Liberia In the Heart of Darkness

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

MONROVIA -- The civil war in Liberia is about hatred: personal hatred based on political rivalry, brutally used to turn tribe against tribe. Charles Taylor, head of the rebel National Patriotic Liberation Front, and President Samuel Doe, the harsh ruler of the country's 2.5 million people for the past decade, loathe each other. Says Taylor: "The only good Doe is a dead Doe." In the past eight months Taylor's 10,000-member army has overrun most of the country, leaving only small pieces of Monrovia, the capital, in Doe's control and setting the Gio tribe, which supports Taylor, against one of Liberia's smallest but most powerful tribes, Doe's people, the Krahn.

Few soldiers or rebels have died in battle, but thousands of civilians have perished. Two weeks ago, two bodies lay by the side of the road leading to a Monrovia airport, hands tied behind their backs. A third man, denying he was a Krahn, pleaded with the rebels for his life -- but to no avail. Creating yet more violence, Prince Yormie Johnson, a Gio, split away from Taylor last February. By the summer, Johnson and his few hundred men had swept into the center of the capital, taking on both Doe's and Taylor's forces.

Last week, in an effort to halt the tribal carnage, 3,000 troops of a five- nation West African peacekeeping force began to fan out in besieged Monrovia (pop. 500,000). Doe and Johnson welcomed the troops, but Taylor, challenging their legitimacy, vowed to kill them all. If the fighting cannot be stopped, the attempted overthrow of Doe could threaten the stability of the whole West Africa region. Already, the intervention has ignited bitter controversy among Liberia's neighbors.

Taylor is unimpressed by outside efforts to calm the civil strife. "I am not going to roll over and play dead," he told TIME. "This is an attempt to rescue Doe. A peacekeeping force means all sides agree. We have not agreed. If we're attacked, the price will be expensive. The world is going to remember."

Most of the world has paid little attention to the war, and Liberia's neighbors are only belatedly showing concern. When the Economic Community of West African States, a 16-nation body formed 15 years ago to promote regional cooperation, held an emergency summit in early August, only seven members bothered to attend. Determined to solve their problems without the help of uninterested superpowers, they hastily decided that ECOWAS should go into the peacekeeping business. To achieve a cease-fire in Liberia and supervise free elections, they created a West African force, the Economic Community Monitoring Group. Yet when the time came to pass out white ECOMOG helmets, only five countries sent troops: Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Gambia.

Taylor does not trust any of them. "Peacekeeping?" he scoffs. "We've arrested Guinean soldiers here in Liberia. How can they come to keep the peace? We've captured Nigerian weapons from Doe's soldiers. How can you bring a jaguar into the house and say he has come to make the peace? ECOWAS is going to make this another Vietnam -- a war that never ends."

Whether Taylor has actually arrested Guinean soldiers or captured Nigerian weapons, the neutrality of the peacekeeping force is very much compromised by political friendships and tribal affinities. The stated purpose may be to restore order, but Liberia's rival leaders suspect that some peacekeepers are actively supporting the other side. Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida has been a longtime ally of Doe's and has reportedly offered him asylum. Guinea and Sierra Leone are home to a large number of Mandingo, a tribe that has supported Doe and his Krahns.

The Ivory Coast, a supporter of Taylor's and one of West Africa's dominant economies, did not bother to attend last month's summit. When the peacekeeping forces were deployed last week without having first achieved a cease-fire, Togo refused to participate. President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso promised to aid Taylor with his own troops if asked. Even the U.S. withdrew its original approval of ECOMOG, saying that without a cease-fire, there was no peace for any international force to keep.

Taylor dismisses all criticism of his refusal to accept a cease-fire. "Why negotiate?" he says. "Is there any group that has taken nine-tenths of a country and then negotiated? Who's providing food to the people? Who's providing water? Who has put drugs in the hospitals? Haven't you seen my soldiers everywhere? We surround Monrovia. We are the government. Doe is the rebel."

Taylor is called the President by more than just his followers and has named a cabinet of ministers. He travels in a presidential-style convoy, riding in a bulletproof taupe-colored Mercedes with the red flag of his army fluttering on the left fender and the Liberian flag on the right. A white police motorcycle stolen from Doe leads the motorcade, while two or three cars stuffed with armed men trail Taylor's car. Bringing up the rear is an antiaircraft gun balanced on the back of a pickup truck.

The "President" receives visitors in his "executive mansion" -- the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Paynesville, a suburb east of Monrovia -- wearing a bulletproof vest, surrounded by gun-toting bodyguards garbed in strange, looted clothing. Groups of soldiers await his bidding nearby in the garage; they are mostly children in dirty T shirts and ragged shorts, a rifle in one hand, a bottle of Sprite in the other.

The war has taken a heavy toll. In Nimba County the villages were never heavily populated. Now they are deserted: some people have joined Taylor, some are dead, most have fled in fear. The county produces 25% of Liberia's rice, and a few paddies along the road still flourish, but there is no one to harvest the crop. The iron-ore mines at Yekepa once earned 70% of Liberia's foreign currency, but work has been suspended since late January. Whatever glory the war once held here has dimmed. At checkpoints the youthful soldiers who jauntily display human skulls with sunglasses perched over the empty eye sockets are themselves dull-eyed with hunger. Before they let a car pass through, they ask for bread.

Taylor's so-called capital is Kakata, about 35 miles northeast of Monrovia. He has distributed thousands of bags of stolen Pakistani rice there, and the rebels say volunteer doctors from the relief agency Medecins sans Frontieres are working in the hospital.

But Kakata is without almost everything else. At night, lights burn in just three houses, powered by privately owned generators. There is no water. The streets were once lively with Mandingo shops; now much of Kakata is burned and looted. Any Mandingo who did not manage to escape was "killed like a chicken," boasts a rebel. Every morning hundreds of people gather alongside the road, waiting for the occasional bus or truck to take them east to safety. If they are lucky, they will join 300,000 other refugees who have fled this war. "Doe started the killing 10 years ago," says an old man waiting with his family. "Who will stop it now?"

Few think that ECOMOG can. While President Dawda Jawara of Gambia played host at a meeting in the capital of Banjul to choose an interim President for Liberia, men with guns were very much in control. Taylor forcibly moved nearly 2,000 Nigerians and Guineans, mostly civilians seeking refuge in their embassy compounds in Monrovia, south to the port city of Buchanan, out of the reach of rescue. With Taylor's rebels shooting at Nigerian soldiers and Burkina Faso sending in troops to support Taylor, escalation of the war has already begun.

"Want a short-term worst-case scenario?" asked a Western diplomat in the Ivory Coast. "Everyone divides into constituent parts: Doe, Taylor and ECOMOG. Want a long-term worst-case scenario? Doe goes back to his Krahn in Grand Gedeh County. Taylor goes back to where he started in Nimba. And it's Doe against Taylor." All over again.