Thanks to Charles Taylor and Nigeria’s `peacemakers’, the election could herald a gangster state in Liberia, argues Stephen Ellis
LIBERIA has had its first presidential election since the massively rigged 1985 poll, which many Liberians see as a main cause of the war which lasted from 1989 to earlier this year.
The fighting may now be over. But peace and an election alone do not make for democracy. The elections will be greeted with mixed feelings by many in the international community because of doubts about the winner – Charles Taylor.
The country’s new president is a civilian warlord turned politician rather than a military man like so many West African heads of state. Taylor, who led the rising which began Liberia’s war in 1989, has made a fortune by selling diamonds, gold, rubber, hardwood, dagga and other products from the regions he has controlled over the last eight years.
He has used this to buy weapons and to run a military and political organisation which has now catapulted him to electoral victory and into the club of West African presidents. Many will be disturbed by the precedent of a civilian fighting his way to power – like Laurent Kabila in Congo – and by Taylor’s massive ambition and well- attested ruthlessness.
The key external actor is the Nigerian government, which organised a West African military peacekeeping force known as Ecomog.
This force, in which Nigerian soldiers were joined by contingents from other members of the Economic Community of West African States, entered Liberia in 1990 with the prime aim of stopping Taylor coming to power. But seven years and tens of thousands of deaths later, this is exactly what has now happened.
Nevertheless, a lot has changed since the days when Taylor used to refer to General Sani Abacha, president of Nigeria, as “a black Hitler” and took hundreds of Nigerians hostage. In the last three years Taylor has developed a far better understanding with the Nigerian government.
But there are still many in Abuja who mistrust him and wonder whether Taylor will not use his position to work against Nigerian interests in partnership with his supporters in Libya and in those French- speaking countries which have supported him throughout his campaign. They wonder also whether Taylor will respect the business interests which some Nigerians have developed in Liberia.
Once Ecomog had installed itself in Liberia’s capital city in 1990, its Nigerian commanders discovered that they could defend Monrovia against Taylor while making a fortune from war profiteering.
Politicians and businessmen in Lagos acquired contracts to supply Ecomog with fuel, equipment and all the paraphernalia of war. They encouraged the emergence of new, anti-Taylor factions in Liberia, selling them guns and ammunition in return for payment in whatever the warlords could loot from the country. The country’s limited infrastructure was torn down and sold for scrap abroad. 2
The people of Monrovia said that Ecomog stood for “every car or moving object gone”. Everything now has to be rebuilt. The Nigerian government will be hoping to keep its economic foothold in Liberia and to get a share of the contracts which the country’s reconstruction is expected to provide.
At the beginning of the war the Nigerian and some other West African governments had good reason to be afraid of a Taylor presidency since his fighters included various adventurers and revolutionaries trained in Libya. One of them, Foday Sankoh, actually went on to become a warlord on his own account in Sierra Leone, and the Nigerian government has always been afraid that Taylor might distribute arms to the Nigerian opposition too, thus further spreading Liberia’s war.
On at least one occasion, in 1994, the Nigerian government and the Nigerian forces actually intervened to stop a peace treaty that was in sight because it was against their interests.
Some national contingents in Ecomog have acquitted themselves well. Most notable are the Ghanaians, who make up the second- largest group in Ecomog and who have earned a reputation for relative honesty and remain popular with Liberians.
But overall, Ecomog remains a poor precedent for an African peacekeeping force of the future, and Liberia, once at peace, could nevertheless turn into the type of gangster- state which will cause further instability in a troubled region.
— Stephen Ellis is a political analyst at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands