President Sirleaf interview with IRP Gatekeepers

In this final part of our interview, the president is asked whether renewed violence in the run up to the election could occur.

IRP Gatekeepers interview with Liberian President SIrleaf, Part 3.mp3

President Sirleaf interview with IRP Gatekeepers

In this second part of the IRP interview, President Sirleaf talks about her legacy as a President.

President Sirleaf interviewed by IRP Gatekeepers Part 2.mp3

IRP Gatekeepers Interview with President Sirleaf

The seniors editors of the International Reporting Projects Gatekeepers trip to Liberia spent our final day interviewing President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It was a wide ranging discussion about rebuilding her war ravaged country. She met us in a conference room at the executive office building. She was dressed in a blue print traditional Liberian dress, with her trademark Liberian head wrap. She spent an hour with us, answering questions about economic growth, contracts with multinational companies, ethnic tensions and security.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Part 1.mp3

Leaving Liberia

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Liberia

November 17^th 2010

Now we go see the president of this troubled but striving country. Then we leave it behind and head out to the airport. What do we possibly ask her? She knows the problems better than we do. She hears the complaints and pleas on a regular basis.

Better roads! And after a bone jarring 7 hour drive on the best highway in the country, slaloming between potholes, dipping down onto the dusty shoulders millimeters from young boys and old women who appear out of the bushes, who make their way down to homes and market stalls, we can attest. Roads are bad.

Healthcare! She tours the crowded hospitals She sees the good works of NGO’s and religious groups providing free care, vaccinations and treatment. She meets with the good doctors and nurses from around the world who give up their time to live in this hard place to help others, she meets the Liberians who have returned after exile to struggle to make a dent in an avalanche of Malaria, Typhus, Aids. She knows how difficult it is to rebuild a health care system that has been destroyed by 14 years of war.

She knows rape and sexual violence against women is epidemic. That is what doctors, nurses, NGO leaders, young women tell us. Why? War, superstition, sexism? All of the above and wrap in poverty and feelings of disempowerment when you are surrounded by a planet of wealth and watch your own wealth shipped overseas.

 She knows the country has iron ore, vanadium and diamonds and rubber.  She knows that even oil may be in the countries near future.   But people are asking, when will the jobs come? Will her government negotiate a strong price for their resources? Will she be able to convince the multinationals to bring value added manufacturing to the rubber plants, to the iron ore mines? Senators and environmentalists said to us, why doesn’t Liberia manufacture rubber bands?  Why doesn’t this nation have steel plants along with the iron ore mines? Why don’t we have furniture factories for the rubber wood, Hevea to westerners versed in the latest renewable resource?  When will Liberia be a place where value is added, rather than a nation of resource extraction? It is a longstanding complaint from those nations who feed the developed world their resources. Can this President make a difference?

So how do you make headway?

Education!  Schoolyards seem crowded, but the majority of people in this post war country are under 18. Where are the qualified teachers after a generation has been forced to flee schools in fear of their lives?  Where do young men and women get the fees to pay for college?  1000 dollars a semester at private, Episcopalian, Cuttington University may seem reasonable to Americans paying 10 or 15 times that amount, but most Liberians are getting by on 2 dollars a day.

That must be a bitter pill considering how hard Liberians work. Many of the people we meet have two or three jobs, though jobs might be too strong a term. They get a little bit here and there, selling something, arranging something else, maybe driving or getting a small stipend from an NGO.  There are small businesses everywhere; market stalls where people will sell single disposable razors ripped out of the bulk packaging from a wheelbarrow. Some people have bought fleets of motorcycle to use as cheap taxi’s.  We have seen three on a bike, with packages too.  There are business centers, where rows of tailors, all men in some locations, sit at old sewing machines and make shirts and pants out of cloth from Africa and places beyond. Women open pharmacies, rent the building, bring in sellers of tires, or rice, or cloth or generators or cell phones. There are many garages and shade tree mechanics. They have to be some of the best in the world to keep their cars running over Liberia’s strut crushing roads.  People sell blocks of frozen, presumably fresh water. It is often their only source of clean water. Charcoal sellers abound.  Charcoal is made the old fashioned way, limbs are chopped up and smoked in a dirt covered mound, then set out along the roadside in sacks covered in palm fronds, awaiting pickup for transport to the city.  People use the charcoal for cooking in homes that don’t have electricity, running water or toilets. You can smell that reality on the streets and the towns, and don’t walk the beach barefoot. They are used as traditional facilities.

