Hurtful Hand on Liberia
As Liberia's civil war flashed in the media this summer -- countless dead, more than a million refugees -- there was ready sympathy for a people we'd probably first heard of, and last heard of, sometime in school.
President Bush reminded us of our special tie to the small West African country, when he referred in passing to its "unique history" as a nation founded by freed American slaves. But beyond ritual rhetoric, he was careful to take no responsibility for the tortured country's future, or its past.
For some of us who knew the story from the inside, that evasion was shocking. The president's stock, simplistic version of U.S.-Liberian relations hides the sordid reality I knew firsthand as a National Security Council aide for African affairs under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. In fact, much of Liberia's agony can be traced directly back to American policy. The "unique history" Bush referred to holds a reckless patronage haunting both nations.
In the White House version, Liberia began as a "beacon of hope." Bureaucrats used to write the same cliche for the presidents I served. But then, as now, it falsified history. A "beacon" for some, perhaps, but certainly not for all. Backed by guns and money from a 19th-century white America eager to resettle them, our ex-slaves promptly set up a caste tyranny, even their own slave trade, over the indigenous tribes, beginning 159 years of divide-and-rule supported by the U.S. and relentlessly seeding today's communal chaos.
Liberia, says every U.S. government publication, is Africa's oldest independent republic. Well, it may be old, but it's not quite a republic or independent. The Americo-Liberian dictatorship effectively excluded 99% of the population politically and economically. From the 1920s, astride the world's largest latex plantation, the giant American multinational Firestone all but owned the nation as a rubber colony. The company and an accommodating regime rounded up young men from the interior in Gulag-like labor battalions, while their paramilitary thugs brutalized anyone protesting some of the worst exploitation in Africa. When I was on the NSC staff, Firestone executives -- Liberia's real rulers -- were far more important in dealing with the country than any Liberian or U.S. official.
