American Warlord (31 page)

The pain was unbearable for Dulleh. He heard Yeaten order him to cup his hands together. The general poured the scalding water into Dulleh’s hands. Dulleh began screaming so loud, he could hear nothing else.

Yeaten raised a shotgun to the prisoner’s head and ordered him not to spill the water. Dulleh saw Chucky stand up and raise a gun to his head. He recognized him only as the young man he’d seen with President Taylor.

Dulleh could think about little more than the pain. The burns on his hands, across his back, and on his leg throbbed excruciatingly.

The young man addressed him. “Do you remember the man you talked to in the office not long ago?” Dulleh heard him say.

Dulleh could only nod his head.

“That man has the Holy Bible in his hands,” the young man said. “I don’t have it in my hands.”

Dulleh finally realized who the man speaking to him was. He was the president’s son, Chucky.

Several soldiers then forced Dulleh flat onto his stomach. He caught a glimpse of Chucky with a short, round object in his hand. Suddenly a jolt of electricity burst through Dulleh’s body. He had felt Chucky press the stick again to the back of his neck; the shocks continued across his back. The soldiers flipped Dulleh over and pulled his pants down. Dulleh looked down to see Chucky jabbing the stun gun at his penis.

It was an image that would remain with Dulleh long after he was disappeared into state custody, without charge or trial, another victim of Charles Taylor’s paranoia and his son’s sadism.

Despite Taylor’s fears about rebels in Monrovia, the real threat remained on the front lines. In July 2002 Chucky had sent Christopher Menephar to assess the fighting as it neared the capital.
³⁷
He was no longer a hardened child soldier but a lieutenant colonel in the ATU, a commander who took his responsibilities seriously. Menephar prepared a memo titled “General Front Line Report Bomi, Gbojay, Arthington Mont., Bomi Co. Liberia.”

The report reflected the military formality as well as the lack of formal education among the elite ATU fighters: “On the 24th of July, I was mandated by GOC to assests [
sic
] the various front lines,” it began, then went on to describe the fighting in Bomi County, including assaults by small groups of lightly armed rebels and ambushes carried out by government troops. The report painted a positive picture of the counteroffensive by Taylor’s troops: “We observed that the enemy are on the run in Bomi” by a “joint” operation on the evening of July 19, 2002, involving the AFL and ATU.

The rebels sought to establish a headquarters in Tubmanburg, an old mining town with a population of less than twelve thousand, that would put them within striking distance of Monrovia. The memo reported five men wounded, one hundred fifty enemy dead. The numbers were impossible to verify—whether the count was accurate and whether the dead were, in fact, the enemy. Menephar’s report noted that the ATU was fighting alongside militias throughout Bomi County and that there was a “good working relationship between the local pop and government.”

It is unlikely that Menephar was completely candid or accurate in his account of what happened in Bomi. He had little incentive to provide a leader as volatile and ill equipped as Chucky with any information that would reflect badly on him or his father.

In fact, a few old men would emerge from Tubmanburg to tell a different story. According to that account, government fighters did “liberate” the town.
³⁸
Rather than fight, the rebels disappeared into the bush, leaving little sign of their presence. The government commander then assembled the civilians and explained to them that they would be evacuated to Monrovia. A truck carried away one group of men, women, and children. When it returned to Tubmanburg a short time later, the residents noticed that the vehicle’s cab was soaked in blood. The remaining civilians who could not fit on the first journey were forced into the truck and driven to a bridge overlooking the Mahel River.

The ground there was littered with bodies. Babies with their skulls bashed in. Women with their bellies slit open. The fighters were busily dumping the dead into the river. When the truck stopped, the soldiers forced the civilians out. One fighter pulled a man’s wife aside, shot her, then set upon mutilating her body. The fighter then turned to the husband. All the man could do was beg to say a final prayer.

“We are not here for God business,” the fighter said.