Yet, most everyone has a cell phone, from chiefs to small farmers, from market women to students.  It is revolutionizing business and relationships in ways most never imagined.  It may even be an instrument to defuse tensions. Maybe before we get to fisticuffs over this plot of land we both want to farm, let’s phone the tribal chief, shall we? 

The motorcycle taxis are ubiquitous, driven by young men. They are even in a union of sorts and lobby the government for concessions.  We are told most are ex-soldiers. Most have a hard look when you pass them, lined up one after another on a street.  But most smile and if not too cool, even wave. And the rides are cheap. They got some money when they turned in their weapons.  Some could afford these small motorbikes.

Maybe they turned in those weapons. And maybe there are still vast weapons caches that could be dug up when the warlords, some of whom now sit in the senate, decide they are not getting their piece of a peaceful Liberia. It is a concern of some of the experts, dismissed by others. The UN military mission is scheduled to wind down soon after the next elections. The new Liberian Army is still small, 2000 troops, and still training. The national police force is small, also still in training and under funded.  Out on the border, the police chief has a small hot hut for a station, and to call his office rustic is to be polite.

As the next presidential election approaches in 2011, the second since the wars ended and civilian rule was put back in place, will the parties use the ballot box this time? Will the institutions that are supposed to keep order function as promised?  We have heard from many who feel betrayed by President Sirleaf. Like President Obama, she offered so much hope after years of fighting, but she cannot meet everyone’s expectations. There is still resentment against the Americans who settled and formed the nation and who ran it as their own private club for 150 years. There is antipathy between tribal groups, who have their own languages, regions and power bases.  Can she get each group to see themselves as a nation of Liberians and can that ideal be made a reality?

So what do we ask the president? She knows that market women barely make enough to provide for their families, that they live without running water, that clean water costs money, that electricity is for the fancy hotels and the big men with generators behind walls topped with razor wire and guarded by young men in security uniforms, themselves just eking out a living. She knows that though the world has forgiven Liberia its debt, more debt is coming. She knows that they don’t get enough from their rubber leases to Firestone, that the iron ore should be coming soon, but there won’t be enough jobs. She knows that oil is possible, but a long ways off, that diamonds can mined illegally and smuggled, that timber can be cut illegally, that a porous border invites drug traffickers. She knows that corruption is epidemic and sadly endemic. That is why she sacked all her ministers last week. She wants to only hire back the ones who are honest.

But that is a squishy idea in a struggling fourth world, not even third world, nation. The war destroyed a system that had already been a kleptocracy since its founding by Americans in the 1820’s.  These free men and former slaves, supported by southerners who wanted them gone lest they foment a rebellion, supported by congress to the tune of 100 thousand dollars, big money in those days, these light skinned negroes claiming Thomas Jefferson as a parent, these men set up a state that oppressed and robbed a land of many different tribes, faiths, and languages, all the while setting up a mirror of the antebellum south and a culture of privilege amidst want. And now this nation, under this first female president of Africa, who some think is still too close to the elites who looted and left during the war is standing for election again. She is widely admired for her integrity and her strength. She has offered Liberians a path to a future, but it comes with baggage. There is a lot of hope and determination, but there are also fresh and strong memories of family killing family, little kids with assault weapons murdering and raping grandmothers and forcing baby sisters into sex slavery.  Yet so many Liberians are just trying to keep their front stoops clean, who wash down the walls of their businesses every morning, who just want to get a few dollars ahead, educate their children.  And hope this time the world is watching.

7 hour drive thru Liberia condensed to a minute or so.

Audio postcard from Liberia #1

Audio postcard from Liberia by the wrack line

old redemption hospital

free hospital

aids ward

old providence hospital

going home today

Alice Seah, tailor in training

She hand sewed the pleats.

"We are working for Liberia"

We traveled across bustling, beat down Monrovia, past curbside markets where women sold potato greens and bottled water.  We went through the Barcalounger Laz-Z-boy district. Couches and chairs lined the road. Men were wiping them down to keep them shining and attractive to potential customers. These were roadside sales.  They must have had to haul them back to a warehouse at the end of the shopping day.

 We passed the impressive new Chinese embassy compound. It is about the only new building we have seen so far in Monrovia and it reveals the extent of their presence. They are building roads while getting access to Liberian resources.
 We also passed the abandoned presidents executive mansion. The damage from an electrical fire is the ostensible reason it hasn't been rebuilt, but some people also think it is haunted. It clearly has a bad reputation for many Liberians. Samuel Doe executed President William Tolbert there and later kept prisoners there.  Some of his hit squads operated from the building. President Sirleaf chooses not to live there.

