American Warlord (23 page)

The threat of violence was constant. Chucky wore a sidearm on his hip at all times; his bodyguard, Bobby, with him, an AK-47 at the ready. On August 11 a second rebel attack struck Voinjama.
²⁸
Shortly afterward the BBC’s Africa Service broadcast an interview with a rebel calling himself “2nd Lieutenant Mosquito Spray.”
²⁹
The leader made it clear that his group was not aligned with any faction from Liberia’s dormant civil war. (Rebels who had captured several aid workers referred to themselves as “the Joint Forces for the Liberation of Liberia,” a previously unheard-of group.) “Mosquito Spray” gave little indication of the group’s aim other than that it had formed to oppose Charles Taylor’s government.

The gravity of the news didn’t sink in initially for Lynn, who ran around Chucky’s house in the pitch black wearing night-vision goggles, laughing off the ridiculous name of the new rebel leader.
³⁰
Details of the assault trickled back to Monrovia—unlike the April incident, the fighting was sustained. Taylor described the forces as “very heavy, well armed and equipped.”
³¹
He suspected Guinea’s hand in the fighting, which appeared to originate in the neighboring nation. Taylor declared a state of emergency and called up his militia to deploy forces toward the border. It was time for Lynn to go home.

Lynn returned to Orlando in late summer, the daydream of Liberia over for a moment. Chucky called her when he could—but was vague, rarely discussing the fighting in the bush, which had started with the first assault on Voinjama that spring and resumed after she departed.
³²
Beyond his security role, he hoped to start making money, dabbling with timber and diamond-mining ventures. In times like these—when everything was going well—he never mentioned coming home. He was content with the idea that America represented his past and Liberia his future. Lynn loved him, but she couldn’t leave her life, her family, and her friends in the United States entirely behind. For better or worse, the couple had grown accustomed to living across the Atlantic from each other.

Lynn filled in the distance between them with suspicions about his philandering. They had been engaged for more than a year, but now the stakes had changed. That autumn she told Chucky that he was going to be a father.

If she had known what Chucky was doing in Liberia, it might have given her pause before moving ahead with their marriage. He had stepped to the fore in the ATU as a punisher and enforcer—of both prisoners and his own recruits. This didn’t endear him to his men. Many trainees at the base were still seething with anger over the killing of Justin Parker, when they learned of another punishment Chucky had meted out in Monrovia.
³³

The incident involved an ATU soldier Chucky discovered drinking at a nightclub. This violation, while minor, was significant to Chucky. He was incensed that the man—a young, strong fighter from the Mano tribe named Kougbay Dunuma—was in uniform.
³⁴
Chucky ordered the man arrested and brought to the Executive Mansion, to be locked in a cell located near the seawall behind the building. Punishments varied for prisoners. Sometimes they were forced to cut grass in the sun using a machete—which Liberians called a cutlass. Others were imprisoned without any legal or disciplinary proceeding. But Chucky had decided to make an example of this young fighter. At daybreak the morning after his arrest, Dunuma was pulled from his cell and tied to a pole.

Chucky ordered a punishment that amounted to a death sentence: one thousand lashes. (To give context, in antebellum Alabama slaves found in possession of a weapon could receive no more than thirty-nine lashes; those who forged “free passes” for other slaves could receive one hundred lashes.) An officer from Benjamin Yeaten’s unit, Bartuah Gbor, recounted seeing the commotion from his office.
³⁵
Dunuma was bound and restrained. For the better part of an hour, two men took turns striking the prisoner with a stick and a rubber truncheon. Gbor stepped out from his office to see what was happening. When the officers had finished, Dunuma looked at Gbor and said, “Can I have water to drink?” But Dunuma didn’t live much longer. Gbor recounted that without making another sound, the man died. Chucky and the others removed the body to bury it outside town.

The ATU was becoming notorious for human rights abuses. Gbatala became a prison camp as much as a training facility. In early August 1999, as unrest continued near the border, several new detainees arrived at the base from Monrovia and were sent to Vietnam.
³⁶
Among them were two men who had been transferred from cells at the Executive Mansion: Nathaniel Koah, a prominent diamond miner in Lofa County, and Anthony Sonkarlay, one of his employees.

