Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (28 page)

When Milam finished attending to the evacuees, he told us that we had to wait until dark before we could fly onward to the American Embassy, where we would be put up, and where the evacuees would be ferried to a ship offshore. The embassy was a large, iron-gated compound located at seaside on a rocky promontory at Mamba Point. Like a good many American embassies in Africa, the physical setting provided for a defensive last stand, and quick escape from the country, if need be. Nonetheless, we had to land at the embassy under cover of darkness, flying in low and observing a total blackout, because Mamba Point had been overrun with militiamen and sobels—the clever neologism for the men who had first ripped Sierra Leone apart, and were now bringing the practice to downtown Monrovia. The soldiers by day, rebels by night in this particular frenzy of gunfire and theft were none other than the Nigerian and Guinean troops of ECOMOG, the dispirited “peacekeepers” whose job it was to preserve Liberia from just this sort of anarchy.

Our Huey came in low over the sea, ten or fifteen yards above the waves that crashed into Mamba Point in ceaseless, neatly spaced sets, and the smell of brine filled our cabin. Our little group of reporters was told that we would have to camp out by the embassy swimming pool. MREs, meals ready to eat, the army’s shrink-wrapped rations, were handed out, and a long heavy-duty extension cord was strung to us from a generator that hummed in the distance. The embassy staff told us that we would have power for a couple of hours at best, because of the need to conserve fuel. I slept that night under the stars, poolside, stretched out on a chaise longue carefully enveloped in my mosquito net.

Hearing sounds from the compound and from the surrounding diplomatic enclave, I rose with the first light of dawn. Looking around, I could see that the large grassy grounds of the embassy had been turned into a huge waiting area, where hundreds of people were huddled, hoping for their turn to be flown out of the country.

An embassy officer gave me a tour of the compound. The ambassador’s residence, which sat at the low end of the sloping grounds, had been turned into a sniper and machine gunner’s nest for the marines, as well as a billet for the soldiers who worked in shifts to protect the perimeter of the compound from penetration or assault. On the second floor, a marine manning a tripod-mounted .50mm machine gun, aimed in the general direction of the Mamba Point Hotel, where I had always stayed, told me that he had already received incoming fire several times during his shift. “It doesn’t really worry me too much,” he said laconically. “I have faith in my training, and in my equipment. People who shoot at me tend to regret it pretty quickly.”

I was led to the main embassy building, a piece of 1960s-era official architecture whose dull but imposing concrete facade would not have been out of place had it been an annex of the State Department. From a second-story roof I watched with another marine machine gunner as a band of rebels looted the nearby UN military observer’s residence. One by one, the young fighters clambered out of the building carting off whatever they could carry: photocopier, fax, telex machines, computers. As they loaded up a stolen sedan, one of the fighters briefly waved his rifle at us and gave us the finger. The marine peered through his sight and unlocked the safety on his .50mm. I thought I was about to see an American demonstration of force. The scene was defused in an instant, though, when another rebel shouted from the car for the gunman to jump in, and he obliged. As the car sped away, the photocopier tumbled out of the overloaded trunk and crashed onto the pavement. The looters may not have noticed—their car never slowed down, much less stopped.

Ambassador Milam seemed worried and wanted to talk. Taylor and a rival, Alhaji Kromah, leader of the second-largest militia, had seemingly reached an understanding. They would overrun Roosevelt Johnson and his Krahn holdouts at the Barclay Training Center, and then dissolve the Council of State and simply take over the country. Taylor would be president, and Kromah vice president.

All along, the awkward and unacknowledged coalition between the United States and Nigeria had been working to prevent just such an eventuality. The Nigerian army had first arrived here during Doe’s final days, and the West Africa superpower had created ECOMOG to prevent Taylor from shooting his way to power. In many years of trying, Taylor had never managed to beat the Nigerians on the ground, but little by little he had managed to cleverly undermine them. Most of the time this was simply a matter of cutting in ECOMOG’s Nigerian commanders on whatever business the multimillionaire warlord was running, whether diamonds, logging, bauxite and iron ore, or cocaine.

