had just recently been awarded the prize for 2011, for bringing peace and stability to her previously war torn country and for bringing the issue of the rights of women to the forefront of her government's policy. (One of her 2011 co-winners of the Peace Prize was her fellow Liberian, Leymah Roberta Gbowee, a leader of the women's peace and prayer movement in Liberia about whom I'll have a lot more to say in a second installment of this diary series.)
In addition to the accomplishment of winning a second term and being sworn in as president -- Liberia's first president to peacefully succeed himself/herself in elected office in nearly forty years -- and winning the Nobel Peace Prize, President Johnson-Sirleaf also is the first woman to be elected president in any African country, and won her most recent run-off election for the presidency with the approval of 90.7% of the voters of her country. President Johson Sirleaf, an expert in finance, a former finance minister, a former commercial banker, and a former UN development official, so successfully renegotiated her nation's debts, run up by her dictator predecessors, that the international community agreed to completely forgive Liberia's external debt of around $5 billion, in a series of deals she negotiated that started with her convincing the US to waive around $400 million in debt, then getting the G-8 to waive around $325 million, then steam rolling her way through the IMF, the World Bank and the Paris Club until she had miraculously wiped out Liberia's entire external debt.
On the broader productive economic front, President Johnson Sirleaf has managed to obtain the services of some of the most experienced and savvy corporate lawyers in the world -- for free -- to renegotiate Liberia's mineral and rubber agro forestry concessions with multinational corporations in an attempt to get better terms for the national treasury and to get the mines and other industries going that were destroyed or abandoned during Liberia's two horrific civil wars.
President Johnson Sirleaf also created a Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, based on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to take testimony from victims of atrocities committed during Liberia's dictatorships and civil wars, which, with it's hundreds of pages of first hand accounts of the conflict, has revolutionized our understanding of what actually happened during those horrific two decades of dictatorship and mass murder. Unfortunately, she still has the herculean task of governing a country that is around the third poorest in the world, with a completely demolished infrastructure, a generation of young people who missed an entire childhood of schooling, hundreds of thousands of traumatized civilians, a few thousand truly pathologically traumatized victims and former child soldiers, and an uneasy peace in which former combatants and mercenaries threaten to go back to the bush unless their social and economic needs are met.
She may look like an elderly, grandmotherly African woman, but she is also nicknamed the "Iron Lady of West Africa" for a reason, or number of reasons -- for having barely escaped being shot by firing squad by Liberia's first dictator, Samuel Doe, in 1980; for having been sentenced to ten years in prison in 1985 by Doe for "insulting" him in a speech; and, after being released by Doe because of international pressure, for running for office as an opposition party figure against him rather fleeing the country, which most middle class and affluent Liberian leaders were doing at the time; for spending another seven months in a Liberian prison in 1987 before finally going into exile; and for returning to war torn Liberia in 1997 to face down the even worse Liberian dictator, warlord, mass murderer, psychopath and war criminal Charles Taylor, in pseudo "elections" in 1997. (Oh, and by the way, she really is a grandmother -- eight times over. Dag, sometimes I just shake my head at some of the things African women can do!)
On the day that President Johnson-Sirleaf was inaugurated for her second term, said predecessor, Charles Taylor, was in jail at the United Nations Detention Unit at the Hague, awaiting a verdict and sentence in his prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the civil war in Liberia's neighbor, Sierra Leone. (I assume that Taylor will also be tried for war crimes committed in his own country, Liberia, at some point; presently he is being tried essentially for exporting civil war and terrorism to Sierra Leone.)
Taylor is accused of a wide variety of atrocities, including mass murder, mass rape, abduction and enslavement of children to serve as child soldiers and sex slaves, looting, and "desecration of corpses," which is a polite legal way of saying cannibalism.
Unfortunately for Taylor, his strongest legal defense is no longer available to him, and it was one of the few issues on which both the prosecution and defense agreed -- namely, that if the purpose of the tribunal was to prosecute the people most responsible for the civil war and war crimes in Sierra Leone, then Libyan dictator, Muammar Gadaffi should be on trial along with Taylor. Taylor wasn't making a garden variety argument that he was being singled out in a world full of dictators; Taylor's argument was that Gadaffi was his co-conspirator in the destruction of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Unfortunately for Taylor, around the time President Johnson Sirleaf was being awarded the Nobel Prize and winning her election, his former patron and mentor, Muammar Gaddafi, was not only overthrown by rebels inspired by the Arab spring, the pan-Arab, pan-North African democracy movement, but was captured by rebels in October 2011, beaten, apparently sodomized with a bayonet or stick, stabbed and shot -- a fate that Taylor should be grateful he didn't suffer considering the violence he, like Gaddafi, unleashed on vast numbers of innocent civilians, and considering how Taylor's predecessor, "President" Samuel Doe of Liberia died -- captured, beaten, kicked, stabbed, his ears cut off and stuffed in his mouth -- all inexplicably captured on video by a French camera crew, the snuff film having become a widely circulated tape in West Africa and now on Youtube.
