Can't say he's alone...
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By Jeffrey Bartholet
NEWSWEEK


A Big Man in Africa
Inside the mind of a tyrant: Brutal and seemingly indifferent to his
people’s woes, Liberia’s Charles Taylor symbolizes much that is wrong with
Africa. But to understand him is to take a first step toward fixing a broken
continent


      May 14 issue —  Enter the offices of an African big man and have a
look around. The first security guard you meet is a wiry fellow with
suspicious eyes and a shirt collar so frayed that you have to wonder what’s
been chewing on it. The hallways are gloomy, the stairwells musty. Two giant
glass partitions, shot up during the Liberian civil war, are still pocked
and shattered.

        YET THE BUILDING maintains a perverse sense of tradition. Along the
way, you pass a portrait of former Liberian president William Tolbert, who
was disemboweled in this very building during a military coup in 1980. You
also encounter a portrait of Tolbert’s executioner, former president Samuel
K. Doe, whose ears were hacked off before he was executed by drunken rebels
in 1990.

The guards get a lot bigger and better dressed as you proceed. Still, you’ve
got to wonder: do these tyrants ever learn? Africa is littered with Big Men
who fell hard. Some were assassinated, like Laurent Kabila of Congo, who was
shot in the head in January by a bodyguard pretending to whisper something
in his ear. Others died in mysterious circumstances, like Nigeria’s Sani
Abacha, who reportedly expired during a Viagra-fueled orgy with prostitutes.
Others were chased into ignominious exile, or cling to power against a
growing clamor of criticism, like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. But still they
come, with their supersize egos, their entourage of sycophants, their
penchant for violence. Some have presided over systems so corrupt that
they’ve given rise to new political terms—like “kleptocracy” and “vampire
state.” They plunder the continent’s natural resources and leave little in
their wake but ruin. Who are these leaders, and what are they thinking?

‘DON’T GO THERE’
       Charles Taylor is sitting at his desk, absorbed in paperwork, keeping
everyone standing. When he emerges, he seems a bit stiff and defensive in
his dark suit and gold silk tie. But for two hours, he answers questions in
great gusts of American-accented English, his arguments peppered with
familiar idioms—”Oh no, don’t go there ... don’t go down that road!”—and
liberal references to God. Taylor wants you to believe that his crazed
militiamen didn’t commit atrocities during the 1990s civil war. “Murder and
rape, those things weren’t permitted,” he insists. When you mention heads
and skulls posted on stakes in his territory, he puffs himself up with
indignation. “Well, it depends on which head you saw,” he argues. “That
might have been an enemy soldier.” When you repeatedly ask for a simple
recounting of history—how he escaped from a Massachusetts jail in 1985—he
says he doesn’t know. But you were the one who escaped. “Maybe the good old
Lord just wanted to bless me,” Taylor says.

        Finally, he wants you to believe that all the current accusations
against him are false. No, he hasn’t harassed and intimidated political
opponents in Liberia. No, he hasn’t been trading guns to the Revolutionary
United Front rebels in Sierra Leone, a force infamous for chopping the limbs
off children. No, he’s never had anything to do with diamond smuggling. Yes,
he has had a long relationship with rebels of the RUF. But far from being
the primary instigator of the gruesome war in Sierra Leone, Taylor insists
he has been a pivotal peacemaker. He also says that he’s met international
demands to disengage from the RUF. A recent United Nations report detailing
the allegations against him, and U.N. sanctions to be imposed on his regime
this week, are all based on disinformation, and are perhaps part of a
shadowy international plot. “For God’s sake,” he says at one point, “the way
things are going ... it’s like somebody wants to take me out.”
        Somebody does. Rebel incursions into Liberia from neighboring Guinea
have recently intensified into a new round of civil war. Rampaging fighters
have committed fresh atrocities, forcing tens of thousands of civilians to
flee. The rebels last month killed one of Taylor’s ministers while he was
choppering into the battle zone. Clearly worried, Taylor has mobilized his
own ex-fighters, and members of his notorious Anti-Terrorist Unit have
routinely tortured and raped people suspected of aiding his opponents,
according to a re-cent Amnesty International report. So history grimly
repeats itself: another traumatic round of bloodletting is underway in
sub-Saharan Africa, and, at the center of it all, another African strongman
is clinging to power.