The Nigerians had come from a country where corruption was as deeply embedded as any in Africa, and their president, Abacha, had set a particularly flagrant example. ECOMOG’s discipline and esprit de corps had been steadily chipped away. Nigeria had received modest donations from the international community to help defray the costs of its operations in Liberia, but Abacha and his top commanders pocketed most of the funds and paid their soldiers a mere fistful of dollars each month. The Nigerians lacked transportation and walkie-talkies. Their rifles were filthy and rusted, and lately many of the men had even taken to selling their bullets to the rebels in order to make ends meet.

When hell broke loose in Monrovia on Easter weekend, the Nigerian peacekeepers made no pretense of carrying out their mandate. Instead, as I saw from the roof of the embassy, with their vehicles piled high with stolen goods coursing through Mamba Point, many Nigerians had wholeheartedly joined the rebels in the looting. When I asked Milam if the marines might have to be called upon to provide order, he shot me a look of pained resignation and answered, “Things would have to get pretty bad before we got involved.” Then, a bit cryptically, he added, “There are rumors of a big attack on the BTC, and that could be one such incident. I do know the president [Clinton] has said he wants to do the right thing.”

What was bothering the ambassador was not so much the lack of enthusiasm in Washington for any humanitarian intervention. After all, Liberia had been left to stew in its own juices plenty of times before.
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It was the failure to do more to prevent things from reaching this point in the first place. “My view is that if we could have mounted some kind of economic program in time, we could have drawn a lot of these boys out of the militias and created some jobs, or started some schools,” he said. “Now we are in just an impossible spot, having to turn away mothers with crying babies wrapped around their legs because the whole country has come unraveled.”

A battle had been raging for two days outside of the Barclay Training Center, where Roosevelt Johnson was holed up. In between the looting binges and torrential, blinding rains, which seemed to send everyone into hibernation, fighters loyal to Taylor and Kromah had been mounting sporadic but intense assaults with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. These spells of violence were as spectacular in their recklessness as anything ever filmed by Sam Peckinpah, and like a film they obeyed a certain choreography. By late morning, after the fog and hangover from the previous night’s drugs and drink had worn off, a dozen or so gunmen, half naked or sometimes completely so, would rush the crumbling, bullet-pocked gates of the BTC, firing their guns wildly as they dashed forward. Roosevelt’s men were badly outnumbered, but just as predictably, they would blunt the charge by taking cover and picking off a few of the enemy despite an abysmal quality of marksmanship.

Each round of this madness left half a city block littered with bodies, but those who survived more than a couple of them quickly became legends and were celebrated with names like General Housebreaker, General No-Mother, No-Father, General Fuck-Me-Quick and, most notorious of all, General Butt Naked, the commanding officer of Roosevelt Johnson’s Butt Naked Brigade, who doused himself in a potion made from cane juice that he swore protected him from his adversaries’ bullets. With his uniform of scuffed tennis shoes, Butt Naked truly lived up to his name.

Milam had told us that we were free to wander outside of the embassy compound, but that if we did so, we would be entirely on our own, and should not count on being rescued if we landed in trouble. Together with a couple of colleagues, I ventured gingerly down the hill and around the bend from the embassy to inspect the scene for myself, but saw nothing more than the occasional desultory round fired this way or that across the street. Here and there, though, uncollected bodies still lay in the street. These were not the corpses of the fighters, which each side dutifully hauled away after each skirmish. They were the remains of unlucky citizens, often men in their forties or fifties who had been caught in the crossfire, or executed during stickups. Despite the heat, none of them had yet reached an advanced state of decay. Their spilled blood was the best gauge of the freshness of their death. Small puddles glistened near the wounds of some, their faces fixed in agony. For others, the blood had long since dried up, leaving little more than dulled stains on the pavement.

When we got back to the embassy, Milam offered to take a few of us to visit a place known as the annex, a rocky patch of land owned by the United States, where hundreds of Liberians who had been forced to flee the fighting were living in the open. The distance was a mere stone’s throw, and ordinarily one would have walked, but the diplomats were taking no chances, and we drove in an armed convoy.