I started to write this diary about the controversy over Ron Paul's so-called "anti war" foreign policy and the claims by certain commentators like Glenn Greenwald and Robert Scheer, that Paul's isolationist policies are actually closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" anti-war foreign policy than the Obama administration's, and that Paul's foreign policy "made the most sense." In the controversy that erupted in late December over whether Ron Paul's views actually were aligned with progressive "anti-war" positions, it seemed to me few commentators took the time to write about what actually was the substance of Paul's foreign policy or the Obama administration's foreign policy.
Just before this controversy erupted, a conservative blogger had reported that Paul had said in response to a hypothetical question about the Hitler regime in Germany that knowing what we know now, Paul would not have used US military force to prevent the German holocaust against the Jews (and Roma, dissidents, gays, lesbians, the disabled, and others in the death camps). Yes, Ron Paul actually said that he wouldn't have risked the lives of US forces to prevent the holocaust.
I wanted to write about whether not risking American lives to prevent the holocaust represented "progressive" foreign policy and "made the most sense" to Greenwald and Scheer. I wanted to explain that, in fact, progressive foreign policy in the past reflected a willingness to prevent genocide and use force or the credible threat of force exercised by international institutions like the UN, to secure the peace. I wanted to write a diary about what the Obama administration's policy actually is, how it follows in a direct line from Eleanor Roosevelt sitting down in San Francisco with world leaders to help write the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I thought was the progressive and liberal view of international relations, and how that policy explains US assistance to NATO's support for Libyan rebels in their attempt to overthrow Gaddafi, and explains the US role in assisting the African Union's and Somali transitional government's attempts to contain or destroy the jihadist movement in southern Somalia called al Shabaab.
In other words, I wanted to explain the concept of collective security, which has historically been the "liberal" or "progressive" position on foreign policy, but which unfortunately cannot be summed up in a simple angry slogan. And since my expertise is in Africa and these recent uses of US force pursuant to the progressive goal of collective security have taken place in Africa, I wanted to write about the background for these conflicts and why collective security required intervention. I also want to explain why the idea that the Obama administration is simply "bombing black and brown people" is not only factually incorrect sloganeering, but insulting to the memories of victims of holocausts and atrocities not only in Africa but during the whole bloody history of the 20th century. People like Greenwald and Scheer only get away with such nonsense by completely decontextualizing these conflicts -- in essence, writing Africans completely out of a conflict taking place in Africa, making them all the same -- faceless, black and brown people, mass murderers and victims alike, mere props in American electoral sloganeering.
And I wanted to use the dilemma of Liberia and Sierra Leone, including the historical fact that President George H.W. Bush once said something remarkably similar to what Ron Paul said; that just as Liberia and Sierra Leone were about to be plunged into the worst nightmare era of their own holocausts, when people like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and other Liberian democrats and peace activists were begging for US and British intervention, President George H. W. Bush said that all of “Liberia was not worth the life of a single US Marine," after which Liberia and Sierra Leone experienced hundreds of thousands of killings, mutilations and rapes. And I wanted to show how this catastrophe was not just a nameless, faceless mass of brown people deciding to go berserk against each other, but was a planned, deliberate assault by proteges of Muammar Gaddafi for the specific purpose of terrorizing entire populations into political submission.
But every time I tried to start this diary, the background on Liberia grew and grew, and I felt that I was doing the same thing -- relegating an African story and African tragedy to the status of prop in an American political debate. It was important for me not to do this because the role of Gaddafi in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars explains a lot about why he was a uniquely evil and destabilizing figure in Africa, how he not only "threatened the peace" internationally, but frequently obliterated it, making him uniquely problematic in an international order based on -- and increasingly an African international order struggling toward -- effective collective security arrangements that actually keep the peace.
