An extract from A Life Removed: Hunting For Refuge In The Modern World by Rose George.
Today, Charles Taylor has liberated the Liberian people. At least, over 20,000 of them have been liberated to the great beyond.
Nigerian newspaper This Day, on Charles Taylor’s arrival in Nigeria, August 2003
A young man in Cricklewood is watching on TV a country that he used to belong to. Rich is watching it from 3175 miles and 13 years’ distance, because he’s from Liberia, which used to be known for its exports of timber and rubber, but whose biggest export now is refugees. 750,000 Liberians are still on the run from their country, or a quarter of the population. Translated into a nearer and clear hypothesis, that’s equivalent to 12 million British people, or more than London. Emptied.
The camera pans over Monrovia, Liberia’s once-gracious capital on the Atlantic Ocean. I see buildings and waves. The young man sees memories. “Man,” he says, in his half-London, half-Liberian accent. “There’s nothing left!”
***
Conversations with Liberians can be confusing. For anyone unschooled in the country’s recent history, a discussion would probably go like this:
When did you leave your home?
When the war met me.
Which one?
Who raped your mother?
The rebels.
Which ones?
When did you leave Liberia?
Which time?
How was your child killed?
Which one?
It is hard to keep up with the succession of men, women and guns who have destroyed a country. Here’s a short list: PRC, LPC, NPFL, INPFL, ULIMO-J, ULIMO-K, LURD, MODEL. Here are some names: Samuel, Charles, Prince, Roosevelt, George. Innocuous names, for lethal men. I ask refugees why these men made war. “I don’t know!” they said. “Just to destroy.” Liberia used to be a good place to be. It worked, more or less. “Before 1989,” Liberians tell me, “there was no such thing as a Liberian refugee.” People would go abroad to study and almost always come home. With a US$ economy, stability and Atlantic surf, why wouldn’t they?
On a bridge in Monrovia, some weeks earlier, a boy was selling sweets. They were laid out, in red wrappers, along the narrow top of a waist-high barrier. One by one, in a long and dainty line. He was selling them singly, because one sweet can be a luxury in a country only months away from battles so bad, Liberians refer to them them World Wars 1, 2 and 3, with no irony. The red sweets look like shards of glass. They are beautiful, against the damaged stone of the bridge, and behind them there are bullet-holes.
Between June and July 2003, the time of the world wars, this bridge was the stage for prancing boy and girl soldiers, in filthy clothes and crazy wigs, with heavy guns and drugged eyes, who delighted news cameramen and terrified everyone else. They were from both sides of the battle – LURD rebels (Liberians United for the Reconciliation of Democracy) on one side, militia loyal to president Charles Taylor on the other. They gave themselves fine cartoon names, like Jungle Fire, or University of Bullet. They were all undisciplined and dangerous, both the government soldiers launching mortars from the Monrovia side of the bridge, to the young rebels receiving them on Bush rod island, which they now occupied. They had got far enough into the city to write “No Monkey!” graffiti on the walls. The monkey is Charles Taylor, now ex-President of Liberia, so-called because – the versions vary – he was up in the tree and wouldn’t come down, or because he was up in the tree, and he kept taking the best fruit.
Taylor’s militia fighters were firing mortars from a tall building overlooking the bridge, and their Small Boy Unit colleagues were down on the ground, shooting indiscriminately because that’s what they did best, and that’s what they’d been doing for most of the previous 14 years, if they’d been alive that long. Occasionally, either for clearly thought-out political advantage, or because they felt like it, the fighters in the tall building would lob a rocket or two into Mamba Point, the chi-chi quarter overlooking the ocean where the Americans had built an embassy complex that was once the largest in sub-Saharan Africa and which even today is the size of a small, highly-sandbagged village. There were Liberians sheltering in the embassy compound, because they had heard there was an electronic device installed there that could deflect missiles, when the rockets fell and sliced up 20 people. Later, there were Liberians lying on the ground in front of the US Embassy Gate Number 1, because the city’s residents had got too disgusted with the Americans’ refusal to intervene, and piled up bodies – killed by mortars in the Greystone IDP camp the day before - as an incontrovertible message. In case the Americans still didn’t get it, the bodies were accompanied by a handwritten note saying, “America! What else do you want to SEE?”
