Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (27 page)

None of this dampened Albright’s blustery oratory, though, as she gamely shouted to be heard over the droning engines of Nigeria’s huge, camouflage-painted transport planes. “I can confirm to you that the president and his advisors are deeply committed to the future of this country and its people,” she said. “The United States should take a risk for peace when we have the means to make a difference. The civil war is your war. The peace of Abuja is your peace. Either you take the courageous steps needed to secure it now or Liberia will again experience tragedy. The future is yours alone to determine.”

The next time I witnessed an American official holding forth in Liberia was barely three months later. Without warning, fierce fighting broke out in Monrovia over Easter weekend, when a large squad of men loyal to Charles Taylor had been sent to arrest his most voluble rival, Roosevelt Johnson, or better yet, to kill him should he resist. The undisputed kingpin of Liberia’s warlords clearly thought he was applying overwhelming force, but Johnson, a stubby, fast-talking man endowed with sleepy eyes and a preternatural cockiness, was blessed with another attribute that Taylor had not reckoned with: the kind of eel-like slipperiness in tight spots that feeds myths throughout this region about supernatural powers.

The tensions between the two men had been mounting powerfully for weeks, and after the civil war’s seven years of attrition, Johnson was just about the only person left in Liberia who dared to match Taylor boast for boast and threat for threat. Although there was nothing in his background to recommend him for the title, Johnson had won a seat as minister for reconstruction in the country’s volatile unity government. With members of his Krahn ethnic group approaching him constantly to solicit jobs that he had no power to grant, Johnson spent his days fuming in his third-floor walk-up office over not having been named one of Taylor’s co-presidents on the Council of State. Still, Johnson compensated for his limited book knowledge with rare energy and cunning, and ever since his men attacked an ECOMOG position near Tubmanville earlier in the year, taking over the nearby diamond mines, his star had been rising among the idle and disgruntled boy soldiers for whom the war had long ceased being a matter of identifiable causes.

Johnson’s men had been expecting an attack from Taylor’s militia that Easter weekend and managed to slip out of the neighborhood unscathed. Heading northwest toward downtown Monrovia, they remained undetected by steering clear of the main boulevard that passes in front of the executive mansion and the gutted Foreign Ministry, home to hundreds of squatters. Instead, Johnson led his men stealthily through the narrow, fetid byways until they had wended their way toward their only possible redoubt in the city, the Barclay Training Center, or BTC, the headquarters of the mostly Krahn rump national army left behind by Samuel Doe.

The fog of war blew in on gale-force winds over the next few hours as rumors spread of an ethnic cleansing of the city aimed at eliminating the Krahn. In Monrovia, memories of the final days of Doe’s rule, when the president’s Krahn kinsmen were hunted down in the street and shot or dismembered, were still fresh. Indeed, Taylor’s periodic sacks of the capital had only fed fears of renewed horrors. His two previous sieges had each been called “battles for Monrovia,” which gave them more honor than they deserved. They had been horrific affairs, unencumbered by any rules of warfare, with civilians slaughtered, heavy weapons fired at close quarter, and rape and looting on a grand scale. No one could have known that battle number three was beginning in earnest, and that it would be the worst of all, but from the panic that coursed through the streets on this day, it was clear that no one was taking any chances.

It is said that forest fires start because of an abundance of dry brush lying around beneath the canopy. When the conditions are right, all it takes is a spark. Monrovia, too, was a blaze waiting to happen, and the fuel that ignited with a boom that day and burned fiercely for days had been blowing in from the countryside like tumbleweed for weeks— boys as young as eight or ten years addicted to drugs and armed with machine guns and rocket launchers. Years of rampaging by child soldiers had picked the countryside bare of everything it had to offer, and they were itching to use the blood feud between Taylor and Johnson as cover to relieve Monrovia’s residents of whatever fancy, store-bought goods—or values, as they called stolen merchandise—they could snatch up.