‘WHERE’S THE BEEF?’
       If Taylor were a monstrous buffoon, he’d be easier to assess. But
he’s not. He’s well educated, and likes to sprinkle his arguments with
references to American politics and pop culture. (“Where’s the beef?” he
asks about the accusations of diamond dealing.) His aides point out that
he’s the first Liberian president to go to college in the United States, and
that he plays a mean tennis game. And Taylor suffers from a genuine dilemma:
he is caught between international pressures that would force him to cut his
ties with the RUF—and take a few baby steps into legitimacy—and the need to
maintain an alliance with the RUF to ensure his personal survival. Taylor
insists that Americans don’t understand Africa, and that as a result they’ve
also misread him. But then, maybe the converse is true: if we understood
Taylor better—his background, his motivations, his appetites and fears—we’d
have a better sense of what ails Africa.

       Bentley College is not the sort of place you’d expect a West African
warlord to have got- ten his education. Yet it was at this campus of red
brick buildings centered on a stately clock tower, 20 minutes outside
Boston, that Charles Taylor earned his undergraduate degree in 1977.
Economics professor Alexander Zampieron recalls a solid if unexceptional
student. (A check of the records shows that Zampieron awarded him a B-minus
in Macroeconomic Principles, and a C in Economic Fluctuation and
Forecasting.) “He always comported himself very well,” Zampieron says.
Taylor wore a tie to class, attended regularly and routinely sat in the same
seat three rows back at the center of the room. “I had other students from
Africa who I thought could have become revolutionaries, but not Charlie
Taylor, that’s for sure,” says Zampieron.
        Still, it was during a decade in the United States in the 1970s that
Taylor became active in exile politics. Many Liberian students were
agitating against political domination by a class of people known as
Americo-Liberians, freed American slaves who had founded the Republic of
Liberia in 1847. The Americo-Liberians had long regarded themselves as a cut
above indigenous, “uncivilized” Liberians. Although Taylor’s father was
Americo-Liberian, his mother was from the Gola tribe. Associates say that
Taylor has always emphasized one or the other aspect of his background,
depending on which one worked to his political advantage.

ENDING IN DISGRACE
       Taylor’s first flirtation with national politics came with the
Liberian coup of 1980, and ended in disgrace. A semiliterate master sergeant
named Samuel K. Doe, from the Krahn tribe, overthrew the Americo-Liberian
order and installed a repressive and corrupt regime. Through Taylor’s
connections with one of the coup leaders, he became head of the General
Services Agency, which gave him control over lucrative government contracts.
But he had a falling out with President Doe and fled to the United States,
where he had allegedly stashed $900,000 in embezzled funds. Doe requested
his extradition; FBI agents arrested Taylor and put him in the Plymouth
House of Correction in Massachusetts. Sixteen months later Taylor and some
fellow inmates made ropes out of knotted bedsheets, cut through some barred
windows and escaped—at least that’s what’s been reported. In any event, he
eventually resurfaced in Africa.
        Like many other educated Liberians, Taylor figured he could lead the
country better than Doe. But while other Liberian dissidents debated how
best to act, Taylor gathered exiles with military experience, and invited
others to Libya for training. On Christmas Eve 1989, he crossed into Liberia
from Cote d’Ivoire with about 100 fighters. The rebellion might have been
easily snuffed out then. But government troops from Doe’s Krahn tribe
attacked civilians suspected of supporting the rebels. The abuses helped to
swell the ranks of Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, and the
rebels in turn hunted Krahn civilians. Fighters on all sides killed innocent
people—out of ethnic hatred, or to settle personal scores, or just because
they didn’t like the look of somebody.
        The war never really ended. It was fought to several ceasefires and
stalemates, but it seemed to reignite every two years or so. International
organizations promoted free elections in 1997, but no country was willing to
properly disarm fighters ahead of the vote. Taylor’s main adversary was
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former Africa director of the United Nations
Development Programme. She campaigned to put civilians back in power, but
many Liberians had doubts about her ability to give them what they wanted
most: peace and security. Taylor won an overwhelming majority, in part
because Liberians feared that he would return to fighting if he lost. “You
killed my ma! You killed my pa! I’ll vote for you!” some chanted. Since
then, security services and other goons have intimidated critics and
human-rights activists, many of whom have fled the country.
        In the spring of 1999 some of Taylor’s fiercest opponents instigated
a rebellion similar to the one that he began more than a decade ago.
Atrocities have begun anew. Last July, Liberian Otto Bernard was working as
a driver for Medecins sans Frontieres in northern Liberia when well-armed
rebels—operating from bases in Guinea—commandeered his car. At one point,
when he was a prisoner listless with hunger, the rebels gave him a bowl of
soup cooked with the meat of a human heart, cut from a government soldier.
“I looked at the thing a long time,” he recalls. “Then I threw it away ...
Then they told me, ‘We gave you food and you threw it away—you will pay the
price.’ I started crying.” With help from a sympathetic rebel, Bernard was
able to escape before he was to be executed.