Koah’s story embodied the kleptocratic bent of the Taylor government.
³⁷
While he’d been detained by the ATU, his arrest had little bearing on national security. Instead, by Koah’s account, its purpose was to shake him down for a five-carat diamond. Koah, a prominent diamond miner and former supporter of Taylor’s, had been in this position before. In 1994 he had mined a nine-carat stone in territory held by Taylor’s rebels. As he made his way toward Ivory Coast, where he intended to sell the diamond, Taylor’s fighters intercepted him, instructing him to detour to Ganta in northern Liberia because “Charles Taylor wanted this diamond.” That stone, Koah said later, went to the purchase of weapons that helped Taylor retake his stronghold in Gbarnga. But Koah did not have any diamonds this time.

When Koah arrived at Gbatala, he would later testify, he’d already been subjected to several days of intense abuse and interrogation about a diamond he was allegedly carrying. He’d seen firsthand the person the president’s son had become. Soon after his detention at the Executive Mansion, Koah witnessed the beating death of Duduma. (The two men had briefly been tied to the same pole.) He’d also seen his own wife stripped naked and beaten in an attempt to elicit information. He’d even been brought across Monrovia to White Flower where, he said, President Taylor himself interrogated him about the diamond and an alleged coup plot. Koah told the president nothing—by his account there was nothing to tell. He was turned over to President Taylor’s son.

Chucky was interested not only in the diamond but also in Koah’s political affiliations. The president’s son directly questioned the prisoner, but Koah could offer no response, he would later testify. The change Chucky had undergone in his few short years in Liberia was alarming. “He came as an innocent child and he saw his father in power and they handed him [a] gun,” Koah recalled. “When he handled gun, he was happy, he was power drunk. He could do anything when his father was president.”
³⁸

When Chucky received no response from Koah, he ratcheted up the pressure, ordering his prisoner to pour a two-pound bag of salt into a cooking pot and begin eating it while he watched. Several days later Koah was taken to the third floor of the Executive Mansion where, he testified, Chucky ordered him to be suspended above a smoking fire. Several fighters stoked the fire below him with cotton and what Koah called “acid liquid,” sending plumes of acrid smoke upward. Koah passed out quickly from the smoke. When he eventually came to, he found himself in a bath of ice water with Chucky standing over him, demanding to know if he was still alive.

Koah was then delivered to Gbatala. It was at a tenuous moment; indiscipline pervaded, even among the commanders.
³⁹
Trainees continued to arrive from Monrovia and surrounding areas, only to find themselves menaced by David Campari. The Gambian would wake the trainees several times over the course of the night to assemble for roll call and deprived them of food, while entertaining women and drinking heavily on the funds set aside for the recruits. He trusted none of the Liberians and would draft vulnerable new recruits as spies to monitor dissent. All this behavior occurred out of Chucky’s sight. When he would arrive on the base, Menephar and the others were too afraid to report Campari to him.

“Nobody wanted to get hurt,” Menephar recalled. “And this guy is surely going to hurt you, he’s going to hurt you seriously.” The ATU recruits that did cross Campari were ordered held in the same holes as other prisoners. “He send you there. And you’re not going to come [back] from there,” he said.

With more prisoners on the base, Campari’s attention began to shift to the detainees. Gbatala was a nightmare, Koah and Sonkarlay would later testify, where the prisoners experienced daily beatings and were forced to eat cigarette butts and drink their own urine, scarred with molten plastic and covered in voracious driver ants. The men claimed they were even forced to witness the killing and mutilation of other prisoners.

At the time of Koah’s arrival, access to the holes was limited to the MPs, but the guards permitted Menephar to visit his former commander from the days of the civil war—a man named Morris Gbleh—who had also been imprisoned in a hole following the incident where he shot a sentry after returning from the village drunk. Gbleh was treated as a pariah within the ATU after that, but Menephar brought cigarettes to Gbleh’s hole, “because he was like my dad.”

There Menephar witnessed some of the abuse the prisoners would later recount, including being raped and forced to rape others. (Menephar refuted accusations about prisoner executions: “I never saw that. I never heard it.”
⁴⁰
) Word of the sexual assaults made it back to Monrovia, where it crossed a boundary with Charles Taylor. He sent his son to investigate at the end of the rainy season in 1999, between late August and October. Chucky arrived on base shortly thereafter and marched down to Vietnam, where Koah, Sonkarlay, and another man Chucky had ordered detained at the St. Paul River bridge—a furniture maker named Rufus Kpadeh—were being held.

