I have never met Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia, but I
once spent several days at a conference with the man who was then
his Army chief of staff. His name was Prince Johnson, and I am not
at all embarrassed to say he scared the hell out of me. He was a
youngish man with cold dead eyes, and despite his gold braid,
epaulets and lieutenant general’s rank it was clear he was not
really a soldier. He was more a professional murderer, better
suited to disemboweling Taylor’s opponents than he was at
commanding troops. Indeed I later heard from a reliable source an
account of Prince Johnson in action. He tied a poor unfortunate to
a tree, and then lopped off his fingers, ears, lips and nose before
he allowed him to bleed to death.
I bring this up now, of course, because Liberia is much in the
news, and President Bush must decide what he will do, if anything,
to end the violence there. Meanwhile I do not know if Prince
Johnson is still around, but I suspect that if he has been
replaced, Taylor has chosen a successor very much like him. Prince
Johnson, incidentally, never said a word at the conference,
although he did distribute a paper he had written. It referred to
the “Lord God Jehovah,” but not, as I recall, to Christ, and was
virtually unintelligible.
But whatever Bush decides to do about Liberia, it is already
clear that his presidency will be far better for Africans than that
of his Democratic predecessor. Clinton expended no political
capital at all on Africa, while Bush has committed himself to a
massive program to combat AIDS. At the same time, to his great
credit, he seems to have divorced himself from the influence of the
Congressional Black Caucus. (Actually he still has a way to go in
the divorce, but that’s another story.)
Bush took no members of the Black Caucus with him on his trip to
Africa. He did not even ask any of them for advice before he left.
This has made them very angry, of course; the Black Caucus has been
trading off its supposed expertise on Africa for years. On NPR the
other day a member of the member of the Caucus — it sounded like
Maxine Waters — said she was outraged that Bush did not talk to
Donald Payne, the Caucus’s principal spokesman on Africa, before
his trip. She was especially outraged, she said, because Payne
knows more about Charles Taylor and Liberia than anyone else.
And, in a way, she was right. Payne had his first connection
with Taylor when Taylor was in prison in Massachusetts — he later
escaped — and Payne was a local politician in Newark. In the years
to come Payne championed Taylor’s cause in Congress, even as Taylor
went from horror to horror in Liberia, and became one of Africa’s
great monsters. As pointed out in this column before, there is
often an American connection to African problems. Usually this
revolves around business deals, although rancid ignorance may also
come into play. And in a stunning display last week
Pat Robertson showed he was affected by both.
Robertson, who invested $8 million in a gold-mining venture with
Taylor’s government — Robertson was also once involved with
Zaire’s notorious Joseph Mobutu — said on the “700 Club” that the
“horrible bloodbath” in Liberia was all the fault of the U.S. State
Department and not Charles Taylor. “So we’re undermining a
Christian Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over
the country,” he said. “And how dare the president of the United
States say to the duly elected president of another country,
‘You’ve got to step down.’”
But the Liberian election was rigged, and even Jimmy Carter, an
election observer, had to hold his nose when the results were
announced. (Carter had a wonderfully sanctimonious op-ed
piece in yesterday’s New York Times. Neither he nor
his administration, he said, had anything to do with Liberia’s
decline. Nothing, absolutely nothing, that had gone wrong there was
his fault.)
Meanwhile Africa will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis,
and its future looks grim no matter how decent Bush’s intentions.
It suffers from corrupt governments, and there is little sign this
will change. Hope springs up on occasion, but then the hopes are
dashed. Consider the conference I attended with the benighted
Prince Johnson, in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, in 1997, as an
example.
The conference was convened by the late Joseph Nanven Garba,
who, by force of personality alone, convened soldiers and diplomats
from 14 sub-Saharan nations to discuss African security problems.
As a young army colonel in 1975, Garba had helped lead a bloodless
coup in Nigeria that overthrew the government. At the same time he
and his colleagues promised to surrender power after four years,
and hold democratic elections. African coup plotters always promise
that, but they seldom keep their word, although this time they did.
In 1979, Nigeria held a democratic election.
Meanwhile Joe Garba became a major general, and also his
country’s foreign minister, and then its ambassador to the U.N.,
and president of the General Assembly. He was respected throughout
Africa, and so when he summoned the soldiers and diplomats to Abuja
they came, even though some had been mortal enemies for years.
Moreover they reached some intelligent conclusions (while being
only icily polite to Prince Johnson because they knew he was not
really a soldier).
The principal conclusion, it seemed to me, was that Africa
should solve its own security problems, and that it should not rely
on outside forces. But to do this, the soldiers said, they needed
logistical support, and they had to be free from bureaucratic
control. This was eminently sensible, and enlightened military
circles in the U.S. agreed. The Clinton Administration, however,
had its own hare-brained agenda and so it paid no attention. (It
also prevented the commandant of the U.S. European Command from
attending the conference, even though he had wanted to do so.)
So nothing changed in Africa, and you wonder if it ever will.
U.S. policy there is pretty much run now by the National Security
Council and not by the State Department. And say what you will
about the State Department, but at least it has people who have
spent time in Africa, in contrast, I think, to the NSC.
You could see some of the consequences of that on Bush’s trip.
When he praised Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, for example, for his
anti-AIDS campaign, you wondered if anyone had told him that
Museveni was also supporting a Congo militia that was butchering
helpless villagers.
But nowhere, I think, was the NSC’s influence so clear as it was
on Bush’s stop in Nigeria. During his trip Bush had denounced,
correctly, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Mugabe had intimidated
political opponents, won a rigged election, and was presiding over
a thoroughly corrupt government. All these things also apply to
Nigeria under Olusegun Obasanjo, but Bush embraced the corpulent
Nigerian president as if he were a genuine democrat. Indeed he
actually hugged him. Many Nigerians were distressed this, but the
NSC was in charge, and so apparently that didn’t matter.
