FYI: Our Liberian Legacy (from the Atlantic)

[Fritz]

As a small number of our troops enter Liberia, but before the partisan battle lines are drawn, I thought it may be a good time to bring up Liberia.

Please follow the link if this article interestsd you. It contains a number of in-story hyperlinks to other material.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/f...s/liberia.htm.


Our Liberian Legacy

July 30, 2003

Last week as many as 600 people were killed in a mortar attack on the Liberian capital of Monrovia. President Bush responded by stationing 2,200 Marines off the country's coast. But as the war-ravaged West African nation teeters on the brink of chaos, the United States is coming under increasing pressure to intervene in the bloody conflict between the government of President Charles Taylor and a coalition of rebel groups.

The former European colonial powers have cited the United States' historical connections to Liberia—which was settled by freed American slaves—as the reason a peacekeeping force should be led by American troops. Britain and France have sent peacekeepers to their former African colonies, and at the end of June, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, said that the United States was "the nation that everyone would think would be the natural candidate" to lead an intervention force. Liberians themselves seem to share this conviction; in the wake of last week's attack, they stacked bodies in front of the U.S. Embassy and demanded American troops' protection. But the United States remains uncertain about its appropriate role in Liberia, which was never a colony in the European sense of the word. Thus the debate about intervention is as much about the past as the present. What is the United States' legacy in Liberia? And what, if anything, do Americans now owe Liberians? These questions are not new. Atlantic contributors have struggled with America's obligation to Liberia for three quarters of a century.

In 1822, the American Colonization Society—a group of politicians, religious leaders, and slaveholders—established Liberia as an African homeland for freed American slaves. The Society's motives were not entirely benign. The slaveholders in particular were worried about the "corrupting influence" that free African-Americans might have on American slaves, and they saw the creation of an African colony as a solution. In 1847, after resettling fewer than 20,000 African-Americans in Liberia, the ACS ceded control of the territory and the Republic of Liberia declared its independence.

But America never completely severed its ties with Liberia. In the wake of World War I, when the United States emerged as a great power, Atlantic contributor Evan Lewin examined the nation's new relationship with Africa and claimed that the United States was becoming the colonial ruler of Liberia. "By obtaining a commercial foothold in Africa, the American people has entered upon the first step that leads to direct economic, if not political, control," he wrote in Liberia and Negro Rule (1922). Lewin argued for a new, altruistic kind of colonialism. "The economic imperialism which recognizes only the duty of paying dividends to shareholders is almost a thing of the past," he wrote. He allowed that the United States could seek financial gain in Liberia, but claimed it should have a higher purpose than European colonialism, which was "modifying, and occasionally destroying, the established customs and habits of the native races; changing the age-long political dependence upon native chieftains into dependence upon European administrators; [and] sometimes forging the bonds of economic servitude upon races who hitherto have been more or less free within their own peculiar spheres." Lewin had an alternate vision:
Administration, to be effective, must seek to preserve instead of to destroy. In its modifying and civilizing mission it must keep all that is good in native life and customs; it must support the independence of the chieftains and aid them in the work of governing their own peoples; it must preserve the economic freedom of the races under its charge, and not allow them to be exploited for the sole benefit of European traders, settlers, or planters; and, above all, it must safeguard the rights of the natives in their own lands; train them in agricultural work, so that they can develop their own farms and plantations; and, by realizing that the true prosperity of a tropical country is founded upon agricultural development, foster by every means the latent ability of the natives to sow and reap their own crops. In other words, one of the main functions of administration must be to prevent native races from becoming mere wage-earners working for others, instead of being primary producers on their own behalf.
But Lewin's vision was not to be. In 1926, when Liberia was struggling under British debt, the Firestone Tire and Rubber company extended a $5 million loan in exchange for a ninety-nine-year lease on a million acres of land it hoped to use for rubber plantations. Firestone's influence quickly altered the country's trajectory. In a 1973 report, Atlantic correspondent Stanley Meisler wrote that Firestone "became such a dominant factor in the Liberian economy and so great a source of public services such as roads and schools that cynics enjoyed joking for years that, while most of Africa was colonized by Britain or France, Liberia was colonized by Firestone." Firestone did not share Lewin's vision of "enlightened" economic imperialism.

