Hearth of Darkness - Liberia & Haiti
Noël Quidu
Liberia
The latest cycle of violence was vicious even by West African standards. By July, rebels had all but surrounded the Liberian capital, Monrovia. Under intense diplomatic pressure to avert a bloodbath, President Charles Taylor said he was ready to leave the country for exile in Nigeria. It seemed that his catastrophic six-year tenure would end quietly. But Taylor insisted on staying until Nigerian troops arrived to monitor a ceasefire. Week after week, delays pushed back the deployment date. Emboldened by a fresh arms shipment from a rival neighbor, Guinea, the rebels made a grab for the city’s commercial heart, the port. Quickly overrunning government defenses, they laid siege to the city. Only three bridges separated them from a derelict capital swollen by refugees to 1.5 million people, more than twice its normal size. The result was three weeks of horror — a true descent into the Heart of Darkness — as supplies of food and clean water vanished and the rebels fired mortar rounds indiscriminately on a helpless population, killing hundreds.
July 21 may have been the low point. Rebel mortar barrages hit residential neighborhoods and two U.S. embassy compounds filled with refugees. Nearly 100 people died. Distraught survivors piled 18 bodies in front of the main gate of the U.S. Embassy and cried out for a U.S. military intervention to stop the slaughter. The next morning, Red Cross workers took the bodies away for unceremonious burial on a nearby beach. Fighting between government loyalists and rebel forces was especially intense at the so-called Old Bridge, where fighters engaged across a narrow lagoon with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. Fired up on marijuana and cocaine, the young pro-government militiamen were forced into combat at gunpoint. Photographer Noel Quidu and I saw one of them executed.
The president was unrepentant. When we met with him a few days later, he portrayed himself as the victim of conspiracies. In fact, few failed leaders have been so deeply implicated in the suffering of a people. Taylor came to power with Libyan backing after a notably brutal insurgency that made heavy use of drug-addled child soldiers. He bullied his way to election in 1997, threatening to go back to the bush if he lost. In office, he squeezed his country and the hinterlands of neighboring Sierra Leone for huge personal gain, while failing to bring people even the most basic government services — electrical power and running water. His henchmen were experts in torture, using everything from electricity to colonies of red ants. They maintained two torture centers on the grounds of the presidency itself; other victims died horribly just behind Taylor’s residence outside the city, called White Flower. Taylor’s obsession with purity — he usually appeared in spotless white suits — bespoke a tarnished soul. His lies, direct and natural, came from long experience in dissembling.
“We have no torture chambers here” he insisted in an interview. In fact, he made the whole country a Calvary for his people. On August 11 2003, he finally gave up the game and flew off to exile. This year a growing U.N. peacekeeping force will reach nearly 15,000 troops, the largest such deployment in the world. Fresh elections are planned in two years. But it’s anybody’s guess when Liberia will fully recover from this vampire regime. Title from Joseph Conrad’s novel, “Heart of Darkness”
Tom Masland / Africa Regional Editor, Newsweek
Preview
Haiti. The Last Days of a Dictator
January 2004, Port-au-Prince was in turmoil. Tens of thousands of Haitians had been taking to the streets almost every day, despite threats and gunfire from the armed “chimera” gangs in the pay of President Aristide, now with his back to the wall. It was a state of insurrection, or even a tropical revolution, that would radically change the course of history for the world’s first “Black Republic”. How did this situation arise? A few weeks earlier, thugs in the pay of officials, ransacked the Faculty of Social Sciences and savagely attacked the dean of the faculty with metal bars. This was the final act which ignited an explosive situation.
After more than ten years of oppression, ruled by the man who had come to power in 1990 with the blessing of the Americans and who had become paranoid, the people were no longer afraid. They called for him to leave, the man who had once been a priest in their shantytowns; they called out “Down with Aristide” and “Aristide, criminal!” More and more street demonstrations were held, bigger and bigger demonstrations, despite the unbridled violence of the last-bid defenders of the president – thugs who were often drunk and armed with powerful metal slingshots, revolvers and even military rifles.
The demonstrators, who were mainly students, often fell, struck by stones and bullets ; as did journalists sometimes. The lenses of the photoreporters there in the heart of the crowd, sometimes at the front of the marches, recorded the faces of well known figures from the world of finance, media, churches, teaching and trade unions. Democratic opposition was emerging in the country for the first time in 200 years, since Haiti had gained independence. Support came from men and women from different backgrounds who had the courage to express their defiance in public, and risk their life.
They had placed their hopes in Jean-Bertrand Aristide, hopes for a better and fairer life. And he was the man who had disappointed them! After his triumphant election victory with more than 95% of the votes, the former opponent of the Duvallier clan – Papa Doc and Baby Doc – had never kept his promises of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and had certainly never fulfilled the promise of prosperity.
What was once the Pearl of the Caribbean had been shackled in his demented grip and promptly turned into a hell of poverty, corruption and oppression. Any potential opposition had been carefully quashed, outlawed or paid off. The press was gagged; wealth was plundered; criminal militias in the pay of the authorities imposed a reign of terror in this tropical kingdom of Ubu Rex. Drug trafficking brought wealth for the mafia and the godfathers, often in positions of power, and provided funding for the single political party, Lavalas.
This organized plunder and looting made Haiti, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the least developed country in the entire American continent, with four fifths of the population living below the poverty line and one of the highest levels of famine in the world.
Jean-François Mongibeaux / Le Figaro Magazine