It was also important because I have a special affinity and relationship to those countries. Liberia and Sierra Leone were the first African countries I ever visited, and I fell in love with them. In the 1990s, I could not for the life of me understand how they plunged into some of the most savage civil war of all in a continent plagued by some pretty gruesome civil wars. The people fighting those wars and committing those atrocities were not the people I had met. The people I had met were among the most gentle and hospitable and kind I'd ever met or ever known since.
In fact, thanks to the truth commissions of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the overall amazing fact-aggregating capacity of the internet, I think that quite recently I have come to understand those wars much better -- and the central role Muammar Gaddafi played in them -- and I want to share that understanding with you. But I want to do so in a way that places Liberia, Sierra Leone and Africa at the center, at least of their own stories. So, I've separated this long argument into several diaries, including this one on Liberia, one on Liberia's wars and one on collective security in Africa and the Obama administration's policy.
Before I tell you about the civil war, let me tell you about the country I encountered back in the early 1980s as a recent college graduate and recently minted MA in African studies who had never been to Africa. (I recently found some old fading photos from that time so let me share with you what a wonderful country I saw.)
First a bit of historical background. I'm sure that if you've heard of Liberia at all, you heard that Liberia is a country that was founded by "freed American slaves." Like everything else broadcast about Liberia in the western media, this is a simplification. It's true that the idea of a colony originated with the abolitionist American Colonization Society (ACS) in the early 1800s. A colony was considered a way of dealing with objections to abolition over what would happen to all those freed black people. Some people who opposed slavery, also however, opposed abolition because they didn't know what to do with the freed slaves who they thought were inferior to white Americans and couldn't be made to fit into free and white American society. The ACS organized a colonization expedition. But many of the settlers were already free -- not simply slaves turned off plantations. In other words colonization was as much a way of dealing with the anomaly of free blacks in America, as it was a way of dealing with slavery and emancipation. Moreover, some of the original colonists were West Indian. These colonists settled around a port which eventually became Monrovia, the capital of Liberia today, and they developed a culture that reflected -- one might say mimicked -- elite American culture. They eventually called themselves, "Americo-Liberians," and pretty quickly began to conquer and oppress the indigenous people as they expanded their territory into the hinterland.
An even more complex issue is that many subsequent colonists were not actually slaves, but captives. By 1808, the US, including the slave states, had abolished the slave trade even though they had not abolished slavery. (Keep this in mind for something I will discuss later about Ron Paul's views on slavery.) The British Empire also abolished the slave trade. As a result, both the US and British navies treated slave ships pretty much as pirates. They patrolled the coast of Africa, and on finding slavers, forcibly returned the ships to African ports. Since it was beyond their capacity to return captives to their homes, they each chose a place to simply leave the African captives. For the Americans, that port was the capital of Liberia, Monrovia, named for President James Monroe. For the British that port was "Freetown," the center of their growing colony of Sierra Leone, just north of Liberia. Because so many captives were coming from the Congo River basin at that time, the slang name among indigenous people for Americo-Liberians became "Congo-men."
Another complexity is that Americo-Liberians also developed a culture of adoption and marital alliances with prominent chiefs of the indigenous people. A wealthy Americo-Liberian family would take in foster children from the country people and raise them and often give them their names. President Johnson Sirleaf is often assumed to be Americo-Liberian, but she claims indigenous ancestry as a member of an indigenous family that was “adopted” by an Americo-Liberian family.
For all these reasons, Americo-Liberians were not actually as "American," that is "black American," as they portrayed themselves to be. But the culture was so strong that Americo-Liberian politicians and elites spoke only English, wore frock coats and Abe Lincoln type stovepipe hats, and denigrated indigenous culture and indigenous people who were often called "country people." The Americo-Liberians created a closed political culture with basically only one viable political party -- the True Whig Party -- that excluded the vast majority of people of indigenous origin who had not been adopted or incorporated into their society. The Americo-Liberians even had a small army, officered by Americo-Liberians, but manned by recruits from indigenous communities -- an army used primarily to forcibly collect taxes from the country people and that served as a deterrent against European powers that were, throughout the 1800s, "scrambling" for territory in Africa, even against established nation states like Liberia, Ethiopia and Buganda.