WILL HE PAY?
       Taylor knows the stories well; his own forces committed similar
atrocities during the war. Many Liberians would like him to pay for that. So
as he considers his own fate, Taylor has got to be weighing the obvious
dangers. Although he is generally portrayed as an expansionist—greedy for
regional power and loot—he may be just as motivated by fear. Only days after
President Kabila was assassinated in Congo earlier this year, Liberian and
diplomatic sources say, Taylor changed his personal security detail. “Well,
one must be very careful,” Taylor allows, when asked if he has security
concerns. “Africa is a little different ... In some modern countries, you
have a political opposition. In Africa, you are not just an adversary if you
lose an election; you become almost an enemy.”
        Taylor supports the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone partly because of
this fear. Beyond giving his associates access to diamonds, the alliance
also helps to establish a “friendly” buffer along that deeply unstable
border. Likewise, he may be helping rebels in Guinea because he wants to
keep Liberian dissident forces based there on the defensive.
        Taylor claims to be mystified about why he has become an
international pariah. He argues that he could do far more for Liberia than
his largely uneducated predecessor did. (The Doe government, with a terrible
human-rights record, received $500 million in U.S. aid during the 1980s.)
Taylor encourages his countrymen to “think big,” and campaigned on putting
computers in schools—a pledge that seems more preposterous now that public
schools are hardly operating. He says he’s a diehard capitalist. Yet just
about the only companies that will deal with Liberia are those that want to
extract resources like rubber, gold or timber.
        Without the cold war to give his devastated country even a shred of
strategic importance, Taylor is a dictator adrift: he needs American support
to survive, let alone thrive. But he also must be concerned that the
conditions of American support will prove to be his undoing. So he tries to
have it both ways: he maintains the facade of democracy, while ensuring that
no one threatens his power. Taylor allowed the creation of a local
human-rights commission, for instance, but then assured that it had no
support to carry out its work. Although he has allowed the press some
freedom to criticize him, Taylor personally owns a TV station, a network of
FM-radio stations and the nation’s only shortwave channel; he closed down a
rival outfit last March because, he said, it was funded by foreign-aid
groups.

SMARTER THAN ANYONE ELSE?
       Yet diplomats who deal with Taylor say he is too slick for his own
good. “Charles Taylor thinks he’s smarter than anyone else, and that we
won’t see through him,” says a senior diplomat in Monrovia. “He
miscalculates.” Many of his own people are similarly weary. After more than
three years of Taylor’s rule, electricity has been restored to only a few
blocks of the capital, jobs are few and malnutrition rates are high. Tons of
garbage burn in great heaps on the streets. The annual government budget is
about $65 million, and the national debt, inherited by Taylor’s government,
is $2.55 billion.




