Liberia In the Land of Blood and Tears

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

MONROVIA -- The murderous civil war in Liberia has reached so volatile a state that on my first day in Monrovia, the capital, I found myself on both sides of the fighting without ever having changed position; suddenly the struggle swirled around my companions and me and engulfed us. President Samuel K. Doe, the man whose ouster rebel forces sought when they began fighting 10 months ago, has been dead for six weeks, but violence, hunger and general chaos continue to hold Liberia in a bloody embrace. An estimated 10,000 Liberians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the war began -- and more are dying every day.

I went to Liberia at the invitation of rebel leader Charles Taylor, the man who last December launched the campaign to topple Doe, a former army master sergeant who had seized power a decade earlier. In January part of Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (N.P.F.L.) broke away and formed a separate faction led by Prince Yeduo Johnson, an army captain. Johnson and about 400 of his rebels captured, tortured and then killed Doe on Sept. 10, but about 1,000 of the slain President's followers still hold the executive mansion in Monrovia and are fighting on. A 6,000-man, five-nation West African peacekeeping force, strangely named the Economic Community Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), began to arrive in Liberia in August but has been unable to stop the shooting. In fact, it has become actively involved in the war, mounting, in conjunction with Prince Johnson's forces, air and ground attacks on Taylor and his rebels.

We arrived in Monrovia in the middle of the night aboard a creaky Fokker civilian plane flown by Burkina Faso air force pilots. Also aboard were four military advisers to Taylor's forces from Burkina Faso and two other journalists. When we touched down at Robertsfield, the national airport, the plane's window shades were pulled down by the crew, and the airport lights were doused as soon as the aircraft's engines were switched off.

We were taken to see "President" Taylor in his newly proclaimed capital, Gbarnga, a small town in central Liberia, then a four-hour drive from the fighting lines in Monrovia. Inside his headquarters, formerly a Doe country residence that is guarded by female soldiers, Taylor, 42, appeared wearing an ECOLOGY NOW T shirt, fatigue pants and a pistol in a shoulder holster. Despite setbacks suffered by his 10,000-strong forces in skirmishes with ECOMOG troops, he vowed that he would not give up the fight. "Look here," he said, pointing to a map of Liberia. "This is all ours -- except for this little piece called Monrovia, and we are going to keep on fighting as long as one foreign ECOMOG soldier remains on our soil." The damage inflicted on Liberia by ECOMOG artillery fire and aerial bombing, which is carried out by Nigerian air force planes, he claimed, amounts to $4.5 billion. "The Liberian people are going to be bitter against their neighbors for a long time," he continued. "They are finding it hard to accept being bombed by Nigerian planes."

Later we moved by car and then by foot into Monrovia to see how far ECOMOG troops on the ground had advanced behind their air and artillery attacks. We were walking past a small airport called Spriggs Payne, held that morning by Taylor's rebels, when we suddenly discovered ourselves, with our N.P.F.L. bodyguard, behind ECOMOG lines. A group of Guinean and Ghanaian soldiers ordered us to accompany them to their base camp just west of Spriggs Payne. "Look what we've got!" shouted one. "Taylor's writers -- and we got us a rebel!" As more ECOMOG soldiers gathered, the scene turned ugly. The soldiers began to push us toward the rear of the camp, their rifles in our backs. One trooper grabbed my arm. I pushed it away, saying, "Get your hands off me." He took hold of me again and shouted, "You aren't a journalist, you're a spy!"

The soldiers disarmed the N.P.F.L. guard and stripped him to his underpants and socks. They tied his hands behind his back, threw him to the ground and began kicking him unmercifully. The assault was interrupted by a barrage of N.P.F.L. gunfire nearby. The unit commander, a Ghanaian captain, said accusingly, "You see? You've brought us an ambush."

Eventually the firing stopped. After an hour of high tension, the captain ordered us taken to ECOMOG headquarters in the Free Port area of Monrovia. There, for the next day and a half, together and separately, we were politely interrogated by a team of ECOMOG military police about where we had come from and what we had seen. We slept for two nights on the floor of the M.P. headquarters, ate military rations and were given soap and buckets of water to wash with.

The next day I was told that another "President," Prince Johnson, wanted to meet "one of those people who was with Taylor," and so I was taken the following day to his "executive mansion," which is located in an office building near the harbor. Parked outside was the late President Doe's silver Mercedes. Dressed in military fatigues, Johnson punctuated his pronouncements by waving a cigar in one hand and a can of beer in the other. Though his troops had occasionally fought alongside ECOMOG against the N.P.F.L., Johnson was nearly as hostile to the peacekeeping force as he was to Taylor. "They told me to move my people out of Monrovia," he said. "I took that territory. It's mine." As for the differences between him and Taylor, said Johnson, "I want civilian rule and democracy. That rogue wants socialism."

On a quick tour of territory north of Monrovia that was recently taken from the N.P.F.L., Johnson posed for his own video cameraman and shouted to his troops, "Where is Taylor?" "Nowhere," the soldiers shouted back. After returning to his headquarters, Johnson, accompanied by a background quartet of two guitars, a Casio keyboard and a hand-held African drum, strummed religious songs on his own guitar. Dozens of soldiers joined in, dancing and singing, "Oh, I love Jesus, because he loved me first."

In the past few weeks Monrovia had turned relatively quiet, as ECOMOG troops set up checkpoints to keep the Johnson and Taylor factions apart. But death hovers over the city. Virtually no food shipments have arrived since rebel forces first entered Monrovia in July, and hunger is taking lives every day. The starving look as if they are sleeping, curled up on the sidewalks, but their eyes are open; they simply lack the strength to stand. Sam, 8, who approached me with his brother John, 11, pleaded, "Missy, we haven't eaten in three days." I took them to the flat where I was staying and gave them each an orange and some rice. Their parents were missing, probably dead -- and there were thousands like them in Monrovia.

Even if the war were to end tomorrow, recovery would take years. Monrovia's power plant has been severely damaged. The iron-ore mining industry, which earned Liberia more than $200 million a year in peacetime, will never recover; the cost of processing low-quality ore with out-of-date equipment is prohibitive. The rubber industry, Liberia's other main money earner, can be revived, but because of growing competition from Southeast Asia, it will never be as profitable as it was.

The psychological damage to Liberia's population of 2 million cannot be fathomed. What does it do to people to walk along Monrovia's sandy beaches and have to step around skulls and rib cages that are only half submerged in the sand? Taking stock of the toll, a Monrovia cleric said simply, "I weep for this country." If only tears could start the healing.