The first True Whig president to begin to address and ameliorate the terrible oppression of the country people was President William Tubman -- a controversial figure who most Liberians today think of the way Americans think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Like FDR, Tubman was elected to more terms than any other Liberian president, governing from 1944 to 1971 before dying in office. He brought monumental changes to Liberia and is considered the “father of modern Liberia.” Although he was born into an old elite Americo-Liberian family and became a lawyer (rising all the way to Justice of the Supreme Court), when elected president, Tubman pursued a policy of “unification and reconciliation” with the indigenous people, perhaps because he was born in a small town far, far away from Monrovia, and grew up among country people. For the first time, a Liberian president appointed indigenous people to political and administrative offices. He was the first to wear traditional African clothing for special events. And he pushed through a vast expansion of the electoral franchise giving indigenous Liberians the right to vote, an expansion of voting rights from the 5% of the population that was Americo-Liberian to the 95% that was indigenous. As a result of World War II, Liberia re-aligned its economy away from Germany (which had been dominant) toward the United States, and the US dollar actually became the currency of the country. These developments caused a vast inflow American of investment in Liberia’s mining and forestry sectors. Because of Liberia’s literacy in the capital, its connections to America and its Americanized legal system, the Tubman administration also pursued the policy of making Liberia a "flag of convenience" for world shipping, which brought in legal and registry fees. With the revenue from all these sources, President Tubman was able to build roads and infrastructure -- before that little connected Monrovia and the hinterland except footpaths and coastal boats. By the end of Tubman's tenure, Liberia was referred to as the "African economic miracle," and as Wiki efficiently summarizes:
Tubman's term is best known for the policies of National Unification and the economic Open Door. He tried to reconcile the interests of the native tribes with those of the Americo-Liberian elite, and increased foreign investment in Liberia to stimulate economic growth. These policies led to the crowning achievement of the Liberian economy during the 1950s, when it had the second largest rate of economic growth in the world. At his death in 1971 in a London clinic, Liberia had the largest mercantile fleet in the world, the world's largest rubber industry, the third largest exporter of iron ore in the world and had attracted more than US$1 billion in foreign investment.
By the time of his death, Liberia had been an independent black republic for over 120 years, was the most stable country in West Africa and one of the most prosperous. Next door Sierra Leone was doing almost as well, although its main global patron was Britain, not the US.
Unfortunately, Tubman's vice president and successor, William Tolbert, proved to be both corrupt and incompetent, although in some ways the "fall" of Liberia was more complex than one bad president. The economy grew strongly under Tubman but was still in many ways a system based on cronyism and connections and patronage. Tubman could manage that complex system and Tolbert couldn't. By the late 1970s, Liberia was seething with discontent. There were thousands of people of Americo-Liberian background who were being excluded from an increasingly closed system and slipping into the same class as indigenous people, and there were indigenous people whose expectations had been radically expanded by the Tubman administration and the timid reform efforts of the Tolbert administration. By the late 1970s, there were all sorts of new democratic and revolutionary movements in Liberia. Students in particular, both at University of Liberia and studying overseas in America, were becoming radical. One ambitious student leader in the US, Charles Taylor, was invited by President Tolbert on one of his trips to America to debate him before a large audience of Liberian students, and later that student was arrested in New York for threatening to storm the Liberian embassy to the UN.
Many observers of Africa in and outside the country were expecting some sort of elite or democratic overthrow of Tolbert or perhaps a revolution by 1980.
Instead, Liberia got a coup from a completely unexpected quarter which effectively cut short the expanded democracy movement. Outraged over the rising price of rice, the staple food of Liberia, a group of soldiers, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, none above the rank of sergeant, executed a chaotic coup, breaking into the presidential residence and killing President Tolbert, and then killing twenty six high ranking officials. West Africa had experienced a wave of post independence coups in the 1960s and 1970s, but none had been this bloody or shocking, especially considering how Liberia was the epitome of stability. (The Nigerian civil war was bloodier, but that was an actual civil war and not just a coup.) Even more shocking, after the coup plotters had consolidated their hold over the government, they paraded thirteen cabinet ministers nearly naked through the streets of Monrovia, tied them to stakes set up on the beach, and had them publicly shot by firing squad. (Today's President Johnson Sirleaf was Minister of Finance, and one of only four ministers who were not executed.)