Ever since the Abuja truce had gone into effect, seating their warlord bosses together in uneasy coalition, the boy soldiers, gaunt and hungry-eyed, their skin scabbed and scarred by every manner of wound and parasite, had been steadily filtering into the city to claim some kind of material reward. On my last trip to Liberia, I had spent several days interviewing the raggedy, atrocity-hardened country boys who had begun gathering on street corners, occasionally brandishing their rifles in broad daylight. To a Westerner, Monrovia may not have looked like much of a city, but to these hungry veterans of countless bush skirmishes and village looting raids, it must have looked like a huge, open-air shopping mall.

One of the boys I met, a gangly fifteen-year-old named Lawrence Moore, had forlorn eyes and gestures, full of flinches and false starts that bespoke both pain and guilt in quantities far beyond my grasp. Tentatively, he began telling me his story downtown on the median strip of Broad Street, where he had been loitering aimlessly on a hot Saturday morning. Lawrence’s dream, now that he had reached Monrovia, was to work in Charles Taylor’s personal entourage. Only those “lucky” few, he explained, could be sure of receiving any kind of payment at all, and it was usually in rice, not cash.

Lawrence had grown up near Kakata, a forgotten little town on the edge of the Firestone estate, and when he was eleven or twelve—he wasn’t too sure—he ran off to join the infamous Small Boys Unit (SBU) of Taylor’s Patriotic Front, following in the wake of an older brother and lots of other boys his age. There had been a few weeks of rudimentary training, and then, suddenly, it wasn’t a fun child’s game anymore. Lawrence said he had received a bullet wound to his foot in his very first firefight. Taylor’s recruitment and indoctrination of young boy soldiers had rested on a few psychological keys, replacing the often missing father in the fighters’ lives with a tough, mature commander, someone stern but caring, and Taylor himself loomed atop this guerrilla pyramid scheme as the
über–
father figure. Indeed, the boys were encouraged to call him Pappy, and most of them eagerly complied.

Lawrence’s attachment to the Patriotic Front was sealed when he was evacuated from the front and treated in a bush clinic, given better care than he had ever known before and allowed to recover fully before being sent back into action. For most boys, though, other balms were required, and they were kept loyal and inoculated against fear through the copious supplies of drugs. “They were always feeding us opium, ganja and crack,” Lawrence told me. “At first, I didn’t want to smoke, but there was no way that you could refuse. We were forced to smoke those things, and after a while there was no way you could stop.”

Soon enough, devotion to Pappy and the craving and fury induced by drugs had become life’s two remaining motivations. “While we were fighting, there was plenty of food for all of us, there was opium and there was medicine if we got sick,” Lawrence said. “When we weren’t fighting, we had to fend for ourselves. So all we wanted to do was fight.”

On two occasions, Lawrence said, his company was ordered to overrun his own village, and only much later did he bother to return to see whether his mother was alive and help move her to a safer place. “Our job was killing, and I’ve killed a lot of people
. . . plenty,
” he added, stretching the word out for emphasis, like an exclamation point, as Liberians often did. “I’ve had lots of friends die right in front of my eyes, but I never felt bad. I said to myself, this is what war is, so I never stopped.”

The battles that raged back and forth across the Liberian countryside became hallucinogenic blurs, of kids sky-high on drugs convinced they were shielded by amulets against enemy bullets, and getting ripped to shreds all the while. Fronts were ill defined and ground was rarely held for long, unless, that is, diamonds or iron ore or another rich source of a fungible commodity was at hand. For the boy soldiers, it was not readily apparent, but for their commanders, and for the warlords whose groups had splintered into a score of factions, this was a war of spoils, and spoils alone.

Lawrence eventually tired of the war, and had come to detest the killing. Nowadays, he longed for his mother and sister, and as he weaned himself from the drugs during the recent ceasefire, he had begun to feel a crushing sense of remorse about his past. He had no notion of political science and could not read well enough to get through a newspaper, not even one of the skimpy and ink-smudged four-page broadsheets that circulated in Monrovia. For him, Pappy was still Pappy, though, and he remained loyal to him; the law of the jungle remained intuitive and natural. As the strongest, most feared and ruthless warlord, Taylor was Liberia’s Little Caesar, and the only route to peace that Lawrence could conceive was that the country would render itself unto him. “If Pappy doesn’t become president,” Lawrence told me in his simple, heavily accented speech, “the situation in Liberia won’t never be any good.”

