As he bullied his way to power, Washington played along. No less an authority than former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, on hand to observe the polling, declared Liberia’s transformation “almost a miracle.”
Now at last Taylor is feeling some heat for a change. His misfortune began last May with the collapse of the year-old peace agreement between civil-war factions in neighboring Sierra Leone. The Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group whose trademark is to hack the limbs off its victims, had relinquished neither its weapons nor its control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines, and instead took 500 United Nations peace-keeping troops hostage. Taylor magnanimously interceded to get them freed, but to his surprise the deed failed to secure his reputation as an international statesman. Instead, it only served as evidence of his de facto control of the rebels. Washington and London soured on the Liberian leader.
Soon other pieces fell into place. British intelligence reported that Taylor has been accepting diamonds from the rebels in exchange for arms, prompting Britain to persuade the European Union to cut off new aid. Last month U.S. Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering threatened Taylor with economic sanctions if he doesn’t cut ties to the RUF once and for all. The U.N. Security Council voted last week to set up a war-crimes tribunal to try imprisoned RUF leader Foday Sankoh, a Taylor protege. And President Bill Clinton will visit Nigeria this week in a gesture of support for the pending deployment of U.S.-trained Nigerian and other West African troops to Sierra Leone. Their mission: to take down the RUF and regain control of the diamond fields–now believed to be the main source of Taylor’s wealth.
Taylor denies all the accusations. Liberia isn’t supplying the RUF with arms or profiting from Sierra Leone diamonds, he told the BBC last week. “Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, we are guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “It is very difficult and frightening when you are dealing with major countries such as Britain and the United States, who are the principal architects of this smear campaign against Liberia.” In long conversations with one of his diplomats stationed abroad, he complained that U.N. officials refused to lay the evidence against him on the table. And though he may be bold while on the offensive, Taylor evidently now fears for his own safety. Two weeks ago a radio station he controls charged that Washington offered a $2 million bounty for his assassination. His aides say Britain is arming Liberian exiles who last month invaded the north from hostile Guinea. Last week Taylor added two security cars to the long convoy in which he travels between his farm outside the capital and the presidential palace.
It has been a long climb to this now precarious perch. Taylor, 52, learned politics at the knee of his father, an American-born lawyer, while growing up in a middle-class suburb of Monrovia. He appears to have been committed to opposing the Liberian establishment by the time he first came to the United States in 1972, to enroll at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. While studying for an undergraduate degree in economics, he often took part in protests against the Liberian government, then led by President William Tolbert. Teachers recalled Taylor as a thoughtful student, bright but not brilliant. He devoted much time to outside activities, which included politics and gambling.
Although Taylor now professes to be a diehard capitalist, he was weaned on leftist ideology. A contemporary who knew him in Washington in the late 1970s said he was a “socialist, leaning toward communism.” Despite his earlier protests of Tolbert’s regime, in January 1980, the Liberian president invited Taylor to observe the workings of government firsthand. Providentially, he was in Monrovia four months later when a low-ranking soldier, Samuel K. Doe, took power in a coup and slaughtered Tolbert and his top officials. According to one acquaintance of Taylor’s, the young activist quietly carried out his own coup by taking charge of one of the few government agencies that controlled any substantial funds, the contract-letting Government Services Administration. Doe eventually confirmed Taylor’s authority.
Within three years, however, Taylor was on the run–a fugitive in the United States. According to formal charges filed by Doe’s government, Taylor had signed a $922,000 contract with a fictitious U.S. firm for spare parts for earth-moving equipment, then had friends divert much of the money to his own U.S. bank accounts. Taylor denied the charges, saying he had fled to avoid being arrested as part of a coup plot. A U.S. judge found the charges credible enough to hold Taylor for extradition when he was arrested while visiting friends near Boston. Taylor spent 16 months in a Massachusetts jail, a self-described political prisoner. He made no waves; one jailer described him as an “accountant type.” One evening he persuaded a guard to relax the rules and let him visit another wing to play cards with friends. With a hacksaw and knotted bedsheets, he and three other inmates escaped. The others were quickly recaptured. Taylor melted away–reportedly to the West Indies, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and finally to a desert camp for revolutionaries sponsored by Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi.
The next time Taylor returned to Liberia, he was a guerrilla leader. He had just 150 Libyan-trained fighters with him when he crossed the border from Cote d’Ivoire on Christmas Eve, 1989. But the revolt quickly got up steam. Doe’s troops were hated in the area. Taylor ruthlessly recruited children as soldiers; human-rights groups have charged that his troops injected prospective members of a “small-boy unit” with heroin and cocaine and had them carry out atrocities in order to eliminate their natural abhorrence of killing. Taylor denies these assertions. The revolution fed on resentment of Doe’s favoritism toward members of his own Krahn tribe. Taylor quickly began tapping territory he controlled for cash, selling lumber, rubber, gold and diamonds. Two years after launching his revolt, he was secure enough to support another uprising in neighboring Sierra Leone, this one by the RUF. According to Western officials, Foday Sankoh had trained in Libya with Taylor.
For years all that stood between Taylor and total victory was Nigeria, the region’s leading military power. Washington poured in aid during the cold war, but shut the tap once Liberia’s big airfield, transmitter and ship-tracking station lost strategic value. Nigeria first landed a West African military “monitoring group” in Monrovia in 1990 and repeatedly held off rebel assaults while propping up an interim government. Taylor established his own capital in the outlying city of Gbanga, where he issued proclamations on stationery bearing the presidential seal, printed his own currency and appointed a cabinet. He changed his middle name from MacArthur to Ghankay–warrior. His bulletproof American limousines flew the Liberian flag on their fenders. “I will never disarm to a Nigerian,” he told an interviewer in 1993, after the United Nations imposed an embargo aimed at forcing Taylor into a coalition government. “They have brought genocide to our people. They bomb churches, hospitals and schools.” But in 1995 Taylor agreed to join other warlords in a peace conference in Nigeria. The talks created a joint council, which ruled until the 1997 elections brought Taylor to power.
Along the way, the former leftist became a Bible-spouting Baptist. Last year he fired almost his entire cabinet and the heads of several public corporations for failing to attend a nationwide prayer service. “Any government official who does not know God will not serve in my government,” he said. The officials were reinstated the next week. With Taylor’s encouragement, a Virginia-based evangelistic group recently opened eight new churches in the countryside. But, three years into his term, Taylor still hasn’t managed to carry out his main campaign promise–to restore electricity to the capital. There is no running water. Lately Taylor has begun to invoke the will of God in nearly every public utterance. As a new confrontation with Nigeria and the West approaches, his long-suffering people must be praying for deliverance.