Sergeant Doe and his fellow coup plotters weren't only murderous, but it quickly became clear that they were virtually illiterate, barely out of their teens, and from the country side. They now had to run one of West Africa's most complex economies and political systems. Sergeant Doe purged the military of Americo-Liberian officers, promoting country people like himself. Various groups of educated or revolutionary factions vied to get the ear of or control over "the boys" as they were called. A school master I met was trying to teach them at night how to read and write and do arithmetic, as well as a little history and political science. Doe wasn't even necessarily supposed to be the leader of "the boys," although he was to many Liberians initially a hopeful figure, a skinny country boy with pretty good speechmaking skills. Eventually, Doe hit on a strategy that guaranteed his power: He loudly proclaimed that his main goal was fighting communism, and this opened the floodgates of military assistance, military training and foreign aid from the Reagan administration, which tripled, and made Doe effective unchallengeable leader of the country. For the next nine years, Doe plunged the country into ever increasing repression, looting, murder, purges and counter purges.
This was the Liberia that I went to -- it was one year after the coup. It was the tail end of the "maybe Doe won't be so bad" period. The coup made things a bit scary because armed illiterate young soldiers had set up "security checkpoints" along the roads -- actually just excuses to solicit bribes to continue traveling -- but once we got to the village, the politics of Monrovia were a different world.
When I was "assigned" to go to post coup Liberia on a summer volunteer program that sent young American volunteers all over Africa, I wasn't very happy with the assignment of Liberia -- even though I had written my advanced seminar paper on Liberia. I wanted to go to a "real" African country, preferably Ghana. I thought Liberia was so Americanized -- if I was going all the way to Africa for the first time, why go to America's long lost 51st state?
I couldn't have been more wrong. Liberia ended up being the perfect choice. I was assigned along with about a dozen other Americans to a remote village about 100 miles south of the capital, a village carved out of the rain forest. Liberia at the time was surreal because it did have a "gloss" of American-ness. Almost everyone spoke English (or Liberia's exotic version of freed slave English). But because it hadn't been colonized by a major power, the interior was perhaps even more "African" than interiors of other African countries. In other words, even when people were describing some of the most surreal and foreign concepts, like the spirits that surrounded the village in the forest or how Juju (voodoo) functioned, they could do so in a way that I could understand. That wouldn't have happened in rural Ghana. English wasn't their first language; the people of my village were the Kru people, but most of them, especially the young and almost all males, were fluent in English.
So let me tell you about my lovely home village, which adopted us. Even though it was a remote village, the poorest of the poor part of Liberia, the Liberia I encountered was not poor by today’s Liberian standards. My village was an agricultural village and the main crop was rice, a common West African crop and a staple of the diet. It’s sometimes called “upland” or "dryland" rice because it doesn’t have to be grown in graded, flat, flooded paddies like East Asian rice. The rice farmers were exceptionally skillful, their knowledge accumulated over centuries. They were massively endowed with natural resources and there is far more farmland and potential farmland than there are farmers to work it. These same West African rice cultures were brought to the US during the colonial era to launch the southern rice industry of the Rice Islands of the Carolinas. Liberian farmers' biggest challenge was American dumping of polished white rice in the markets which reduced prices and farm incomes and caused urban Liberia, these farmers’ natural market, to prefer imported rice over the more nutritious brown country rice.
They also grew a starchy tuber, cassava, and harvested a wild abundance of fruits and vegetables, including the sweetest oranges and grapefruits I’ve ever had, but that had the odd characteristic of never becoming orange and always remaining green on the outside, many varieties of bananas and plantains, pineapples, and many other exotic tropical fruits I had never had before. There were plenty of coconut trees and palm oil trees, and the women had a small industry of grinding and boiling coconuts and boiling gigantic bunches of palm kernels to make cooking oil, which they bottled in old glass and plastic bottles. The women handled commerce, bundling up huge loads of agricultural goods and cooking oil to take by truck to the nearest city to sell in the market or they sent their children to do so. The biggest nutritional problem probably was lack of protein, with the women keeping only small flocks of chickens providing eggs and meat mostly for special meals. On the other hand, because of the nearby forest, there was an abundance of small game, and one villager was a professional hunter (unfortunately disfigured by a tropical parasite) whose livelihood was trapping small game and selling it in the village. Being in the middle of a secondary growth rain forest, but very near virgin rain forest, there was a huge logging industry nearby and the most fortunate young men were employed as lumberjacks, heading off in lorries early Monday morning and returning Friday night.
Carpenters, masons, contractors did the slow but steady work of upgrading the housing stock from mud and timber walls and palm frond roofing, to cinderblock and tin. They built basic shutters for Liberian girls to look out of or curious children to peek into.
The young people loved soccer and the village had a team that traveled around the county and played the teams of other villages.