We met with some young women who getting basic education and vocational training with support from a Liberian non-profit. THINK started working with girls who were combatants during the war.  As that population aged, they shifted their efforts to young girls caught up in cycles of sexual abuse and sex trafficking. The young women, a few of them mothers themselves, greeted us with a song with the chorus, "we are working for Liberia.
"

Boakai Fofana Part Three

Boakai Part 3.mp3

Boakai Fofana Part Two

Boakai Part 2.mp3

Weekday in Liberia,

Part one of a three part conversation with Liberian journalist and broadcaster Boakai Fofana

Boakai Part 1.mp3

A conversation with Boakai Fofana, Liberian radio Broadcaster

Boakai Fofana, Liberian Journalist

Today we got our first look at Monrovia. We also toured the site where the original settlers from America landed. Think of it as Liberia's Plymouth rock. More on that in future posts. Our fixer for this part of the trip, in addition to Louise Lief of the International Reporting Project, is Boakai Fofana, a young Liberian journalist at AllAfrica.com and a radio broadcaster. He helps produce a health and education program aimed at young Liberians on the United Nations Mission in Liberia radio station.  He recently interviewed the President of Liberia Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf on the occasion of her birthday. He was displaced by the civil war and leave Liberia. Now he is back, married and helping his country rebuild

A Primer on Liberia

A Primer on Liberia.

We had a primer on Liberia in advance of our night flight to Brussels and Monrovia.

Raymond Gilpin is a Cambridge educated economist who analyzes the complex economic forces at work in a country or region during and after conflict.  He is the director of the Sustainable Economies Center of Innovation for the United States Institute of Peace. USIP is congressionally funded and charged with providing “independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress.”

Mr. Gilpin says to understand Liberia, or the West African region, we have understand the pivotal factors of capital, labor and land.

More than any other country on the continent, he says, the motto of Liberia, “ Love of Liberty Brought Us Here,” recurs in pernicious ways. Because of this, Liberia has the most troubled history in Africa.

When the Americo-Liberians settled on the shores of Liberia, they brought everything with them, including cutlery and even timber. He says they never saw themselves as part of Africa. They insisted the British colonialists in Sierra Leone deal with the as Americans.

There followed 133 years of one party rule by the Americo-Liberian True Whig party.

Harvey Firestone arrived in the 1920’s to get the rubber harvest for the American Auto industry. By that time, the country was bankrupt, in debt to the British, Americans and other creditors. Firestone convinced the US government to cover their debts. In return Firestone got 10% of the arable land in the country on a 99-year lease.

The True Whigs were now beholden to Firestone and the US government. This began the tradition, Gilpin says, of the US overseeing the Liberian budget from D.C.

The many indigenous peoples were left out of the arrangement. Many were displaced, and Liberian boys of many different ethnic groups were forced to work in almost slave like conditions by the Liberian army.  Much of this forced labor was documented by the Christy report in the 1930’s.  Here also begins the tradition of forcing children into labor and military action.

By now the notion of land, labor and capital, Gilpin says, reveals itself as inherently unfair. Many groups are unhappy with the elites, even though the nation, particularly those in power, did pretty well. Investments and infrastructure projects were healthy. Pan Am flew into Monrovia’s airport, the only airport with direct service from them in Africa.

Animosity was growing and some Liberians turned to other models.  Charles Taylor, later warlord and President of Liberia, received training in tactics and Marxist ideology at camps set up by Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi. They saw control of Diamonds and other resources as a way to destabilize the elites and import weapons.  In the 70’s, a growing debt crisis and the decline of rubber and iron ore undercut the linchpins of  Liberia’s economy. Military and civil servants went unpaid. When Samuel Doe executed President William Tolbert, many embraced the coup.

According to Raymond Gilpin, a new elite took over. Americo and native Liberians, educated in the U.S. and Europe became the new ruling intelligentsia. But the notions of Land, Liberty and Capital remained defined by personal interests.  These new leaders came to Monrovia defining liberty as allowing them to act with impunity. It was a free for all, again and these new leaders continued to loot the county.

Then others emerged, including Charles Taylor and the ethic shifted from state theft to predatory resource capture.  Groups emerged to seize and control different resources, mines, diamond smuggling routes out of Sierra Leone. Liberty was defined as the liberty to be lawless.

When peace talks finally took place in 2003, the rebel leaders sought amnesty and demanded pieces of the state in exchange for an end to the fighting. Rebels demanded different ministries, or they threatened to return to war. Others in the intelligentsia backed different warlords and power bases emerged.

