West Africa: A region in flames
Unsurprisingly, Mr Bush, who is making a tour of Africa next week, will not be touching down in Liberia. Instead, he will be visiting the continent’s two most powerful countries (South Africa and Nigeria) and three of its better governed ones (Senegal, Uganda and Botswana). However, as The Economist went to press, there were signs that a reluctant Mr Bush would decide to send some American troops to Liberia. His reluctance is understandable. America has more to gain by engaging with sensible leaders than with the likes of Charles Taylor, Liberia’s besieged despot. It is also easier to help countries that are trying to help themselves. But Mr Bush would be right to intervene. Chaos in one country tends to infect the neighbours.
West Africa’s civil wars are usually reported as tragedies befalling individual states. This month, the spotlight is on Liberia. A couple of months ago, the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire received more attention. Before that, it was Guinea, and before that, Sierra Leone. In fact, all these wars are intertwined, and it is impossible to understand one without reference to the others.
If one thinks of Liberia as an isolated calamity, the case for American military intervention is weak. Granted, America has old links to the country-it was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves-but Liberia has no strategic or economic significance. Its people are suffering, but a cynic might point out that there are only 3m of them. If, however, one sees Liberia as a flaming match in a petrol-drenched neighbourhood, the case for extinguishing that flame is much stronger.
It is a complicated story. Liberia’s instability threatens Sierra Leone, which is struggling to recover from a devastating war for which Mr Taylor is largely to blame. Mr Taylor has also backed rebels in Guinea. Guinea’s president, Lansana Conté, beat them back, but his country remains fragile. Mr Conté is thought to be terminally ill, yet he refuses to name a successor, so most Guineans expect a coup-or worse-when he dies. Most important, Liberians have fought on both sides of a new war in Côte d’Ivoire, the most sophisticated economy in West Africa and the second-largest, after Nigeria. If Côte d’Ivoire were to go the way of Liberia, it would cripple the three landlocked states-Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger-that depend on remittances from migrant workers in Côte d’Ivoire.
Taken as a whole, West Africa’s crisis is one of the world’s worst. The regional war has claimed perhaps half a million lives, and continues to blight millions more. This is why it is not only hysterical crowds outside the American embassy who are begging Mr Bush to send troops. France, Britain and the UN are demanding the same.
A Taylor-made catastrophe
Surprisingly, given Mr Bush’s recent call for him to resign, so is Mr Taylor. Addressing some of the few journalists in Monrovia whom his security services have not threatened to kill, he said: “I think the US ought to come now, to use my strength, my popularity and my legitimacy, and work to bring peace in Liberia.”
Mr Taylor was perhaps not being entirely genuine. He has promised before to stand down, most recently as part of a ceasefire agreement last month. He then issued a clarification, however: he had only said he was “prepared” to stand down, but since the Liberian people were clamouring for him to remain, he would have to. Mr Taylor is understandably reluctant to leave office. The international court in Sierra Leone has issued a warrant for his arrest on war-crimes charges.
Things look tough for him at home, too. A group called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and a sister-force, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), control most of the country and are poised to take the capital. Mr Taylor’s foot-soldiers, boys in women’s wigs or shaven-headed girls in shower caps, are vigorously looting. One Monrovia resident describes how they attempted to shoot and eat her neighbour’s dog. But it was nimble and they were drunk, so they killed her neighbour by mistake.
Mr Taylor first rose to prominence in 1989, when he marched into eastern Liberia with a band of Libyan-trained guerrillas. Though American-educated, he charmed the local tribesmen. With their help, he marched on Monrovia, and was prevented from capturing it only by a Nigerian intervention force backed by Sierra Leone, Liberia’s northern neighbour. Foiled and furious, he predicted that Sierra Leone would soon “taste the bitterness of war”.
It did. In 1991, Mr Taylor sent 100 men to capture Sierra Leone’s diamond fields, commanded by a Sierra Leonean, Foday Sankoh. Mr Sankoh rounded up reluctant locals, especially children, to join the rebel army he called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). With Mr Taylor’s support, the RUF depopulated half the country, murdered an estimated 200,000 people, and hacked the limbs off thousands more. Both Mr Sankoh and Mr Taylor are alleged to have profited from the illicit trade in Sierra Leone’s diamonds.
The UN sent peacekeepers in 2000, but the RUF took them hostage, skinning several alive. Finally, Britain intervened. While British paratroopers secured the capital, Freetown, special forces quietly routed the RUF’s drug-addled killers. Peace was restored.