As I look at these pictures, what strikes me compared to today’s Liberia is its relative affluence. Today, rural Liberians can barely feed themselves; in these pictures, you can see people had nice clean clothes and shoes and even had enough discretionary income to have matching soccer uniforms. The young people were also crazy for school although the facilities were at the point we arrived atrociously underdeveloped.
I also remember being constantly surrounded by singing, clapping and other forms of music and dance, and even little girls could spontaneously burst into singing and clapping in their native language.
There was even a kind of traveling circus, two people dressed as “clowns” who went from village to village entertaining, but since it was in the vernacular language, I couldn’t understand the jokes.
The social structure of the village was really eye opening for me, because though I’d read about chiefdoms and “tribes” and “clans” as the organizing structure of rural African life, it wasn’t until I saw it in action that I understood it. The village was deeply but only really nominally Christian, and the one church was affiliated with the African American originated “African Methodist Episcopal Zion” denomination. Everyone went to church on Sunday in the mud walled structure that served as both a church and community meeting hall. But the leaders of the village, the three chiefs or patriarchs, were also proudly polygamist. They were also lay preachers. This was even though one of the goals of the church was to discourage polygamy. Each patriarch had between three and six or seven wives, who each had many children, which means that in a rural village of a hundred people, most of them are the sons, daughters, or wives of just three men. This for example was my “adopted father,” the chief and lay reverend, Mr. Pyne, and his youngest wife and child.
This means that when the village has to make a decision, it’s more like a huge family making a decision, not like a formal political system making a decision.
In this case the village elders were urging the entire village to rally behind our project of helping build a school building to replace the mud and stick building that would be assisted by the AME Zion church. Everyone got together in the church/community hall to discuss the matter with the three patriarchs leading the discussion but pretty much anyone being able to have their say. When the meeting concluded that they would adopt this project, the patriarchs gave rousing speeches encouraging everyone to participate. A day or so later, the first task was moving a shipment of cinder blocks that had arrived to the building site and as you can see, almost all the young people of the village turned out to move this massive inventory one block at a time, and a few days later to begin digging the foundation.
The drawback to this familial unity through polygamy (an important issue I’ll come back to in the next diary) is that it limited the economic and social progress of young men. In a village in which people are related in complicated ways, and the three richest most powerful men have five or six wives, most of them much younger, young men have few avenues for advancement into adult family life. The older men monopolize many of the younger women, which means there’s an age dynamic of younger men seeking even younger women, as the women their age are taken. Similar challenges face young women. You might think from an American perspective that patriarchs like Chief Pyne would constantly be on the lookout for younger trophy wives to “replace” their older wives, but something of the reverse happens. These patriarchs deeply respected their first wives with whom they generally spent most of their time – sort of like co-CEOs of a small enterprise, while younger wives were clearly junior, not just to the patriarch of the family, but to the matriarch. For example, this was Mr. Pyne’s senior wife, who adopted me as her son, and looked after me for the whole summer I was there. I’m probably now a decade and a half older than she was then.
There was definitely a lot of dating going on among the young people, like this couple who were very publicly “in love,” but you always got the feeling that the opportunities for young people like this to form families was limited, and one of the poorest families I knew were a recently married, non-polygamous husband and wife.
This is not, by the way, about monopolization of material wealth. In fact, one of the ironies is that, as I said, there was way, way more farmland than there were farmers to work it. But it’s almost impossible in a rainy, tropical area surrounded by rain forest to start a farm without a huge workforce. I garden avidly in my tiny New York backyard, and by August most years, despite my best efforts, I’m usually being defeated by weeds. Imagine trying to farm in a tropical rain forest where vines grow a foot a day! A hypothetical young man and his young wife couldn’t even clear a quarter acre of secondary forest land by themselves, let alone keep it clear while the rice grows and matures. By contrast, a patriarch with land that has been cleared for decades, with say five wives and a small army of say thirty children, including a number of vigorous young sons, can clear an acre of land in an afternoon. In this way, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – not because of control over things, but because of control over people. The eminent historian of Africa, John Illife once concluded in his master work, “The African Poor,” that the most significant statistical correlating factor and best predictor of whether an African lived in extreme poverty was that he or she was part of a small family; the best predictor of economic opulence was membership in a big family. So much for the dominant American “neo-Malthusian” understanding of rural Africa. But as I’ll point out later, this dominance of the system by the “big men” created simmering resentments that ultimately people like Charles Taylor were able to exploit during the civil war.