The Americans didn’t get it in the way the Liberians would have wished. They refused to send an American peacekeeping force, like the one the British sent to next door Sierra Leone, or the French sent to Cote d’Ivoire, though an American assessment team strongly recommended intervention. But the US put its strength, several years too late, behind the promise of 15,000 peacekeepers, just not American ones (as usual, developing countries were to supply the majority of blue helmets). It helped get rid of Charles Taylor, who was persuaded to step down, and now lives in comfortable exile in Calabar, Nigeria, with a large entourage and a large phone bill. A month or so after the bodies at the gate, Liberians had a kind of peace. The fragile kind. The last time they had any peace more durable than that was in 1979.
***
I remember the television coverage from last summer, the garish boy fighters, the undertones of excitement of reporters getting to see somewhere comprehensively and newsworthily destroyed. I paid some attention, I felt some pity. But I still thought Monrovia was a country, and Freetown was its capital. Liberians in the UK say most people think they’re from Libya. “They know Sierra Leone, because it was a British colony. But not us. If they were in the merchant navy, they’ll know us from the Liberian flags of convenience.” (Liberia has the second largest shipping fleet in the world.) When Graham Greene travelled through Liberia in 1936, he called his book Journey without Maps, because there weren’t any of Liberia. When I looked for a map in London’s best map shop, things had progressed. There was exactly one available. In German.
It is a small country – smaller than England - but even before it provided the spectacle of war, there were reasons Liberia should have stood out. On a corner in Monrovia, just before the presidential drive which leads past the Executive Mansion and which Charles Taylor forbade any citizen from driving down, there are three battered posters. The one with the biggest dimensions and biggest dents is the one to remember. Two cartoon figures face each other, a small man in shorts, a tall man in a stars-and-stripes hat. Behind them, there is a winding road, with way stages of Liberia’s history marked out. The small figure – Liberia – has a grievance. “We have come a long way, big brother,” his speech bubble says. “But it’s still rough. We are still suffering.” Uncle Sam looks puzzled, perhaps because he’s now speaking Liberian. “For true?”
In reality, most Americans would have no time for the small figure, because they wouldn’t know he existed. But they should. Liberians call themselves America’s little brother, or America’s stepchild. They think they’re the 51st state. Their towns are called Harper and counties are called Maryland, and there are enough children called George and Jefferson to make Republicans and Democrats proud. Monrovia is named after US President James Monroe. The Lone Star flag is a single-issue version of the Stars and Stripes: the single star represents the lone independent state in Africa in 1847, when Liberia was founded, and the eleven stripes are the eleven men who signed the Declaration of Independence. The country’s motto – “the love of liberty brought us here” - would look fine on an American license plate. There were even stories, when the economy was good, of wealthier Liberians who lived in the US and commuted to Monrovia. “We don’t think of ourselves as an African nation,” says someone. “We are an American nation in Africa.” African-American-Africans.
There are, for true, historical roots for this belief. In 1792, Toussaint Ouverture began a successful slaves’ revolt in Haiti. American slave-owners were alarmed enough for the repatriation of freed slaves to Africa to seem like a good idea. The American Colonization Society was formed, and volunteers were found amongst free slaves. In March 1820, 86 returnees landed at Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone, and two years later, after nearly half had been killed by malaria and disease, they came to Liberia, or the land that took the name. They easily convinced King Peter, the local African leader, to sell them some land. He didn’t have much choice, as Lt. Robert Stockton was pointing a pistol at his head. The treaty was signed in 1825, and ceded Cape Mesurado for 500 bars of tobacco, three barrels of rum, five umbrellas and ten pairs of shoes, among other things. The country officially began in 1847, with the octoroon Joseph Jenkins Roberts its first African-American president. It was named Liberia – from the Latin for freedom – but the settlers had learned from their colonial masters that freedom has to be controlled. They had learned, too, how to be colonisers: The new Liberians dressed in clothes more suitable for Massachusetts than Monrovia, and built fine houses with porches that would be acceptable in Charleston. Liberia was founded by homesick exiles. From here, that looks like a fitting beginning.
