Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

by Scully, Pamela;

  During Sirleaf’s first term, Liberia became in effect Development Central. Liberia offered a laboratory for international development experts who were struggling to find new ways of partnering. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the international community was still reeling from failures to stop violence and create peace in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As we have seen, this soul-searching led to Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000, which emphasized the need for women to participate in peace-building and postconflict reconstruction. It also led to a new emphasis on partnering and good governance as central pillars of development practice. Now, with a feminist president possessing unusual financial and administrative skills, development experts saw in Liberia an opportunity to do good.

  International aid organizations such as Doctors without Borders, CARE, and the Carter Center sent experts to staff hospitals and clinics. These organizations also developed and provided training on the rule of law and on how to end gender-based violence. In addition, they helped run parts of the government. Sirleaf faced a dilemma: if she did not use the help of outsiders, she could not run her government, but by relying so much on foreigners, she risked alienating her citizenry. The term “lacking capacity” became a mantra of development experts and the government. It was not one necessarily appreciated by Liberian citizens who had had the capacity to survive numerous corrupt regimes and the brutality of civil war and were still standing. The issue of what kind of capacity Liberia needed remained a simmering issue of debate in Monrovia, one that rose again in the Ebola outbreak of 2014.

  Women’s Council, National Council of Elders and Chiefs at International Women’s Day, Monrovia. March 2008. Photo by Institute for Developing Nations, Emory University.

  Sirleaf also fulfilled her commitment to women’s rights and to honor the contributions of women to building peace in Liberia. She reinvigorated the Ministry of Gender and Development, established under Taylor in 2001. The ministry now was tasked with overseeing the huge transformations she wanted to bring about in women’s rights. The revised rape law, passed by the parliament just prior to her inauguration, was a key piece of legislation invoked by the Sirleaf administration to emphasize its commitment to ending impunity for sexualized violence. As in the road to peace, women’s groups were instrumental in the passage of the law.8 The new rape law expanded the definition of rape by using gender-neutral language, which acknowledges men also can be victims of sexualized violence. The law expanded forms of rape to include gang rape, rape with a weapon, and rape of minors. In addition, rape was made a felony, and thus it could not be bargained away through negotiation between parties or their representatives. This was often done in rural areas, where police were, and still are, virtually absent, and where women are loath to bring charges of rape against men for fear of community reprisals. Thus, for the rape law to have teeth, other things needed to be done. The Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia (AFELL) was instrumental in the creation of a new court to handle cases of gender-based violence. This Criminal Court E is supposed to ensure attention to handling and resolving rape cases. However, there is a great backlog of cases, and an initial study of the workings of the court suggested that many structural impediments remain to its effective functioning.9

  But governance was only one of a host of factors that would rebuild Liberia. As part of the peace settlement in Accra, warlords had agreed that Liberia have a truth and reconciliation commission of the kind that had been instituted in South Africa after its democratic elections in 1994. Liberia’s transitional government legally created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia (TRC) on May 12, 2005. The mandate of the Liberian TRC was “to promote national peace, security, unity and reconciliation.” It was charged with investigating some twenty years of civil war between January 1979 and October 14, 2003, that is, events around the coup led by Samuel Doe, to the end of the Liberian Civil War. The TRC was tasked with identifying the root causes of the war, documenting human rights abuses, creating opportunities for victims and perpetrators to engage in dialogue toward reconciliation, identifying economic crimes, paying special attention to women and children, and writing a report to the government giving recommendations for criminal prosecution and amnesty.10 The government put some $7 million toward the TRC, and Sirleaf inaugurated the commissioners shortly after her inauguration, thus setting in motion the TRC. She also made public efforts to encourage citizens to engage with the TRC, visiting the commission in July 2007, for example, as well as issuing statements urging people to participate.

  In many ways, the Liberian TRC was a model truth commission, coming after a decade in which transitional justice mechanisms of this sort had become institutionalized in peacebuilding efforts. The TRC did a lot of hard work, taking over 22,000 statements, 500 live statements to hearings of the TRC, holding a national conference on reconciliation, and meeting with regional leaders. The Liberian TRC was the first to have a TRC also for the Diaspora, to make sure that the Liberians living outside the country had a voice in the reconciliation process. The Liberian TRC was a pioneer in its attention to sexual violence and the experience of women and children; it was very intentional about gender equity.

  Learning from the South African experience, which had sidelined women, the Liberian TRC made sure to include women on the commission: of the ten commissioners, four were women. The journalist Massa Washington headed the Gender Committee, which investigated crimes against women. Extensive conversations and workshops with women around the country gave granular detail to the documentation of sexual violence: the report concluded that all parties to the conflict engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence. The number of women affected by sexual violence is hard to judge, as there is a wide variation in numbers cited in different reports. A World Health Organization study reported that out of 412 female respondents, 77 percent experienced rape during the civil wars.11 The Liberian TRC reported that only some 8 percent of violations reported involved sexual violence, although of course the number reported and what people actually experience diverge. In any event, the TRC report stated that because of their sex, “women and girls experienced incredible acts of violence and torture. On account of their gender, women and girls were subjected to abduction, slavery, and forced labor.” The Liberian TRC thus brought into view women’s experiences and was thus aligned with some of the goals of the Sirleaf administration: to lift up women and include them in Liberia’s social and body politic.