While aid to Liberia plummets, Taylor’s personal generosity grows. He uses
some of his “personal” funds to support wives and mistresses: Taylor has a
Christian wife and a Muslim wife, as well as two former wives who share his
name and other women who bore children by him. Every so often he gives away
cash or cars to the winner of a beauty pageant or the victor in a tennis
tournament that he sponsors. Late last year, he and his ministers attended a
special gospel concert at Monrovia’s Centennial Pavilion—one of the few
properly renovated buildings in the city. When one of the singers performed
a new song for the occasion—about Liberia’s “shining future”—Taylor jumped
up onstage, danced around and made her sing it again. He then promised the
woman $25,000, anointed her Liberia’s “musical ambassador” and instructed
his aides to issue her a diplomatic passport.
        Many ordinary Liberians, who scrape and scavenge for food, were
upset. But Taylor is unapologetic. “That song now serves as a uniting force
in Liberia, a force of reconciliaiton, a force of peace,” he says with
typical bombast. Taylor also claims that the money he hands out comes from
his own “personal” funds—which he says come from foreign backers. Told that
many Liberians want to know who gave money to him, he replies huffily: “It’s
none of their business.”
        It’s easy to imagine why so many educated Liberians strongly oppose
Taylor. Yet his more thoughtful critics also oppose the current insurgency,
and worry about who might come next if Taylor is violently removed. “There
is always someone who wants the power—that’s the trouble,” says a Monrovia
newspaper editor. “Here, you don’t have a middle class. Everything is too
extreme: either you’re in the government, or you’re nowhere. We talk about
change of leadership [by force]. But we’ve tried that.” Liberian Archbishop
Michael Francis, an outspoken critic of human-rights abuses, agrees. “Doe
came to redeem us and what did we get?” he says. “Taylor came as our
redeemer—to get Doe off our backs, and all of these people joined him. More
redeemers. What did they get us?”
        If that sounds unremittingly grim, it is. Taylor is just one of many
African strongmen who rule countries in similar straits. The continent is
mangled by war, disease, poverty. In many countries, towns have no
electricity, schools lack books, hospitals have few medicines. Millions of
children have been killed by malaria and orphaned by AIDS in recent years.
Sanctions alone won’t solve that. Nor will neglect. Nor will bursts of
enthusiasm for “new” African leaders, or even fresh elections. Even those
countries that have moved toward greater democracy—like Nigeria, Ghana and
Senegal—still have a long way to go.
        Taylor hopes to use Africa’s desperation to justify his own abuses,
arguing that strong leaders are needed to ward off chaos. With the help of
American-educated advisers, he wants to talk the Bush administration into a
policy of “constructive engagement” toward his regime. “We’ve listened to
statements made by President Bush,” says Taylor hopefully, “to the effect
that America is not just going to go around the world banging every little
country, saying, ‘This the way we do it— do it [this way]’.”
        So Bush’s top foreign-policy advisers, including two
African-Americans, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national-security
adviser Condoleezza Rice, now face some fundamental questions. Should
strongmen like Taylor be judged by a different, “African standard” of human
rights and democracy and accepted as the only stand-in for order on a
chaotic continent? (Other former rebels and coup leaders, like Ghana’s Jerry
Rawlings, have eventually proved to be reformers.) Or should the
international community declare the Taylors to be outcasts if they don’t
live up to more stringent norms? The best answer may lie somewhere in the
middle: to prod the Big Men into reform while not cutting off their people.
In the case of Liberia, the United Nations has im-posed “smart sanctions”
designed to hurt the regime while sparing ordinary Li-berians—by slapping a
travel ban on senior government officials and their spouses, for instance.
        Charles Taylor feigns, at least, a sense of optimism. He’s hoping to
withstand the sanctions push, believing that the fickle international
community will eventually come around. So he’s biding his time—keeping up a
Big Man front, but anxious, too.

        He can’t fully trust anyone around him, and has several security
outfits spying on one another. “Well, I’ll tell you about my makeup,” he
says, when asked about the psychological toll on him. “Stress affects me
very little.” But that bravado belies another reality. In Taylor’s world
view, the weak are devoured. To remind himself of that, all he has to do is
walk the corridors of his executive mansion and examine the portraits of his
predecessors. What Taylor and his countrymen need is a new vision of
Africa—and a belief that there is another way.


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