40,000 African-Americans, Africans captured from slave ships and West Indians arrived over the next forty years. They settled along the coast, naming their towns Robertsport, Buchanan and Harper, and installed a top-down political system that created such disparity between indigenous and settler, the Boers would have been proud. “This country started badly,” Blahmo Nelson tells me in his fifth floor office in the Mansion. Nelson was Charles Taylor’s director of cabinet, and is now the Director for the Scrupulous Implementation of the Peace Agreement. He still counts himself as Taylor’s friend, though Nelson’s mother starved to death in a war that Taylor was responsible for. But then, he likes to call Liberia’s situation “spontaneous combustion,” when there was little that was spontaneous about it. He also likes to give lectures on good governance, and how Liberia’s founders didn’t have any. “They ruled with a house-slave mentality. The house-slave was superior to the field-slave, and all the slaves were superior to the indigenous Africans. The only difference between the Liberian system and South Africa’s was that Liberians are all black.” The same principles applied: A small minority ruled a majority, with heavy-handed unfairness. Liberia’s sixteen tribes created another one, calling the Americo-Liberian settlers “Congo people,” because that’s where some of the slaves captured from departing ships had been stolen from, though this of course offended the non-African – or less African – Americo-Liberians. They were effective rulers, both at repressing the natives and doing business. In 1927, the legislature signed a deal with US rubber company Firestone, which wanted to kick the US’s dependence on British rubber. It got a million acres for 99 years, at 8 cents an acre, on condition that Liberia took on a $5 million loan. So Firestone got a deal, and Liberia got noticed. In 1943, Liberia declared war on Germany because the US asked it to. It gave its ports for the refuelling of submarines, and supplied rubber to the Allies when the Japanese took over the rubber plantations in the Far East.
By the late 20th century, Liberia was the Dubai of West Africa. It used the US dollar for currency, and this made it a magnet. The University of Monrovia – motto: lux in tenebris – was filled with Nigerians and South Africans. Ghanaians came to marry Liberian women. Africans from all over came to do their shopping. Monrovia was the transit point, the standard stop-over. The first cheque to the ANC was reportedly signed by the Liberian government, and Nelson Mandela is rumoured to have had a Liberian passport.
Liberia was attractive financially and politically: In Cold War times, it became strategically crucial, because the US was desperate to tame the mischief-making Colonel Gadhaffi, not far north in Libya. The Americans built their huge embassy. They installed the CIA headquarters for sub-Saharan Africa here, as well as a Voice of America radio station and the Omega listening post. They made a pact with Liberians to turn the airport of Robertsfield – now Monrovia’s only airport, since Charles Taylor closed the other one because it was too close to his mansion – into a US air base in 24 hours. This pact is still intact. When the indigenous sergeant Samuel K. Doe had President William K. Tolbert killed in 1979, and started his revolution, for a while Liberia got more aid than any other country in the region. By the time Samuel Doe was captured in 1990, and bled to death after treatment by rebels working for Prince Johnson and his INPFL (Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia), the country was run by corrupt, venal officials. And from then on, things got worse. The country was run by corrupt, venal officials, and plundered by corrupt, venal rebels.
Liberians always call armed men “rebels”, even if the cause of their rebellion isn’t usually clear. Sometimes they’re not rebelling against anything. In 1995, the New York Times magazine ran a story about Liberia entitled “A war without purpose in a country without identity.” Neither is true. The war in Liberia was about power and money, like most wars are. It was calculated in its intent, even if the foot soldiers were anything but. “The way we think about Liberia is strongly influenced by images of chaos and random violence” wrote US academic William Reno in his book Warlord Politics and African States. In fact, “warlord pursuit of commerce has been the critical variable in conflicts there.” Warlords are businessmen. The biggest warlord of all, future president Charles Taylor, promised to make Liberia into Hong Kong. He also promised not to be a wicked president. He didn’t deliver on either count.
***
The world’s first African republic now has the world’s largest peacekeeping force for the world’s worst country. Some of this is arguable; the peacekeepers are supposed to be 15,000 strong, but so far only 9000 have been deployed. The Economist voted Liberia the worst place to live in the world in 2003, but that was before the peace agreement. Even so, Nicky Smith agrees with it. She’s the country director of the International Rescue Committee, who are hosting me for this trip. Nicky – who used to work for MSF, the aid world’s shock troops, and featured as one of the year’s “heroines” in the women’s monthly Glamour – has worked in all the guilt-spots of the world. Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan. She says Liberia is in the worst state of all. Because it stopped being a state, years ago.
