American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  In early October 1999 a Monrovia-based human rights group, FOCUS, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on Koah, after receiving a tip about the diamond miner’s detention. Even as Taylor consolidated his power in Liberia, there remained a community of influential local human rights workers. The largest, longest-standing human rights group was the Justice and Peace Commission, a group backed by the Catholic Church with offices connected to the archdiocese of Monrovia and Gbarnga. Taylor had an adversarial relationship with these organizations, as he had with the media. He preferred to target outspoken human rights leaders and journalists individually through intimidation and arrest, rather than outlaw their organizations. Critics of the government had to consider their own safety before speaking out.

  At that time, FOCUS was actively engaged in a campaign to have the Gbatala base destroyed because of the alleged human rights abuses taking place there. The next day The News, a Monrovia daily, published a front-page story with Koah’s picture, indicating that he’d been detained by the ATU and brought to “an unknown location without charge and … subjected to torture, denied proper meal [sic] and safe drinking water.”

  The petition was surprisingly successful. Koah was almost immediately removed from the base and brought to nearby Phebe Hospital for treatment, before being delivered to President Taylor and Chucky. At that meeting, according to Koah, both father and son warned him to remain silent about the abuse he had endured, especially to the media. Chucky warned him that should he reveal anything “contrary to our advice, the government won’t guarantee your safety.”

  Koah went directly to the press. Through FOCUS, he revealed the location of the ATU base at Gbatala and decried “gross human rights abuses ranging from forced sodomy to intense torture and other forms of inhumane treatment,” singling out that “the Anti-Terrorists Unity [sic] are reportedly perpetrating these acts which [are] commanded by Chucky Taylor, the son of the President of the Republic of Liberia.” It was an attempt not only to lend credibility to his allegations but to provoke outrage in Taylor at the actions carried out by his son’s men.

  “If I lie before God and man, you may kill me, Mr. President,” he said at the press conference.42

  Previously, Taylor had shown little interest in addressing allegations of abuses among his security forces—chronicled each year in the State Department’s report on human rights violations in Liberia. But following Koah’s statements, he ordered an investigation into the incidents of rape. One of the soldiers who had participated in rape was detained on the base, Menephar said, but shortly thereafter escaped. With both the president’s and the public’s attention suddenly focused on Gbatala, Menephar noticed that Campari had grown uncharacteristically afraid. If Taylor was truly intent on pursuing consequences, Campari had some reason to be: the Gambian had issued the order that the detainees should be raped, Menephar said, and fearing this would be discovered, he had allowed the soldier to slip away so he couldn’t implicate his commander any further.43

  The incident also became a rare rallying point for human rights groups to direct international attention to Taylor. On November 7, 1999, the Justice and Peace Commission sent a letter to Desmond Parker, the UN human rights officer, indicating that Koah had been “detained and tortured at the ATU Base in Gbatala, Bong County, from July 26 to October 18, 1999,” and asking that the UN safeguard his rights, person, and provide health care for him.44 Parker, a Trinidadian who was social with Chucky and his mother, took no immediate public action in the case, and the issue failed to rise above the din of local politics to put pressure on Taylor.45 (Parker, who was named chief of protocol for the United Nations in 2010, declined comment, citing UN regulations.46) Koah, a diamond trader, hardly cut a sympathetic figure, particularly in light of the increasingly negative attention toward conflict diamonds. And in relative terms, Charles Taylor’s government had been accused of far worse than what Koah alleged occurred at Gbatala.

  Yet Koah represented a persistent problem for Chucky. Even though he had been warned of the consequences of not remaining silent, he continued to speak out, in an effort to humiliate and shame both Chucky and his father. In Liberian society, when an individual is publicly accused of wrongdoing, there is an expectation that if that person is innocent, the accused will rebut the allegation publicly. Chucky chose not to use the press to respond to Koah: he decided to deal with the man himself.

  Several days later ATU soldiers arrived at Koah’s home outside Monrovia, fired several shots through his front door, kicked it in, and poured into the building searching for him.47 Koah hid in the ceiling, leaving his wife, Esther, and his seventeen-year-old daughter to deal with the gunmen. When the fighters couldn’t locate him, they arrested Koah’s wife and daughter.