War as Taylor knew it best had returned to Liberia. He had entrusted Benjamin Yeaten, his most relied-upon enforcer, to confront the threat. The methods were familiar to those who had survived the civil war. Terror stood in for military might. Rebels were the enemies, but too often civilians were the targets. As long as foreign powers supplied weapons—as Guinea did to the rebels—the underequipped and ill-trained government forces could do little to maintain their monopoly on the use of force and defeat their enemies.

In October 2002, Charles Taylor granted the new American ambassador, John W. Blaney, a rare private audience.
¹
Exhausted by the sanctions and the fighting over the summer, the Taylor government was left with very few resources. His inner circle was collapsing in on itself. Isaac Gono’s gratuitous murder was only the latest symptom of the decline, but the problems ran far deeper than indiscipline in his security forces or his murderous son.

For months the Taylor government had been screaming itself hoarse to the international community over the growing insurgency. The West’s covert support for the rebels was growing clearer: white helicopters with no official markings were reportedly seen transporting and resupplying the rebels near the front, and captured enemy fighters reported that they had been trained by U.S. Special Forces. Meanwhile, the rebels’ public relations arm operated freely in the United States. Whatever support the rebels enjoyed in Washington, covert or otherwise, ran contrary to the State Department’s objective of stopping the violence in West Africa. In the background, American diplomats lobbied the government in Conakry to close the border to Liberia and cease the traffic of fighters into Liberia. Publicly State Department officials made a clear distinction: they did not back the rebels, but they did support the opposition. This policy was summed up as “ABT”—Anyone But Taylor.
²

The ATU continued to be a menacing presence near the U.S. embassy compound. In one incident, heavily armed fighters carrying AKs, RPKs, and RPGs appeared along the compound’s northern perimeter.
³
When confronted, the fighters explained that they were “conducting a routine weapons search of the area,” despite the proximity to the diplomatic compound. With increasing frequency, dismounted ATU patrols appeared on Mamba Point, approaching the embassy gates to berate the local guards. At one point a disoriented civilian attempted to climb onto the embassy property.
⁴
The local guards who detained him noticed that he had been severely beaten. The man told them, “ATU commander Chucky Taylor and associates were chasing him.”

Charles Taylor’s behavior had taken a turn for the strange over the course of the year. Despite the fact that he was already married, he was rumored to have wed a recent high school graduate who was seven months pregnant in a tribal ceremony.
⁵
The rumor infuriated the first lady, Jewel Howard Taylor, and drew questions from the press. Taylor said that he was entitled to four wives and that it was his wife’s responsibility to help find appropriate matches.

If Taylor was comfortable or calm, given the tumult of the year, he didn’t show it when he met with Ambassador Blaney. Sitting alone with the ambassador, Taylor fidgeted noticeably. His relationship with the United States had grown so tense and distrustful that the ambassador found it necessary to assure Taylor that the United States did not seek to physically harm him.

Taylor appeared reassured by the statement. He visibly relaxed, then tried to explain away the behavior that led to the rift with the United States. “Yes, he had been involved in Sierra Leone, and deeply regretted it,” the ambassador reported Taylor as saying. “But Washington did not understand the context of that involvement.” Taylor had chosen to arm the Sierra Leonean rebels out of fear that “these forces would have been turned on himself and Monrovia.” Now he desperately sought to rescue his relationship with the United States, offering use of Robertsfield for the U.S. military and future rights for yet-to-be-discovered Liberian oil fields.

Taylor was convinced that there was an “ocean of oil” to be discovered offshore in Liberia.
⁶
The entire Gulf of Guinea remained largely unexplored at that time—the result of the region’s instability and the costs and technical challenges associated with deep-water drilling. Two years earlier Taylor had commissioned a 2-D seismic imaging study by a Houston-based company, TGS-NOPEC, which suggested the potential for significant deep-water reserves offshore.
⁷
The notion that war-wracked Liberia could transition to an oil-producing nation might seem far-fetched, but Africa was a continent of transformation, where many impoverished and violent states altered their global positions with the discovery of resources.

