American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Taylor appeared reassured by the statement. He visibly relaxed, then tried to explain away the behavior that led to the rift with the United States. “Yes, he had been involved in Sierra Leone, and deeply regretted it,” the ambassador reported Taylor as saying. “But Washington did not understand the context of that involvement.” Taylor had chosen to arm the Sierra Leonean rebels out of fear that “these forces would have been turned on himself and Monrovia.” Now he desperately sought to rescue his relationship with the United States, offering use of Robertsfield for the U.S. military and future rights for yet-to-be-discovered Liberian oil fields.

  Taylor was convinced that there was an “ocean of oil” to be discovered offshore in Liberia.6 The entire Gulf of Guinea remained largely unexplored at that time—the result of the region’s instability and the costs and technical challenges associated with deep-water drilling. Two years earlier Taylor had commissioned a 2-D seismic imaging study by a Houston-based company, TGS-NOPEC, which suggested the potential for significant deep-water reserves offshore.7 The notion that war-wracked Liberia could transition to an oil-producing nation might seem far-fetched, but Africa was a continent of transformation, where many impoverished and violent states altered their global positions with the discovery of resources.

  Taylor’s offer seemed genuine to the ambassador, yet his actions suggested that he was committed to his path as a warlord. Liberian forces were involved in the renewed conflict in Ivory Coast, completing the troika of insecure states bordering Liberia. Even after their positive meeting, Taylor continued to publicly suggest that the U.S. government sought to forcibly remove him from power using “American funded assassins.”

  “No one should trust Charles Taylor,” the ambassador reported back to Washington, later concluding that “we need to make another move in order to keep Taylor corralled or we may find ourselves in an even bigger and rougher rodeo.”

  By early January 2003, Charles Taylor had stepped into the twilight of his political career. The preceding summer a new, more abstract threat than the rebel army had emerged in Freetown: the tribunal created out of a UN Security Council resolution, known as the Special Court for Sierra Leone.8 Prosecutors had spent years investigating crimes related to the civil war that had destroyed Liberia’s neighbor and brutalized the populace. The investigation invariably led to Liberia, not only to Sam Bockarie, who still unofficially enjoyed refuge in Monrovia, but also to Taylor. As the rebel commanders whom Taylor sponsored from Sierra Leone atomized throughout the region—a few looking to cut a deal with the new court—the Liberian president’s role in the conflict became more and more difficult to conceal.

  Taylor had real reason to fear being brought before an international tribunal. International justice had become more forceful in the late 1990s. Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević’s indictment and arrest demonstrated the international community’s willingness and capability to put a head of state on trial. If the investigators were able to assemble enough evidence to charge him, Taylor knew, his elected position would offer no immunity.

  The truth of the matter was, Liberia was dying from the inside. Displaced Liberians poured into Monrovia fleeing the fighting in the countryside, while others fled into Sierra Leone. Meanwhile Liberians in Ivory Coast began to return en masse to southern counties in Liberia, running from that country’s civil war. The situation would have been alarmingly complex for any nation to face, but for a government that had devoted none of its energy to the well-being of its people, the crisis threatened a humanitarian disaster. Taiwan, motivated by Liberia’s recognition of its nationhood, had again stepped into the breach for Taylor, shipping approximately ten thousand tons of rice and undertaking projects to restore water and electricity to the capital.9

  By February 2003 the rebels were headquartered in Voinjama, having pushed government forces out of Lofa County. The rebel group had taken control of Robertsport, a picturesque oceanfront village midway between the border with Sierra Leone and Monrovia, securing a potential port should their supply line through Guinea be cut. Two senior officials in the State Department met with rebel representatives to hear their demands and gauge their willingness to participate in peace talks.10 The rebels made it clear that they could assault Monrovia but didn’t believe it yet necessary to achieve their goals. For Taylor, this refrain eerily echoed his own as a rebel leader a decade earlier, when he had sat down with Ambassador Kenneth Brown to discuss the terms of Samuel Doe’s departure. Just as Taylor had demanded then, the LURD representatives were emphatic that any deal the rebels cut had one requirement: the president must leave power.