I just want to emphasize how Liberia was when I first encountered it because most Americans know little about Africa and to the extent they know anything about Liberia, it's that it is incredibly poor -- the poorest of the poor, the third poorest country on earth, utterly dependent on foreign aid. Few know that it was at one time "Africa's economic miracle" with a per capita income about equal to modern Egypt's. I've heard all sorts of explanations of poverty in Africa on "teh internets" but few non-expert experts seem to realize that the greatest cause of poverty in most of the really poor parts of Africa is war. It isn't "over population" or "people breeding like rabbits" or "running out of resources." Wars that destroy infrastructure, drive farmers off their lands, keep kids out of school, destroy and loot schools and clinics, murder educated technocrats or drive them into exile -- these things will send a country reeling from "lower income developing country” into “economic basket case” in a year, and ten years of this can send a country almost back to the stone age. This is what happened to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The warlords, especially Charles Taylor who had been trained by Gaddafi in how to terrorize whole populations, committed atrocities in the county in which my village was located. Taylor, as Gaddafi's protege and a graduate of Gaddafi's "revlotionary" training camps realized that there really was no point in actually having a coherent ideology of liberation, organizing the peasantry onto your side, no need for a liberation army to operate among the peasants, as Mao once put it, like fish swimming in water. Taylor learned that he could abduct children and young boys, subject them to horrific trauma and conditioning, arm them, and send them to murder, rape and kill their own people.
We normally think of war as being most unfair to women and children, and it is. But what is unique about the Liberian civil war, according to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is that the demographic group most likely to be murdered by armed militias in that war were middle aged men. Taylor abducted boys, plied them with drugs, even forced them to used drugs -- amphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, and as an initiation often forced them to kill their village elders and patriarchs, frequently through gruesome means like beheading and disembowelment. Then, he would say to these traumatized young people, you have no family, the militia is your family, your village despises you because you're a killer.
Believe it or not, this was Taylor's actual strategy. If you think I'm exaggerating, when Taylor eventually fought his way to a stalemate and forced deeply flawed elections with the population under threat of obliteration, his campaign slogan was "He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, I'll vote for him." And the terrorized electorate voted him into the presidency over Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Just look at the difference between what Liberian boys were like before Taylor got them,
and after:
So I’m anti war, as much as any Ron Paul supporter, including the likes of Glenn Greenald and Robert Scheer. But I’m also anti war in a way that recognizes that sometimes force has to be used to prevent war – especially on a continent with weak political states that have trouble confronting psychopaths and with plutocratic oil dictators, like Gaddafi, willing to provide such psychopaths with an almost unlimited supply of weapons. I’m also anti the fake decontextualized equivalence and “moral outrage” practiced by the likes of Greenwald and Scheer who hold that using force against, say, a Charles Taylor militia (or his mentor, Muammar Gaddafi, or al Shabaab) is the same as using force against innocent civilians.
I'm opposed to war but support the use of force or credible threat of force by international organizations under collective security to keep the peace because of what happened to Liberia, and to my village. When I found out about Google Earth, I did some research and first found out the geographic coordinates of the village I lived in, which fortunately was listed in a UN database, presumably for relief workers. I plugged them into Google Earth, to at least get an aerial view of my old village. I know the area was profoundly affected by the civil war, and that the capital and trade center of the county the village was located in, Greenville, was, as Wiki puts it, completely and totally destroyed. The county was a site of repeated trampings back and forth by war lords, and was on the route for invaders from the Ivory Coast. The village of the pictures above, appears on Google Earth as a brown smudge of earth surrounded by green rain forest, being slowly engulfed and reclaimed by the bush. I found out that the village I lived in, the village of the people in these pictures, no longer exists, at least not under its old name. There appears to be a refugee camp or new town not far away. By a remarkable coincidence I was able to locate one person from that summer recently on Facebook, a wealthy merchant who at the time lived in Greenville. After initial re-introductions back and forth (he didn’t remember me), I wrote to ask whether anyone that I had met that summer had survived the war, anyone at all – I wanted to know whether anyone from the village, any of the soccer players, any of the chiefs who were also lay ministers, or their wives, any of the master rice farmers, the disabled hunter or the construction contractors, any of the young people in Greenville who frequented the disco in Greenville, any of the young students I met in town or in the villages – had any of them survived the war? I never received an answer or other communication from him.