Taylor’s offer seemed genuine to the ambassador, yet his actions suggested that he was committed to his path as a warlord. Liberian forces were involved in the renewed conflict in Ivory Coast, completing the troika of insecure states bordering Liberia. Even after their positive meeting, Taylor continued to publicly suggest that the U.S. government sought to forcibly remove him from power using “American funded assassins.”

“No one should trust Charles Taylor,” the ambassador reported back to Washington, later concluding that “we need to make another move in order to keep Taylor corralled or we may find ourselves in an even bigger and rougher rodeo.”

By early January 2003, Charles Taylor had stepped into the twilight of his political career. The preceding summer a new, more abstract threat than the rebel army had emerged in Freetown: the tribunal created out of a UN Security Council resolution, known as the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
⁸
Prosecutors had spent years investigating crimes related to the civil war that had destroyed Liberia’s neighbor and brutalized the populace. The investigation invariably led to Liberia, not only to Sam Bockarie, who still unofficially enjoyed refuge in Monrovia, but also to Taylor. As the rebel commanders whom Taylor sponsored from Sierra Leone atomized throughout the region—a few looking to cut a deal with the new court—the Liberian president’s role in the conflict became more and more difficult to conceal.

Taylor had real reason to fear being brought before an international tribunal. International justice had become more forceful in the late 1990s. Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević’s indictment and arrest demonstrated the international community’s willingness and capability to put a head of state on trial. If the investigators were able to assemble enough evidence to charge him, Taylor knew, his elected position would offer no immunity.

The truth of the matter was, Liberia was dying from the inside. Displaced Liberians poured into Monrovia fleeing the fighting in the countryside, while others fled into Sierra Leone. Meanwhile Liberians in Ivory Coast began to return en masse to southern counties in Liberia, running from that country’s civil war. The situation would have been alarmingly complex for any nation to face, but for a government that had devoted none of its energy to the well-being of its people, the crisis threatened a humanitarian disaster. Taiwan, motivated by Liberia’s recognition of its nationhood, had again stepped into the breach for Taylor, shipping approximately ten thousand tons of rice and undertaking projects to restore water and electricity to the capital.
⁹

By February 2003 the rebels were headquartered in Voinjama, having pushed government forces out of Lofa County. The rebel group had taken control of Robertsport, a picturesque oceanfront village midway between the border with Sierra Leone and Monrovia, securing a potential port should their supply line through Guinea be cut. Two senior officials in the State Department met with rebel representatives to hear their demands and gauge their willingness to participate in peace talks.
¹⁰
The rebels made it clear that they could assault Monrovia but didn’t believe it yet necessary to achieve their goals. For Taylor, this refrain eerily echoed his own as a rebel leader a decade earlier, when he had sat down with Ambassador Kenneth Brown to discuss the terms of Samuel Doe’s departure. Just as Taylor had demanded then, the LURD representatives were emphatic that any deal the rebels cut had one requirement: the president must leave power.

For Lynn, Liberia remained a loose end. She had not spoken to Chucky for nearly a year and a half. She had left him and his world behind, for the comparatively anonymous existence as a single mother putting herself through school in Orlando. But their divorce did not move forward, in part because Lynn wasn’t ready to let go of what she called her “African princess fairy tale.”
¹¹
The prince in that fairy tale had been replaced by a man who had threatened to execute her family. The boy she had fallen in love with seemed to have disappeared completely into the madness of the civil war. She still cared for that person, but she wasn’t certain whether he still existed.

Bernice eventually broke the silence between the two of them. She still lived a few miles from Lynn in the Pine Hills home where Chucky had grown up, though she spent much of her time in Monrovia. One day, as Lynn recalls, her mother-in-law called out of the blue. Chucky was killing himself with drugs, she said, and she needed Lynn’s help to save his life. Lynn couldn’t ignore her mother-in-law’s plea. She picked up the phone and reached out to him—not only because Bernice had asked her to but also because she had yet to let go of her husband. “Even though he was a shitty father and a shitty husband, I didn’t want him to die,” Lynn said.
¹²