The first person I met there was a family patriarch in his fifties, Simway Lattey, who had gathered his wife and children—from grade schoolers to young adults—around him. The Latteys had camped out next to one of the huge gray boulders streaked with black that gave the grounds, when they were empty, the foreboding look of an ancient geological formation.

“What kind of food have you had to eat these last couple of days?” I asked. “No food,” Lattey said. “Nothing. All we’ve had is a little water.” He held up a five-quart motor oil jug and a small sack of corn-meal, and added, “This cost me five dollars, and there are nine in our family.” Lattey had brought his family to Mamba Point thinking the Americans would rescue them. “We walked here from Sinkor [a distance of two or three miles] overnight. Running, really, the whole way.”

The marines flew me and the other reporters back to Freetown the next day, and while another group of reporters were getting their turn witnessing the American operation, I was trying to find a way to get back to Monrovia on my own steam. The transportation options were not great—taking the occasional aid flight, hitchhiking a ride with the never-too-press-friendly Nigerians aboard one of their C-130s or hiring the Ukrainians to rattle and roll me all the way back aboard one of their flying cymbals.

I had been holed up in the Mammy Yoko Hotel for a couple of days when I was paged as I was walking through the lobby. When I grabbed the phone at the grimy booth, it was Jackson, the
Times
’s Liberian stringer and the longtime Monrovia correspondent for the Voice of America. I had not heard him on the air for a couple of days, and without any other word from him, I had been worried. As Jackson spoke, I could hear the crackle of automatic weapons fire in the background. “Things are getting really scary here, Howard man,” Jackson said. “I’ve got to get out somehow.”

Jackson explained that he had been sheltered at the Mamba Point Hotel by its Lebanese owners. They had been hiding him in the basement whenever fighters came around asking for him. His car, which the fighters stole from the parking lot in the first days of the crisis, had given him away, though, and each time they returned, the demands that the hotel turn Jackson over grew more menacing.

A UN aid worker from East Africa named Jerry, who was somehow left behind in the stampede of foreigners out of Monrovia, was the only regular guest left in the hotel, and he and Jackson had become friends in their shared confinement. I urged Jackson to leave at once with the UN man, to head around the bend and up the hill for the fiveminute walk to the embassy, where they could join the evacuation. “He can’t leave because it is too dangerous to walk up the hill, and I can’t leave because even if we made it, I don’t have a visa,” Jackson said. “The Americans have been pulling all kinds of people out of here who have no connection to the U.S., but they’ve told me I am not eligible for asylum, and they are adamant.” Jackson said that he had pleaded with the embassy’s information officer, but to no avail. The Voice of America had been of no help, either, he said.

For a long moment, I could not tell if I was more shocked or disgusted. I told Jackson I would call the Voice of America’s headquarters to see whether that would help. I got the number from him and called, telling someone in the Africa Service that if anything happened to their Liberia correspondent, who was refused asylum despite facing a clear and present threat to his life, I would make sure it made the front page of the
New York Times.

When I called Jackson back a few hours later to check, he told me that almost immediately after my call to Washington he had received a call from Dudley Sims, the embassy’s spokesman. Sims told Jackson to sit tight, near the entrance of the hotel, promising that a diplomatic vehicle would arrive any moment to extract him.

I was relieved, but still incensed and filled with distrust. In the intervening hours, I had managed to hitch a ride back into Monrovia with some senior American officials whom I came across quite by accident. They would helicopter me back to the embassy compound, but once in Monrovia, I was on my own, meaning I would have to sleep somewhere else.

I called Jackson again to check with him just before jumping aboard the helicopter. No embassy vehicle had arrived, and the afternoon sun was about to begin its quick fadeout. Jackson was scared and depressed, and said he was going to return to the basement, where it seemed safer. I told him the only thing left to do was to try to reach the embassy on foot, and after several minutes of discussion, he agreed to try. I wished him luck and told him I hoped to meet him at the embassy when I landed.