  However, the Liberian TRC was plagued from the start by divisions between commissioners and a sense that it was foisted upon the country instead of arising from a genuine desire by participants to heal the wounds of the past. The TRC did not interview Charles Taylor, who was then on trial at The Hague for his crimes in connection with the civil war in Sierra Leone. Thus a key figure in the carnage unleashed on Liberia did not participate, which some felt limited the possibilities of reconciliation. In addition, Liberians saw few results from the work and money spent on the TRC. Old wounds were reopened, with little sense that the wounds would be healed.

  For Sirleaf, the TRC process was a difficult time. A witness to the TRC claimed that he saw Sirleaf in military uniform in 1990, the suggestion being that Sirleaf was more involved than she acknowledges in her autobiography.12 Although Sirleaf acknowledges meeting Taylor in the bush, she insists that the meeting was in a personal capacity only and that shortly thereafter she severed the connection.13 The TRC decided to call Sirleaf to appear because of her earlier public ties to Charles Taylor. In February 2009, President Sirleaf appeared before the TRC in Monrovia as part of its “institutional and thematic hearing on economic crimes.” In her statement she said that she had given assistance to Taylor, but this was before she and the general public realized that he was a war criminal. Sirleaf also vigorously denied charges that she had appeared in a military uniform: “I have never worn a military uniform in my life. If anyone can say that, then I will go to my travel documents and disp
rove them. I think it was a case of mistaken identity.”14

  In order to present the final report to the country, the Liberian TRC organized a National Conference of Reconciliation from June 15 to June 20, 2009, at the Unity Conference Center built by the original Organisation of African Unity, outside of Monrovia. The conference acknowledged the historic inequalities between Americo-Liberians, or Congo, and indigenous Liberians, as well as the disrespect created by features of the national imaginary. The memorandum of the conference stated that the motto of Liberia “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here,” in which Liberians and settlers were clearly conflated, should be changed. Instead, the conference recommended that the motto read “The Love of Liberty Unites Us Here.” This is a change that has not been made. One wonders why, given that it would be a hugely symbolic gesture of reconciliation.

  The final Liberian TRC report was delivered to parliament in June 2009. Revised volumes 1 and 3, which included appendixes and specific reports, were released in December 2009. The report is both a fairly scholarly accounting of the histories of abuses, violence, and inequality in Liberia and, in the context of the time, a bombshell. The report recommended that the leaders of the various warring factions, including Charles Taylor, be prosecuted. That was expected. But in addition, on page 361 of volume 2, the report identified people “subject to/recommended for public sanctions.” The report recommended that these people be “barred from holding public office, elected or appointed, for a period of thirty (30) years.” The report named names, and one of those names was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

  As Lansana Gberie, a former head of the International Center for Transitional Justice in Liberia at the time, argues, this was an extraordinary claim. Lustration, the censoring of officials from engaging in public life, is usually reserved for people who abused their official positions. Sirleaf was not charged with that. In addition, Sirleaf after all was imprisoned by Samuel Doe for a year. The charges against Sirleaf, whom the report mentions only a few times, are about her meeting with Taylor, in whose government she never served.

  Despite her disagreement with this section of the report, Sirleaf publicly proclaimed her support for the TRC process. In an interview in May 2010, she said that the commission had done “a good job trying to examine the root causes of our nation’s conflict and they’ve made some very useful suggestions and recommendations about how we go about with the healing process.”15 However, she said that the lustration clause, which bans people from holding public office, and in the case of Liberia, often when they had had no chance to appear before the commission, raised concerns about due process. Sirleaf clearly disagreed with the report: she ran for a second term as president, in clear opposition to this recommendation of the Liberian TRC.

  In her second campaign for president in 2011, Sirleaf was no longer the peaceful yet strong heroine. Now she was a sitting president, responsible for all that had happened and had not been accomplished in her first term, and with the TRC recommendation casting a long shadow. In contrast to the great support for her in her first election campaign, now popular opinion generally went the other way. As Prue Clarke and Emily Schmall reported at the time of Sirleaf’s reelection campaign:

  As she runs for a second term as president, the 72-year-old Johnson Sirleaf has been booed and heckled. Her first term has been one long cascade of corruption scandals, and critics of her administration say they’ve been attacked, intimidated, and offered bribes. No one accuses the president of being personally responsible for any of these abuses, but she has clearly been let down badly by many people she trusted. In fact, although Liberia has no credible opinion surveys to predict the election’s outcome, many political analysts believe Johnson Sirleaf could lose, particularly if balloting goes to a second round after the Oct. 11 vote. Some Liberians have actually threatened violence if she’s reelected.16