  The women weren’t spared. Chucky interrogated them in his office at the Executive Mansion, according to testimony the wife and daughter later provided, demanding to know Koah’s whereabouts. The women refused to tell him anything. After several hours, he turned them over to two soldiers, who led them apart and raped them. The women suffered serious injuries during the assaults but were released the following day. They couldn’t easily turn to the press or human rights community, as sexual assault carried with it a severe stigma in Liberia—and going public offered no guarantee that the women would see justice served in Taylor’s nation.

  For his part, Koah climbed into a cargo truck and slipped across the border into Ivory Coast, abandoning his country and family. Chucky’s former prisoner had been forced into exile, but not before exacting a huge cost to the ATU’s reputation as a new, highly trained force. Yet Taylor had not abandoned the project. In fact, he hoped it would be a showpiece for his administration.

  On December 17, 1999, Charles Taylor’s convoy arrived at Gbatala base for a graduation ceremony.48 The president was finally ready to unveil his secret training program. Accompanying him was a small group of dignitaries, including Daouda Malam Wanké, the president of Niger, and Maj. Stefan Arredondo, a representative from the office of the defense attaché with the U.S. embassy. Chucky, dressed in military fatigues, escorted his father, clad in a white safari suit, onto the base. Despite the events of the prior months, Taylor wanted to use the Anti-Terrorist Unit’s graduation to show off the unit to outsiders, to showcase the advent of a professional fighting force in Liberia. The nominal purpose of the unit was for “VIP protection”—but the day’s proceedings were meant to be a show of force and a projection of Taylor’s power. The unit performed a live-fire demonstration and, at one point, launched an RPG-7 at the target range, surprising the audience.49 President Wanké hastily excused himself to go to the bathroom, apparently unsettled by the missile’s detonation.

  While it was meant to be a public demonstration, some things had to remain concealed for the graduation ceremony. The South Africans and Gambians were ordered to leave to avoid linking the unit to any mercenary units. “The government did not want any foreigners on the base, because journalists from all over were going there,” Menephar said.50 A new commander, a Liberian named Jason Wennie, was brought to stand in as the base commandant.

  Despite the success of the graduation ceremony, tension had been mounting between Chucky and his father. Beyond the Koah case, his son’s leadership style troubled Taylor: Chucky kept strange hours, sleeping throughout the day and rising at night to begin his work. He was impulsive and reactionary, quick to punish and lock up his own men, but rarely equipped with anything resembling a plan. His personal life was sloppy as well. Commanders surrounding Chucky noticed that he had begun to drink, use drugs, and womanize more openly.51

  Moreover, the vision Chucky had at the outset for a small, well-disciplined unit collided with the demands facing his father to build a force sizable enough to carry out Taylor’s military agenda. After graduation, another batch of recruits traveled to Gbatala, including seasoned NPFL fighters sent by President Taylor to undergo ATU training. Many of the NPFL holdovers were veterans of the civil war and members of Taylor�
��s Special Security Service; they were considered to be “militia”—shorthand for untrained, undisciplined, and unaccountable. While months earlier, the South African mercenary Fred Rindel had stressed the importance of quality fighters, the addition of these new fighters showed that quantity had become more important to Charles Taylor.

  While President Taylor’s action did not surprise the recruits already on the base, the next round of trainees he ordered sent did. Late in December 1999 a green Mercedes cargo truck lumbered up the gravel roadway leading onto the base grounds, delivering a new contingent of men.52 The gunmen were fresh from the front lines along the border with Sierra Leone and Guinea, but Menephar noticed something different about them—they were not Liberians but Sierra Leoneans. These men were from the Revolutionary United Front, belonging to the commander Sam Bockarie, known by the nom de guerre “Mosquito” (not to be confused with the rebel “Mosquito Spray” who had attacked Voinjama). Journalists covering the war in Sierra Leone noted his decidedly unmilitary background: he had reportedly been a disco dancer and hairdresser before becoming a militia commander.53 Bockarie was a feared leader, in large part due to the savagery of the RUF, which had cut a swath of terror across Sierra Leone, killing civilians and amputating limbs of survivors. This reputation preceded him and his men when they arrived in Liberia.

