Can't say he's alone... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask] if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------