Today some of the most ruthless warlords are sitting senators and ministers and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is bound to some of them.

Gilpin argues that a Truth and Reconciliation commission set up to bring peace to Liberia was hamstrung and ineffective. Warlords saw it as a chance to get amnesty. No one had to answer for his or her actions and apologize, as occurred in South Africa and no one was held truly accountable.

This leaves the nation still wounded, with many ex soldiers still on the a payroll of Senators cum warlords, who threaten to mobilize them again if their demands are not met or they are somehow forced to account for their actions during the war.  Warlord and Senator Prince Yormie Johnson has said that if anyone comes for him they better bring a bulldozer.

Even Charles Taylor, now on trial in the Hague, may avoid a harsh sanction, since he is charged with crossing the border to terrorize nationals in another country, but the case is reportedly weak.

Next year, national elections are scheduled. President Sirleaf, condemned by the unpopular Truth and Reconciliation Commission for her early support of Taylor, says she will run again. Many Liberians see her as a Mandela figure, a unifying leader who has held the warring factions back and helped build a national identity.  Efforts to rebuild national institutions and separate them from political influence are ongoing but incredibly difficult.  Now the notion of liberty, according to Gilpin, is boiling down to a question of whether to return to war or accept messiness of democracy.  And underlying much of the turmoil are ongoing disputes over land ownership.

For Liberia to succeed, Raymond Gilpin says three things must occur Land issues must progress, people have to get title to their own lands, the nation has to invest in retraining for the thousands of young men who only know how to make a living through war and pillaging and the rule of law must be asserted on the ground and also in an overarching way. Those who waged war must be given a way to apologize; victims and warriors have to come to terms, even if the idea of punishment is dropped.

At this juncture he says, there needs to be robust international assistance or violence will re-emerge as parties jockey for power in the run up to the 2012 elections.  

What is a failed state?

What is a failed state? How do you reclaim one?  Foreign Policy Magazine issued its rankings of failed states this year and Liberia ranks in the middle, 33rd out of 60. Small consolation if you are one of the teenagers facing an ongoing epidemic of rape, or even a UN Peacekeeping troop being robbed at cutlass point in downtown Monrovia.

There are many scholars trying to figure it out. I don't have a good definition yet. Here is what Noam Chomsky says in his book on failed states:

Among the most salient properties of failed states is that they do not protect their citizens from violence-and perhaps even destruction-or that decision makers regard such concerns as lower in priority than the short term power and wealth of the state's dominant sectors.

He is talking about a state like Liberia during the civil war. Is it still a failed state today?  Here is one short excerpt, Iten 13, from the August Security report by the United Nations  Mission in Liberia to the Security Council 

There have been a number of cases of mob violence, some prompted by lack of confidence in the police and the wider justice system. On 27 February, an off-duty police officer was set ablaze in Monrovia by an angry mob after he shot a man for undisclosed reasons. An Armed Forces of Liberia soldier, who attempted to rescue the officer, was attacked by the mob and subsequently died of his injuries. Early in July, student elections at the University of Liberia turned violent on two occasions, resulting in eight injured students. As political attention is increasingly focused towards the 2011 elections, some mob action has taken on political connotations. On 11 July, the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives and his supporters allegedly assaulted and seriously wounded a police officer who, while fulfilling official duties, had earlier impounded a truck belonging to the Deputy Speaker. Approximately 200 armed partisans from his party, the Congress for Democratic Change, subsequently prevented the police from questioning the representative in a siege lasting several hours.

On our upcoming reporting trip to Liberia, we will be talking to UNMIL officers, as well as sitting legislators. After so many years of destruction and violence, any progress towards restarting a failed state must lead to many desultory conversations. We shall see where they find hope. The UNMIL report does offer some small measures of progress, but tinged with pessimism:

"Liberia continues to make significant progress in consolidating its peace and security. However, potentially destabilizing factors, such as persistent political and social divides, limited progress on national reconciliation, and the widespread perception that impunity is prevalent continue to threaten the gains achieved so far."

So, what is a failed state? How do you even begin to bring one back from chaos and anarchy?  Sourcewatch, in defining a failed state, brings up the argument that there is a neo-colonialist tinge to the phrase, but sticks with the notion among many international activists that some kind of definition is necessary to allow for humanitarian interventions.

These interventions can last for decades and cost billions. The UNMIL effort is into the billions now and there is agreement that the troops should stay at least until after the 2011 elections. Then what? A reassessment is the conclusion from the UN.
Any thoughts?