  “It was my first time seeing Sierra Leoneans,” Menephar recalled.

  Months earlier, in March 1999, the RUF had struck a peace deal with the government of Sierra Leone, which called for a disarmament and demobilization program for rebel fighters.54 The RUF leader Foday Sankoh called for combatants to abide by the terms of the peace, but only 4,217 of an estimated 45,000 fighters put down their weapons.55 Sam Bockarie defied Sankoh and refused to disband his militia. The arrival of these insurgents at Gbatala signified Taylor’s lack of support for peace in Sierra Leone—not only were the rebels permitted safe passage into Liberia, they were provided housing and military training. Whatever deniability Taylor had cultivated regarding his involvement in Sierra Leone, he was now willing to jeopardize it with the presence of the fighters.

  He continued the expansion of the ATU, sending Yeaten’s soldiers with the SSS and SOD to Gbatala base for training in late December and early January 2000.56 Campari returned with a retinue of bodyguards from Maryland County to again assume control.

  The new round of fighters at Gbatala were a motley bunch: older, battle-hardened factional fighters. The extent of their training prior to Gbatala was limited to what was called halaka—a brutal variation on endurance training that had been introduced to the NPFL in Libya.57 Recruits had to survive beatings and live-fire obstacle courses to prove their mettle. Menephar, who had been tasked to assist the South Africans in training this new batch of recruits, looked down on them but set about the task of training them. “They were not properly taught. They needed to be taught professionally,” he later said.

  Taylor required a strong offensive force, capable of cross-border raids. Taylor did not seek an overt military conflict with any of his neighbors—but he felt the best way to defend Liberia was to weaken his neighbors.

  The international community saw other motives in Taylor’s pursuit of mayhem in Sierra Leone. He profited from trafficking in “blood diamonds” plundered there, using the proceeds to bankroll his lifestyle and war machine.58 This practice had drawn the scrutiny of international human rights organizations and the United Nations, which began to explore the potential for sanctions on the precious stone trade. UN investigators linked a ferocious RUF assault and siege on Freetown in January 1999 to arms shipments that had been transported through Liberia at Taylor’s behest.59

  By February 2000, the Sierra Leonean presence in Liberia had become an open secret.60 For American officials looking to stop the bloodshed in Sierra Leone, the fact that the RUF was not demilitarizing but instead strengthening its alliance with Taylor represented trouble. Late that month Liberia’s foreign minister admitted to the U.S. embassy that Sierra Leonean forces were in Liberia. The following month, in a meeting with the ambassador, Taylor denied that the men were receiving training, but he appeared uncomfortable doing so. In fact, Bockarie had traveled in Taylor’s entourage on a recent trip to Libya. The RUF fighters were now yet another military element fully under Taylor’s aegis.

  There was method to the disorder of Taylor’s security forces.61 By redrawing the divisions among the armed groups surrounding him, he prevented any single group or commander from attaining too much power and influence—including his own son. Their relationship—like most relationships in Chucky’s life—was extremely volatile. In his father’s presence, Chucky played the obedient son, showing Taylor respect in front of his peers.62 Beyond his sight, Chucky often ignored his father’s orders, according to a senior ATU commander who asked to not be identified.

  Chucky’s day-to-day behavior veered toward the unpredictable—he was “sometimey,” as Liberians said, meaning that he often acted normally but could explode. He drove manically and went nowhere without his bodyguards. He conducted his liaisons with women at the Hotel Africa and the Boulevard Hotel rather than at his home. One hotel employee recalled Chucky emerging from his room, enraged at an electrical outage and holding the staff at gunpoint until the generator could be restarted.63 A manager at the Boulevard said, however, that unlike most members of Taylor’s inner circle who frequented the hotel, Chucky always paid his bill.64

  On January 28, 2000, Monrovia hummed with activity. Official convoys raced through the streets and helicopters buzzed over rooftops, as dignitaries and not-so-dignified hangers-on to the regime arrived for the marriage of the president’s son. Chucky and Lynn had no interest in having a state wedding (Lynn had envisioned a small affair for close friends and family), but Charles Taylor insisted on an event in line with his position.65 The event could only take place in Africa—both Chucky and his father remained fugitives in the United States, so the couple would marry in Monrovia. The date set for their nuptials was also his fifty-second birthday.