I heard the news of the Easter fighting in Monrovia on the BBC, and caught the next flight from Abidjan to Freetown, an even more war-wearied West African city and the capital of Liberia’s neighbor, Sierra Leone. It was reported on the radio that the United States was planning yet another evacuation in Liberia, and by the time I got to the Mammy Yoko Hotel, a decrepit though once elegant resort complex built on a sweeping half-moon bay just outside Freetown, hordes of reporters had already gathered there.

I quickly learned that the marines, who had been sent to extract people from Liberia, were reluctantly planning to ferry into the country only a select few of us. Gathered with the other reporters who were to fly into Liberia with the marines, we chartered a rickety helicopter owned by Ukrainian mercenaries to fly us to Lungi, the mildewed, dilapidated airport located across the bay, on the far outskirts of Freetown, where the U.S. evacuation effort was already gearing up.

The Ukrainians had been hired by the Sierra Leone government to do battle against that country’s own Taylor-style insurgency. With its thousands of loose rivets, their helicopter gunship sizzled frighteningly throughout our short ride across the bay, and the marines at Lungi watched with bemusement as the Soviet-vintage clunker landed. Later, as we prepared for takeoff in an American Huey, a marine expressed surprise that we would have risked flying in the Ukrainians’ metal. “When you get in one of our birds, at least you know that the only thing that can bring you down by surprise is a direct hit,” he said.

We were airborne again in a matter of minutes, and with our ears stoppered with plugs against the noise, the best we could do for communication was the hand signals we made in appreciation of the American bird’s maneuvers as it swooped and wheeled, hugging the lush coast. We sped east by southeast for nearly two hours, zipping past abandoned lumber mills and mines, and the occasional forlorn village, usually little more than a modest clearing of red earth amid a sea of leafy green. The entire time, gunners peered out the bay doors, ready to reply with their impressively large mounted machine gun, in case anyone fired on us from below.

We landed in a huge open field, across the Mesurado River, a good ways from downtown Monrovia, which we were informed was entirely engulfed in combat and thievery. We were told to duck as we were hustled off the helicopter and quickly herded into a corner behind a high concrete wall.

Directing things on the ground was Ambassador Milam, a diplomat I had met many times before who had always impressed me with his hail-fellow decency. As he ministered busily to groups of people who had gathered here to await their evacuation, though, the relaxed smile that usually played on his open face was replaced with a look of deadly seriousness. The small crowd that had assembled on the grassy field that blistering afternoon contained a sampling of just about all the foreign residents who made up Liberia’s heterogeneous international community.

There were doughy American missionaries dressed in clothing that looked almost as if it had been selected for its blandness; the families of the Lebanese traders who had been in this country for generations, running everything from the diamond business to petty commerce; a sprinkling of Greeks and Indians; and a handful of West Africans from Ghana and other nearby countries. Here and there, I could spot a Liberian family who had been allowed onto the field in preparation for evacuation. The diplomats said they were people who had lived in the United States or had some special claim to entry into the country, such as the birth of a child in America, which confers automatic citizenship to the infant. Even amid the crush and chaos, the Liberian families stood out. They had all somehow managed to put on their Sunday best, as if they had mistaken the marines’ choppers for the church altar.

To my eyes, the presence of a few families like these only brought into sharper relief the ambiguous morality of the evacuation. The marines were doing their job with typical efficiency and even dignity, but there was no escaping the ugly fact that America was swooping into this country once again to conduct a triage, neglecting precisely those who were least able to fend for themselves. Ordinary Liberians were being relegated to a category of subhuman existence whose intimate workings I had first learned about as a young reporter covering police headquarters in New York. There, I quickly deduced how certain murders were automatically classified as nickel-and-dime cases— “jobs” that required little follow-up by detectives, and by inference, by the press as well. It was another insidious form of triage, and it took only a few days on the assignment to understand that the “garbage” cases almost invariably involved people of color.