When Chucky arrived, Koah complained about the rapes, according to testimony Kpadeh later provided.
⁴¹
Chucky didn’t share his father’s concern over the assaults and instead told the men that “he wanted to see if it was the truth.” The men were then pulled from their holes and forced to rape one another again. Chucky said nothing, the men recalled. Instead, he and the other ATU soldiers stood there shooting photographs. Chucky’s behavior defied explanation, but the mistreatment of the prisoners had real consequences for his father.

In early October 1999 a Monrovia-based human rights group, FOCUS, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on Koah, after receiving a tip about the diamond miner’s detention. Even as Taylor consolidated his power in Liberia, there remained a community of influential local human rights workers. The largest, longest-standing human rights group was the Justice and Peace Commission, a group backed by the Catholic Church with offices connected to the archdiocese of Monrovia and Gbarnga. Taylor had an adversarial relationship with these organizations, as he had with the media. He preferred to target outspoken human rights leaders and journalists individually through intimidation and arrest, rather than outlaw their organizations. Critics of the government had to consider their own safety before speaking out.

At that time, FOCUS was actively engaged in a campaign to have the Gbatala base destroyed because of the alleged human rights abuses taking place there. The next day
The News
, a Monrovia daily, published a front-page story with Koah’s picture, indicating that he’d been detained by the ATU and brought to “an unknown location without charge and … subjected to torture, denied proper meal [
sic
] and safe drinking water.”

The petition was surprisingly successful. Koah was almost immediately removed from the base and brought to nearby Phebe Hospital for treatment, before being delivered to President Taylor and Chucky. At that meeting, according to Koah, both father and son warned him to remain silent about the abuse he had endured, especially to the media. Chucky warned him that should he reveal anything “contrary to our advice, the government won’t guarantee your safety.”

Koah went directly to the press. Through FOCUS, he revealed the location of the ATU base at Gbatala and decried “gross human rights abuses ranging from forced sodomy to intense torture and other forms of inhumane treatment,” singling out that “the Anti-Terrorists Unity [
sic
] are reportedly perpetrating these acts which [are] commanded by Chucky Taylor, the son of the President of the Republic of Liberia.” It was an attempt not only to lend credibility to his allegations but to provoke outrage in Taylor at the actions carried out by his son’s men.

“If I lie before God and man, you may kill me, Mr. President,” he said at the press conference.
⁴²

Previously, Taylor had shown little interest in addressing allegations of abuses among his security forces—chronicled each year in the State Department’s report on human rights violations in Liberia. But following Koah’s statements, he ordered an investigation into the incidents of rape. One of the soldiers who had participated in rape was detained on the base, Menephar said, but shortly thereafter escaped. With both the president’s and the public’s attention suddenly focused on Gbatala, Menephar noticed that Campari had grown uncharacteristically afraid. If Taylor was truly intent on pursuing consequences, Campari had some reason to be: the Gambian had issued the order that the detainees should be raped, Menephar said, and fearing this would be discovered, he had allowed the soldier to slip away so he couldn’t implicate his commander any further.
⁴³

The incident also became a rare rallying point for human rights groups to direct international attention to Taylor. On November 7, 1999, the Justice and Peace Commission sent a letter to Desmond Parker, the UN human rights officer, indicating that Koah had been “detained and tortured at the ATU Base in Gbatala, Bong County, from July 26 to October 18, 1999,” and asking that the UN safeguard his rights, person, and provide health care for him.
⁴⁴
Parker, a Trinidadian who was social with Chucky and his mother, took no immediate public action in the case, and the issue failed to rise above the din of local politics to put pressure on Taylor.
⁴⁵
(Parker, who was named chief of protocol for the United Nations in 2010, declined comment, citing UN regulations.
⁴⁶
) Koah, a diamond trader, hardly cut a sympathetic figure, particularly in light of the increasingly negative attention toward conflict diamonds. And in relative terms, Charles Taylor’s government had been accused of far worse than what Koah alleged occurred at Gbatala.