  Liberia had little reason to celebrate the wedding of the president’s son. At the beginning of 2000, the country ranked 174th out of 175 nations listed on the Human Development Index.66 Only 15 percent of the adult population could read and write, and the average life expectancy of a citizen was just over forty-two years, according to State Department estimates. The government provided few, if any, services to the people, most of whom lived without reliable access to electricity and running water. Many teachers went without pay for months and even years. State-sponsored schools and universities barely functioned. The legal system also withered for lack of funds, and when the courts did operate, judges ran the risk of being assaulted and tortured by security forces for unpopular rulings, while others insisted on receiving bribes to simply hear a case. International donors—including the United States—had all but abandoned the country, leaving Taiwan nearly alone in its monetary support for the Taylor government. The United States offered Liberia only $13.1 million in aid for 2000, much of it to provide food to the population, many of whom lived on the edge of starvation.

  The U.S. ambassador, Bismarck Myrick, pleaded for money from Washington to support civil society programs—including opposition groups—which had been blocked by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.67 Myrick recognized that Taylor’s conduct as president, particularly his human rights record, was viewed with “repugnance” in Washington, yet he touted progress on governance issues and noted in a letter to Susan Rice, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, that “Taylor is not the total of Liberian society. He is the duly elected president of the country.”68 Myrick envisioned using State Department funds to bolster internal checks on Taylor’s power, but Washington had no plans to invest in Taylor’s government or programs that could, even indirectly, provide him support. “Only if the other parties are strengthened will the Liberian electorate have an alternative to Taylor and his ruling National Patriotic Party,” Myrick wrote.

>   As lavish as the wedding was to be in Liberia’s current context, Lynn nearly missed it.69 She departed with Chucky’s mother in late December on a KLM flight from JFK to Ivory Coast, but even as it approached Abidjan, Ivorian military officers were staging a coup in the capital. The aircraft rerouted to Togo, where Lynn and Bernice disembarked, then faced the challenge of traveling overland across three West African nations—one of which was in the midst of political collapse—to reach the Liberian border. Lynn was nearly four months pregnant and had with her the beautiful, white sleeveless wedding gown she had selected at a bridal boutique in downtown Orlando. The two set out by car across Togo, crossing the border into Ghana and driving to an airfield, where Charles Taylor had chartered a small, propeller aircraft to pick them up. The two hazarded Ivorian airspace and soon touched down in Liberia. There were just a few short weeks to finalize wedding preparations and ready everything for the arrival of Lynn’s parents and sisters, as well as Chucky’s cousins from Georgia and Massachusetts.

  Conducting a luxurious wedding in this environment suggested a few logistical obstacles. For example, flowers. It wasn’t a matter of simply hiring Monrovia’s top florist: there wasn’t one. President Taylor had to import the flowers from Ivory Coast. Travel for the wedding party was no simple matter, either. Liberia remained hard to reach not only because of carriers and weather but, as Lynn had seen, because of the region’s politics. By January, however, the situation in Ivory Coast had stabilized sufficiently for regular air travel to resume between Monrovia, Abidjan, and the rest of the world. Lynn’s parents and sisters and several of Chucky’s cousins arrived just days before the nuptials.

  Providence Baptist Church on Broad Street in downtown Monrovia was selected for the ceremony. The stone sanctuary sat a short distance from Providence Island, where the church had been originally founded in 1822 by Liberia’s first émigrés. Chucky was dressed impeccably in a black tuxedo, a white boutonniere pinned to his lapel. President Taylor looked on from a wooden pew, smiling. Chucky’s mother, Bernice, wore sunglasses throughout the ceremony. Their wedding party reflected a sampling of Liberia’s elite: Chucky’s best man, Israel Akinsanya, was a Liberian political operator who had spent much of the past decade in the Twin Cities before returning to his homeland; Wisam Fawaz, a groomsman, was a friend and business partner prominent in the Lebanese community and had connections to one of the country’s largest timber companies. Lynn’s family, by and large average Americans, disconnected from the world of politics and power, watched as their daughter and sister exchanged vows with Chucky. The child Lynn carried would be born between these worlds, which were steadily growing apart.