  For Lynn, Liberia remained a loose end. She had not spoken to Chucky for nearly a year and a half. She had left him and his world behind, for the comparatively anonymous existence as a single mother putting herself through school in Orlando. But their divorce did not move forward, in part because Lynn wasn’t ready to let go of what she called her “African princess fairy tale.”11 The prince in that fairy tale had been replaced by a man who had threatened to execute her family. The boy she had fallen in love with seemed to have disappeared completely into the madness of the civil war. She still cared for that person, but she wasn’t certain whether he still existed.

  Bernice eventually broke the silence between the two of them. She still lived a few miles from Lynn in the Pine Hills home where Chucky had grown up, though she spent much of her time in Monrovia. One day, as Lynn recalls, her mother-in-law called out of the blue. Chucky was killing himself with drugs, she said, and she needed Lynn’s help to save his life. Lynn couldn’t ignore her mother-in-law’s plea. She picked up the phone and reached out to him—not only because Bernice had asked her to but also because she had yet to let go of her husband. “Even though he was a shitty father and a shitty husband, I didn’t want him to die,” Lynn said.12

  The two talked. For a moment, Lynn set aside the past and agreed to return to Monrovia, despite the dangers. She was compelled by simple reasons. “I missed him,” she recalled. “I missed Liberia.”

  When Lynn landed again at Robertsfield in early 2003, Chucky barely resembled the person she had married. He appeared wan, strung out, and emaciated; his well-built frame had withered. As troubling as the sight was, she was happy to be there and happy for her son, who was nearly three years old, to be with the father he scarcely knew.

  As they drove toward Monrovia, Lynn entered a new Liberia. In the two years of her absence, it was not only Chucky who had deteriorated—so had the world immediately surrounding him. Gone was the euphoria that had followed his father’s election. Gone was the privilege and freedom of movement that came with being part of the presidential family. Gone was the sense that the small country had a future. Sanctions and the war had whittled away all those things. All that remained was Monrovia, a city distended with refugees and, as the fighting overtook much of the countryside, growing more desperate by the day.

  “I specifically remember asking why they had to let strongholds on some of these places go,” Lynn recalled. Chucky explained to her that securing the country “just wasn’t logistically possible.”

  By choosing to join him in Monrovia, Lynn had willingly entered into the siege, though she could not have known how precarious the situation in the capital was. “Holding Monrovia was the crucial element in any of their wars,” he told her, as she recalled. “Once Monrovia fell, it [would be] over.”

  Lynn tried to create some semblance of normality. Shortly after arriving, she put together a small birthday party for her son. Streamers were hung. A few balloons decorated the table near a glass of beer. Chucky even doffed a golden, cardboard cutout crown, tilting it low over his brow and mugging for the camera. But he never removed his fatigues. His sidearm always lay nearby.

  The tension of the war surrounded Chucky’s villa. His usual retinue of bodyguards lingered outside the house, men who had remained by his side for years—Bobby Dixon, Tarnue Gizzie, Humphrey—and who had always respected him. But Lynn noticed a c
hange in how Chucky treated his men. “He would get angry a lot and he would yell at the men a lot,” she said.

  Eventually she learned of Isaac Gono’s killing, which despite the press coverage had been treated as a secret. When she asked Chucky about it, he refused to talk about it other than to say that he “absolutely did not do it.”

  Chucky had always shielded her from his world outside the house. As the war approached, that separation became more and more difficult to maintain.

  After nearly a year of investigations, prosecutors with the Special Court for Sierra Leone fired their opening salvo. On March 3, 2003, the court issued a set of indictments against leaders from various Sierra Leonean factions, including Taylor allies Foday Sankoh and Sam Bockarie.13 If Charles Taylor felt he’d dodged a bullet, the relief was temporary: he grew increasingly concerned that Bockarie and his men would cooperate with the court in building a case against him. The Sierra Leoneans constituted direct evidence that Taylor had supported the conflict in Sierra Leone—and as the war closed in on Monrovia and he had fewer resources to draw from, Bockarie and his men had become too powerful and difficult for Taylor to control.