Back in Liberia, in 1997, Mr Taylor had terrorised voters into electing him president, but he was not satisfied. As his power in Sierra Leone waned, he sent a force of ex-RUF fighters, Liberian troops and a few Guinean dissidents to invade Guinea. (His excuse was that Liberian rebels were using Guinea as a base.) Mr Taylor’s men swiftly seized a third of the country, pausing only to shoot up refugee camps. But with American military aid, and the Liberian rebels’ help, Guinea pushed them back.
With that, the tide began turning against Mr Taylor. In Sierra Leone, the UN persuaded 25,000 half-starved RUF rebels to give up their guns. Meanwhile, Guinea armed and trained the anti-Taylor Liberian rebels, who rechristened themselves the LURD. With Sierra Leonean militiamen swelling its ranks, the LURD pushed deep into northern Liberia.
Panicked, Mr Taylor launched a terror campaign, popularly known as “Operation No Living Thing”, to deter the locals from offering support. It backfired. “He killed my uncles, my sisters, my brothers, half the people in my town are dead ‘cos he burned that place to shit,” says Major Forma Kanneh, a LURD fighter recovering from wounds in Freetown. He adds, in eloquent pidgin, Liberia’s lingua franca: “After that, me and a lot of innocents take arms.” The arms were supplied by Guinea, says Mr Kanneh, but the uniform-a pair of blue flip-flops-he bought himself.
A looter’s paradise
Late last year, the neighbourhood’s troubles spilled into Côte d’Ivoire, long the most stable country in West Africa. There is a lot to destroy there. Visitors to Abidjan, the commercial capital, are immediately impressed by its smooth roads, glossy skyscrapers, French restaurants and vast seaport. All this is now at risk.
An army mutiny in September snowballed into civil war, pitting rebels from the north, reportedly backed by Burkina Faso, against a government dominated by southerners. Northerners have several justified grievances. The current president, Laurent Gbagbo, has tried to redefine Ivorian citizenship to exclude virtually everyone outside his own tribe. In a country that has traditionally welcomed immigrants, who now make up roughly 25% of the population, this is incendiary. He has made it hard for northerners to get identity cards (and therefore to vote), and he has allowed his supporters to drive “immigrant” farmers off their land and grab it. This has affected a lot of Burkinabés-hence Burkina Faso’s alleged support for the rebels.
The rebels marched towards Abidjan, but were blocked by the French army, which now enforces an uneasy stalemate. Under French pressure, the two sides signed a ceasefire in January and formed a government of national unity. But the country remains split in two, with the rebels controlling the north, the government controlling the south, and French and West African peacekeepers keeping the two sides apart. The north and south are more or less calm, but in the west, near the Liberian border, the war sizzles on.
The western town of Bangolo has been comprehensively pillaged twice in the past six months, first by rebels and then by militiamen fighting for the Ivorian government. The marauders ransacked homes, ripped petrol pumps from their concrete bases and stripped the town’s hospital of drugs, mattresses, air-conditioners, light fixtures and anything else worth stealing. All they left behind were crushed beer cans and empty cigarette packets with labels reading “Sold in Guinea”.
It is a small reminder of how porous West Africa’s borders are. Contraband smokes move effortlessly from country to country, and so, unfortunately, do men with guns. Not long after Côte d’Ivoire’s war began, Liberian militiamen-probably with Charles Taylor’s backing, for he hates Mr Gbagbo-paddled across the river that separates the two countries, and started killing and looting. Mr Gbagbo’s army, in keeping with an old Ivorian tradition of getting foreigners to do their dirty work, recruited other Liberians, mostly refugees, to help fight the first group.
To begin with, the government denied hiring Liberian mercenaries, but then both it and the Ivorian rebels agreed to kick the whole lot of them out of the country. The rebels have tried to do so, but the government has not. Inmates at a camp for Liberian refugees near the town of Guiglo said the army often came recruiting there. “Sammy”, a shy 17-year-old with a high-pitched voice, said he was given an AK-47 and some training, but no wages. Instead, he was told to help himself.
Almost 70km (43 miles) away, in Bangolo, people are unaware of their government’s policy of encouraging foreigners to rob their homes, but they know the consequences. “They took our rice, our cocoa, our furniture,” said Marie Tieri, a local grandmother. “They threatened to kill me if I did not give them everything. And they took young girls to be their mistresses.”
The trouble is, Liberian auxiliaries are extremely useful to the government. Everyone fears them, not least because they are widely believed to have magical powers that make them immune to bullets. Even local university-educated UN officials are convinced of this. The only sceptic your correspondent met was Sammy, who shrugged: “I don’t have no bulletproof.”
