Liberia

LONDON – Whoever wins the Liberian election, which now goes to a second round, will confront the question: how can Liberia avoid a resumption of politics-as-plunder? Charles Taylor, Liberia’s and Africa’s plunderer (and murderer)-in-chief, may be off the scene but the interim government that has presided over Liberia in the preparations for the recent elections has shown that raping raw material resources is deep in the sinews of Liberian politics. In March, a UN panel reported that Liberian officials had signed a secret contract with a European company that gave it a virtual monopoly to sell Liberian diamonds, even though Liberia has been banned from selling its diamonds by the UN until the UN certifies that transparent and accountable procedures are being followed. Although the two front-runners in Liberia’s presidential contest are known for their probity and integrity and doubtless will want to get on top of the problem, the...

LONDON – Even the worst of African situations can be turned around. In Liberia it has been done in two years. The descent during the 1980s and 90s was precipitous, fast and deadly. A quarter of a million people were killed by rival militias, hundreds of thousands driven across borders into refugee camps, one president tortured to death and the macabre event recorded on video, young adolescent boys dressed up in wigs and terrified the populace with random killings and, not least, the country was systematically looted almost clean by its warlord/president Charles Taylor, who became rich on the export of timber, iron ore and alluvial diamonds from neighbouring Sierra Leone. Two years ago I was here at the war’s end. Nigerian and Ghanaian peacekeeping troops lined the road from the airport, backs to the road, eyes scanning the jungle for movement. The roads were sandbagged with checkpoints, the telephone...

MONROVIA, LIBERIA – African peacekeeping has perhaps at last found the right turning on the dangerous road of ethnic strife, tribal war and warlordism that besieges too many countries in Africa. When President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, engineered, or rather enticed, the removal of the Liberian despot, Charles Taylor, to exile in Nigeria last month it turned the page on a new chapter in African peacekeeping efforts. It has been nine years since the U.S. /UN debacle in Somalia when the U.S. command of the UN peacekeeping force decided to cut and run after the gruesome death of 18 American soldiers. This was followed by a period during the Clinton Administration when the U. S. stood back from Africa’s wars. The administration effectively vetoed a major peacekeeping operation that might have stood a chance of forestalling the Rwandan genocide. The combination of a rebirth of political confidence in now democratic Ghana,...

LONDON – The crisis in the Congo, and to a lesser extent in Liberia, throws into relief an issue that has long lain at the doorstep of the United Nations – whether or not to authorize the use of an almighty force and a civilian occupying administration. It is not just the Americans who have shied away from going all the way. At various times countries from all the four corners have given it short shrift. “Peacekeeping” with lightly armed troops was the compromise, which worked well when both sides arrived at the point (often after a lot of fighting) when they wanted a neutral middleman, as in the Middle East or Cyprus (where it averted a Bosnian type Christian/Muslim war), but less well where things were still on the boil, as in the Congo in the early 1960s and Rwanda in 1994. The question pressed by the widening civil wars...