  Taylor’s fear became real when one of Bockarie’s men disappeared from his refuge in Liberia. One of the RUF leader’s closest advisers, a fighter named Victor, feigned illness at Gbatala training base and disappeared upon returning to Monrovia.14 Victor had trained Bockarie’s fighters at Gbatala with the ATU and thus represented a direct link between Taylor and the charges outlined in the indictments released in Freetown. Chucky had already taken the step of destroying the ATU rosters listing the Sierra Leonean fighters.15 His father wanted to take that a step further: he wanted to track down and destroy all the Sierra Leonean fighters in Liberia—Bockarie included.16

  Killing off the Sierra Leoneans became an urgent task that Taylor gave to Benjamin Yeaten. Bockarie’s rebels had been hired out to fight against Ivorian government forces seeking to push out insurgent forces fighting for Alassane Ouattara in the north of Ivory Coast. This assignment had left the fighters temporarily out of touch with the developing intrigue in Freetown and Monrovia. Now Bockarie received an order from Monrovia asking him and his forces to retreat from Ivory Coast and regroup in Liberia’s Nimba County to meet with Yeaten.17 He was reportedly surprised but crossed the border into Liberia nonetheless. He trusted his Liberian counterpart enough to bring along his family, including his wife, mother, and son. The group arrived midday at the country compound belonging to Vice President Moses Blah, where they sat for a meal of rice and cassava leaf.

  This would be the last meal of Bockarie’s life. The official account would hold that Bockarie was killed in a firefight attempting to reenter Liberia. But eventually an ATU officer would testify to the actual details of the Sierra Leonean rebel’s killing.18 According to the officer, Mohammed Sheriff, following the lunch Bockarie was led into the bush and beaten to death. Bodyguards raped and killed his wife and executed his son and his mother. Yeaten’s men fired several rounds into Bockarie’s body to provide evidence to support the official account of his death. One of most dangerous potential witnesses against Taylor would now never be able to cut a deal with prosecutors.

  Yet Taylor still had to deal with the distinct possibility that he would be overthrown. He flew to Accra in June 2003 to sue for peace. The LURD rebels had successfully backed him into a corner from the north. And now yet another faction, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, or MODEL, was pursuing government forces from the south. After a brief lull in fighting, both rebel factions renewed their assaults that month. For months regional mediators had been negotiating to bring Taylor and the rebels to the table. Taylor now realized the loss of Monrovia was imminent, and he hoped that the regional leaders could use the promise of elections to broker a truce.

  When the warring parties convened in Accra, the conference took on the air of a carnival—heads of state from around Africa converged on the city. Representatives from Taylor’s government, the rebels, and Liberia’s varied political constituencies shouldered into the conference center. International figures with little connection to the crisis, like Cornel West and Al Sharpton, waded into this crowd, hoping their voices would be heard above the din. The men wanted Taylor to leave power—but were also pressuring the Bush administration to intervene directly in the crisis. (“This administration’s policy is different, absolutely different, when it comes to people of color,” Sharpton said. “I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be intervention in Europe if thousands were dying in war.”19)

  In Accra, the international media temporarily fixed its glare on Liberia, hoping to document a potential turning point in the crisis. This audience was unparalleled in Taylor’s political career. When he arrived at the conference, he intended to deliver a performance that reflected the significance of the moment. He was left with very little to negotiate; in fact, the only bargaining chip he had was himself and his future in Liberia. Nonetheless, the international attention focused on Accra made this conference the ideal forum for Taylor to proffer a solution to the crisis.

  Back in Monrovia, U.S. embassy officials learned of a looming disaster.20 For months, it had been an open secret in Washington that in March the Special Court for Sierra Leone had indicted President Taylor along with the other defendants. The indictment, which remained under seal, charged the president with a surfeit of counts, including terrorism, rape, looting, use of child soldiers, and slavery—all related to the war in Sierra Leone. It marked the first time in history an African head of state had been formally accused of crimes against humanity.

  Events began to unfold simultaneously in Freetown, Accra, and Monrovia. The Freetown-based prosecutor for the case, an international law professor named David Crane, unsealed the indictment at an explosive moment—just as Taylor arrived at the Accra conference—serving the Ghanaian government with a copy of the charges, as well as a warrant for the Liberian president’s arrest.21 Taylor had known of the possibility of indictment, but like everyone else, he was blindsided by Crane’s announcement.

  The prosecutor explicitly aimed “to humble and humiliate him before his peers, the leaders of Africa, and to serve notice to Taylor and others that the days of impunity in Africa were over.”22 He hoped Taylor would not be returning to Monrovia with a cease-fire in hand but rather would be led in handcuffs to a cell in Freetown.

  According to Robert Ferguson, the State Department had warned Crane against unsealing the indictment during the Accra conference—not only for the danger it posed in Liberia, but because of the unlikelihood that an African leader would assent to the arrest of a peer at an international peace conference.23 In fact, the unsealing of the indictment put the Ghanaian hosts in a nearly impossible position: if they allowed Taylor to be apprehended on their soil, his friends and supporters would likely view the peace conference as little more than a pretext for the arrest. Crane could have waited until after the conference concluded, Ferguson said, to avoid throwing a wrench into the negotiations. “But he chose not to. He wanted to do it then, he wanted to make a political statement, he thought the whole world was watching this conference.”

  Officials at the U.S. embassy could have hardly imagined a worse scenario. As attenuated as Taylor’s authority was, it remained the only power holding together the militias and security forces in Monrovia. His removal, officials feared, could send these groups into a death spiral, as competing armed bands loyal to Taylor fought over the last scraps of property, food, and power that remained in the capital. In the midst of the developing refugee crisis, civilians would undoubtedly suffer the brunt of the ensuing violence.

  Embassy officials began working the phones in Monrovia. It wasn’t clear who could step in should Taylor be arrested. Among those contacted was Moses Blah, Taylor’s vice president. The Americans sought assurances from Blah that he could control Taylor’s fighters should anything happen in Ghana. According to Ferguson, who attended the meeting, the vice president responded, Yes, we und
erstand. We have total control over it. Blah was an ornamental holdover from the NPFL, with ties to Taylor dating back to the Libyan training camps—and according to the Liberian constitution, the succession of power fell to him. But in truth, he had control over nothing.

  When Taylor learned of the indictment, he fled the conference, abandoning the negotiations for the more urgent task of consolidating his power. In Monrovia, once Benjamin Yeaten learned of Blah’s meeting with the embassy officials, he notified Taylor that the vice president was plotting a coup with the Americans. Only hours after the indictment was unsealed, the vice president was placed under arrest. Yeaten, the incident revealed, held the power in Taylor’s absence.

  Crane’s decision to indict Taylor amplified the crisis not only by backing Taylor into a corner but also by applying pressure to those around him. The tactic was akin to going after a mafia family in the midst of a gangland war. As the siege took hold in Monrovia, those close to Taylor found themselves not only confronting the enemy but also facing the choice of whether to turn evidence on their leader. This dilemma was particularly acute within Taylor’s inner circle, including for Chucky. Cooperation would mean not only working with Crane but abandoning the war at its most critical moment.

  That night Taylor returned to a Monrovia hovering near the edge of chaos, but his heavily armed motorcade was greeted by cheering crowds. The response was more complex than simple adulation. Taylor was a savior, even if he was a savior of his own design: he’d manufactured a form of chaos that only he could control; his people were utterly reliant upon him.

  By early June, the front lines of the war had settled on Duala Market, a small city of tin-roofed shacks on the opposite bank of the Mesurado River. The market stretched out across Bushrod Island, a thumb of land that points southward toward where two bridges fork into downtown Monrovia. The island was the nation’s Achilles’ heel, home to the Freeport of Monrovia, the capital’s lifeline to the world. If the port fell, the city would be under siege.