By the government’s reckoning, 3,000 people have been killed during Côte d’Ivoire’s war. Mass rape has caused HIV prevalence in the war zone to jump from 12% to 20%, by one estimate. Roughly 1.2m people have fled their homes. Pro-Gbagbo thugs, often in uniform, have been encouraging “foreigners” to leave. In one Abidjan slum, all that remains of the shacks where 2,500 immigrants once lived is a swathe of grassy wasteland. A former resident tells the story: “They came at midday, with bulldozers. They said we were sheltering rebels, which we weren’t. Then they crushed our homes. What could we do? It was the army.”
For security reasons, Côte d’Ivoire’s once-bustling highways are now clogged with road blocks. Driving from Abidjan to Bouaké, the rebel capital, a distance of 280km (175 miles), your correspondent counted 26. At every one, the police forced passengers off buses and made them form hour-long lines to have their papers checked. For some months, no goods trucks could cross the front line. Now a few big convoys are trundling across, but the service is slow and expensive, so northern farmers are paying more for their petrol and receiving less for their sugar.
Traders in Bouaké say they have never seen business so bad. “The banks are all closed, so no one has any money,” said Alassane Dumbia, a clothes-stall owner. Civil servants are still being paid, but they have to travel to the south to cash their pay-cheques, past those 26 road blocks.
The one benefit of war was that it temporarily drove up the price of cocoa, of which Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s largest producer, without hurting production too much. But every other business has been knocked. Expatriates, mainly French, whose businesses pay roughly half the country’s taxes, have left in droves. A once-flourishing tourist industry has evaporated. The beaches are deserted, the seafront hotels empty. The poor suffer most. “It is hard to farm”, notes Francis Banhiet, the mayor of Bangolo, “when they’ve taken all our machetes.”
Both Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire are caught in a vicious cycle. Ethnic tension has fuelled war, which has further aggravated ethnic tension. Poverty has driven young men to pillage, which has made other young men (and everyone else) poorer. Pro-government militia leaders in Côte d’Ivoire, incensed that rebel chiefs in their early 30s have won seats in the cabinet by taking up arms, are tempted to follow suit. The government, which used to spend admirably little on the army so as to fund schools and hospitals, is now frantically buffing up its arsenal, leaving less for social spending and feeding rebel fears that it plans to go back to war.
To break the cycle will require political will, but neither side trusts the other. This week, the main Ivorian rebel group threatened to go back on an earlier promise to disarm, after a mob tried to kill its leader, Guillaume Soro, who is minister of communications in the so-called unity government. France, the UN and other West African states are trying desperately to get the two sides talking seriously to each other.
Meanwhile, in Liberia, Mr Taylor looks doomed. The neighbours he has injured are striking back, Guinea by backing the LURD and Côte d’Ivoire by backing the MODEL rebels. With the LURD controlling Liberia’s diamond fields and MODEL at the gates of Buchanan, the main timber port, the rebels have succeeded in cutting his cash flow where UN sanctions failed.
If the rebels capture Monrovia, what kind of government might they form? No one knows. Neither group has committed Tayloresque atrocities, but both are alarmingly trigger-happy, and neither has a clear leader or any plan beyond ousting Mr Taylor. A Swiss businessman who fell briefly into the LURD’s hands last month said he was well treated, but unnerved when the rebels started shooting at each other.
If the capital falls, Mr Taylor might escape to his former fief in the east of the country. Arms are apparently being shipped out of Monrovia in preparation. There is a danger that Liberia could disintegrate completely, with the LURD controlling Monrovia and the north, MODEL the south, and Mr Taylor the east. On July 1st, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, repeated his plea for America to intervene to prevent such a calamity. With even minimal American involvement, a robust force could probably be raised. France has said it will help, and West African states have pledged 5,000 troops.
He could learn from the French intervention in Côte d’Ivoire, which probably prevented a bloodbath, and from the British one in Sierra Leone, which restored a fragile peace. A surprisingly calm poll last year saw the re-election of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, who was forced to flee during the war, with over 70% of the vote. The rebel RUF’s new political incarnation won less than 2%.
Freetown now looks relatively prosperous: smart bars and discos are mushrooming. But the boom is driven largely by the presence of 17,500 UN peacekeepers, the largest such operation ever. If they leave, as scheduled, next year, the boom could end, and Sierra Leone’s security will be left in the hands of the army, which voted against Mr Kabbah. A coup attempt in January was put down, but its leader, a former army chief, escaped. In private, British officers charged with training the Sierra Leonean army are less optimistic than when they began, three years ago. Their pupils are still not as disciplined as they might be, and often wreck their shiny new British rifles by using them as ladders.
The source: The Economist (London). http://www.economist.com.