  Despite concern that she would not win, the country voted for Sirleaf a second time. Her compatriots voted in the shadow of her winning the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded on October 7, just days before the election. Inside Liberia, some saw the prize as a show of force by the international community worried that Sirleaf would not win a second term. Winston Tubman, Sirleaf’s main rival, and the nephew of President William Tubman, who had ruled Liberia from 1944 to his death in 1971, lamented, “On the eve of the election the Nobel Peace Prize committee gives her this prize, which we think is a provocative intervention within our politics.”17

  The election was held in October, and with no clear winner, a runoff election was slated to be held between Sirleaf and Winston Tubman. Various election bodies, including the Carter Center, affirmed that the election met the required standards of freedom and transparency. But on November 4, Winston Tubman boycotted the runoff elections, thus leaving Sirleaf as the only candidate. Tubman argued that the members of the National Election Commission needed to be replaced in order for unbiased elections to proceed, given allegations of voting irregularities. Subsequent clashes occurred between members of his party, the Congress for Democratic Change, and the Liberian national police. The bitterness left by the Liberian TRC lingered. Former warlord Prince Johnson, now a twice-elected senator, threw his weight behind Sirleaf because Tubman’s party had endorsed the recommendation that Johnson be prosecuted for war crimes. On November 8, 2011, Liberians again went to the polls, with a 61 percent turnout. Sirleaf emerged victorious with 90 percent of the vote.

  Conclusion

  From the time of her first ascendancy to the Liberian presidency, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf enjoyed great acclaim from countries and organizations around the world. In her role as president of Liberia, a country that became the model for postconflict reconstruction, Sirleaf achieved high visibility. In addition, world leaders recognized her for her historic leadership across various important spheres from politics to finance to women’s rights. The Nobel Peace Prize of 2011 thus was part of a broader recognition for all that Sirleaf brought to the post–Cold War world.

  However, while Sirleaf’s star rose in the international arena, her government’s reliance on international expertise created distrust between citizens and government, a distrust that grew in her second term. Many Liberians had become hostile to Sirleaf, but the West, enamored of her, could not see this. The year after she won the Nobel Prize, the former chairman of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Jerome J. Verdier, issued a blistering critique of Sirleaf, accusing her of presiding over a corrupt regime. This was a view shared by many. In 2013, a new public think tank, the Liberia Institute of Public Integrity, noted in its inaugural policy paper that there was US$2.01 billion in aid that could not be accounted for.1

  The president’s reliance on her family members stoked accusations of nepotism. A person close to the president argues that Sirleaf ended up relying on her sons because she had become disillusioned by corruption she could not control and had reason to fear for her life. Nonetheless, the high-profile positions of three of her sons, as well as internal disputes between them, fed fires of dissatisfaction with Sirleaf’s second term. Her eldest son, James T. Sirleaf, worked for First International Bank. Charles is the deputy governor for operations of the Central Bank of Liberia. Rob, the son who refused to remain behind when Ellen went to Washington, became involved in Liberia raising money for soccer fields, working with the Robert Johnson Foundation, and focusing on Liberian youth. Rob became chairman of the National Oil Company of Liberia and promised to clear it of corruption. He did not take a salary. He then took over First National Bank, and that is when he appears to have come into conflict with his elder brother James, whom he fired. In December 2014 Robert Sirleaf ran for the senate, a move that fueled accusations that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was building a political dynasty.2 He was roundly trounced in that senate race by none other than George Weah, the famous soccer star who had opposed Sirleaf in the first election. Weah won his senate seat with 78 percent of the vote.3 In October 2014, the Liberian justice minister resigned, charging the president with blocking an
investigation into corruption in the National Security Agency, run by her ex-husband’s son Fumba Sirleaf.4

  Sirleaf is no angel, nor a saint. She is in a sense a missionary for a different idea of government, a technocratic one staffed by people educated in finance, management, and administration—in fact, her own type of training. She continues to see this type of governance as the form required. In a 2010 interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, she said as much: The problem is of “capacity at all levels in the society, in government, as well as in civil society. So the biggest thing is, do you have the expertise to be able to put all these people to work.”5

  Through her second term, Sirleaf continued to enjoy the support of the international community. Perhaps this was because she was legible to them in a way that she was not necessarily to all of her fellow Liberians. The language she spoke, of administration, capacity, finance, and governance, matched well and had in some sense informed the new development era with its emphasis on governance, indicators, and assessment. As of 2013, she had received a vast number of international awards. In 2007, Sirleaf received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to civilians by the US President. In 2012 France also bestowed its highest honor, the Grand Croix of the Légion d’Honneur, and in the same year, Sirleaf received the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development. She received at least seventeen honorary degrees from institutions such as Harvard, Spelman, and Yale. She also continued to work at the highest levels of international peacebuilding and finance. In 2013 she became the chairperson of the African Peer Review Mechanism. And African heads of state and the African Union chose her to head a committee to chart the postmillennium goals agenda. In 2012 Forbes ranked her among the world’s one hundred most powerful women.