In the words of the UN: “Liberia is in a state of acute crisis. The majority of the population has no access to health care. Malnutrition is endemic. Disease is rampant. Few hospitals are operational. There is little to no public infrastructure: most schools have been shut down and clean water and functioning sewers are scarce. The economy is in a catastrophic state and tools and seeds have not arrived for the next planting season. The arrival of international peacekeepers is also behind schedule.”
A quarter of the population has had to leave their homes, hundreds of thousands are dead, one in six women have been raped, at least 20,000 children were turned into soldiers. 63% of the population is illiterate (87.5% of rural women), only 26% have access to fresh water. Unemployment is at 80%. Half of Liberia lives on less than 50 cents a day.
These numbers should be compelling, but they probably aren’t. They’re probably just page-turning. It’s hard to feel sorry for numbers, and refugees always travel by tide or mass.
I look at the numbers and wonder how it is that “exiles” get prizes (I think of Edward Said, or Albert Einstein, and see awards ceremonies and intellectual glory), and “refugees” get corn soy blend biscuits (I think of refugees, and I see people streaming down a dusty road in Tanzania, their houses on their heads, or sitting in passive despair amongst tents and trauma). The dictionary thinks that an exile is exiled through a “formal political decree,” but both “exile” and “refugee” undergo “enforced voluntary absences.” It must be because an exile is always singular; refugees are always plural. An exile has a personality; a refugee is just a problem.
***
During my stay in West Africa, I meet a lot of personalities. I meet teachers, cleaners, drivers, politicians, soldiers. I meet an Archbishop and a priest. I meet aid workers and evangelists, expats and amputees. Every single one of them has had to leave their home at some stage in the last fourteen years. Every single one knows what it’s like to wake in the night to the sound of gunfire, to start walking down a road and not know where you’re going. They have all been refugees.
The archbishop? Stuck for several months in Sierra Leone when rebels took over Monrovia’s airport. The aid worker? He went out to look for rice one day and was press-ganged into working for rebels. He got home a year later and only then did his twin brother realise he was alive. The Swiss expat? He was kidnapped by rebels and had to walk for five days to get back. The teacher? She’s built six houses in four years, because she had to, and can’t remember how many houses she built before that. They’ve all been looted.
In the categories of humanitarian aid, some of these people are refugees, and some are IDPs, or internally displaced people. Some wear suits and ties and nice dresses. They earn salaries and for now, as Liberians say, ‘things are OK’. But nothing is definite. No-one is above it. A health worker, healthy and glowing in her office in Monrovia, mentions suddenly that the best way to carry your mobile phone is in your knickers. She’s very precise – you don’t put it in your pubic area, because the women rebels always rifle there first. You put it behind you, in your backside. I think she really means ‘in’, not next to. She’s only being practical.
Don’t be fooled by appearances in Liberia. Don’t be fooled by the bustling streets of Monrovia, by the typewriting scribes tapping out résumés in the concrete loggia of the Education Ministry, by the children walking to school in clean new uniforms, by the activity and motion of this city, by the beauty of its Atlantic beaches. “You look at Monrovia,” says Mary K., a health worker, “and you think it can’t be true that all those people died!” But Monrovia is full because Liberia is empty. Pushed and shoved from one place to another, anyone who didn’t end up in another country is now here, squeezed amongst the roofless buildings and the sandbags. There are a million people in the capital city, or 40% of the population. The streets are full because the city is overflowing. The beaches are where the bodies were buried, during the bad times. “Last summer,” says Mary, “you couldn’t put your foot on Broad Street, because the bullets were flying.” This year, there is only bustle and business and hopeful enterprise: A wheelbarrow painted with the words “John T. Williams Transportation Company.” A shoe-cleaner, sitting on a grimy pavement, has painted on his metal tin that this is Uncle D’s Shoe Repairing Area. It’s best to be quick about making money, when you don’t know how long the opportunity will last. There’s a monument nearby, which could stand as Liberia’s motto: Erected by the Liberian government to commemorate the Geneva Convention, it proclaims that “even wars have limits.” But there’s a shopkeeper who says this better than any monument could: His store is called Living Proof.