On the contrary, Firestone supported—and perhaps aggravated—a simmering Liberian social problem: the division between resettled African-Americans and their descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, and native Africans, whom the Americo-Liberians relentlessly exploited and derisively called "aborigines." As Meisler explained,
The importance of the Firestone loan became evident in the early 1930s. Citing the charges of near slavery in Liberia and reports that Liberian soldiers, under command of an American black, had massacred Kru tribesmen in Liberia, Britain demanded that the League of Nations take over Liberia as a mandate. That would have meant the end of Liberian independence. As a British or even an American colony, Liberia surely would have come to independence in the 1960s with power in the hands of representatives of the tribal masses, not a settler elite. It probably was only the presence of Firestone and the commitment of the U.S. government that enabled the Americo-Liberians to resist the pressures of the British and the League and keep Liberia independent.
While Liberia remained in the hands of the Americo-Liberians, the exploitation of the native Africans continued. Although Meisler wrote that there was "little evidence of overt friction between the Americo-Liberians and the tribal people," the tension simmered just below the surface. Although outsiders saw promise in the 1971 transfer of power from President William V. S. Tubman to Vice President William Tolbert, a more reform-minded ruler, neither man did much to improve the situation of native Africans. In 1980, the simmering tension exploded. As Sanford J. Ungar recounted in his 1981 Atlantic article A Revolution, or Just Another Coup?, an "angry band of soldiers," led by native African Samuel Doe, "broke into the executive mansion, rushed upstairs, and surprised Tolbert in his luxurious quarters. They shot and killed the President, disemboweled him, stuck a bayonet through his head, and tossed his body into a mass grave." That was only the beginning of Doe's rampage. Soon after, "the army took thirteen of the wealthy Americo-Liberian officials who had been arrested... marched them nearly naked through the streets of Monrovia, to ensure that they lost their dignity, tied them to seaside post at the Barclay Training Centre, and executed them at point-blank range."

Doe's sudden and brutal rise to power surprised Americans. "Few outsiders—especially those in the U.S.—thought it was possible for this sophisticated African political dynasty, so schooled in the ways of the West, to be overthrown," Ungar wrote. "Liberia had a reputation as an outpost of stability in a continent of chaos." But "in retrospect," Ungar argued, "rarely has an explosion anywhere in the world been so inevitable." As Ungar put it,
[T]he fact is that for 133 years, a settler elite—a black-settler elite—which made up no more than 4 percent of Liberia's population, had monopolized all political power and controlled access to the country's resources. Its methods and its attitudes made those of the later-arriving white-settler elite in Rhodesia seem mild by comparison.
At least initially, Doe's regime seemed as if it might improve Liberian society. Atlantic contributor Bill Berkeley explained Doe's potential—and his ultimate failure—in the 1992 article Between Repression and Slaughter:
Casting himself as the liberator of Liberia's indigenous masses, [Doe] promised to put an end to the corrupt and oppressive domination by the Americo-Liberian elite and to establish a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth. He pledged to return the country to civilian rule. But he soon proved to be a lawless and brutal tyrant. In October of 1985 he brazenly stole the election that was to have ushered in civilian rule. A month later he put down a widely applauded and nearly successful coup attempt with horrific violence, killing hundreds—mostly members of the Gio and Mano tribes, from the remote border region of Nimba County.
But as Berkeley explained, Doe suffered few consequences for his brutality:
[T]he United States contributed half a billion dollars in economic and military aid in the first five years of Doe's regime—a third of Liberia's operating budget. President Ronald Reagan invited Doe to the White House... There was concern that the young soldier and his populist backers might tilt toward Libya or even Moscow. There was also an "implicit bargain," as one American diplomat told me at the time, "that the military would let go if its needs were looked after."
But when the military failed to let go, the Reagan Administration did not challenge the results of the rigged election... On the contrary, Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, the Administration's chief spokesman on African affairs, issued a series of unforgettable statements during that critical period, about "positive aspects" of the election and about the standards of "a part of the world where the norm is single-party rule," which Liberians to this day regard as plainly racist.
In the end, Doe's regime did little more than transfer control of the Americo-Liberian power structure to members of Doe's own Krahn tribe. At the same time, however, Doe became an increasingly valuable Cold War ally who allowed American broadcasting and navigation equipment to be stationed in his country. In exchange, the United States continued to ignore his abuses. But Doe's decision to "ethnicize the armed forces of Liberia [by] stacking the officer corps and key units with Krahn" had disastrous results, Berkeley explained. When Charles Taylor, Liberia's current president, launched a war against Doe in 1989, his "method was to exploit the genocidal rage of the Gio and the Mano," the two tribes that had suffered the most under Doe's Krahn tribe. "No one has the slightest idea how many people died in the ensuing bloodbath," Berkeley wrote. "Conservative estimates put the number of casualties at 20,000 to 25,000. That would be about one percent of Liberia's population of 2.5 million. But a visitor soon realizes that virtually everyone lost a relative."

Taylor was eventually elected president in a 1997 election that international observers deemed fair. But he never abandoned the brutal violence of his past. In early June, a U.N. war crimes tribunal indicted him on charges of arming Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front—a group that has killed and tortured thousands of civilians in its campaign to control the nation's diamond mines. Now Taylor—like Doe before him—is barely clinging to power as rebel groups converge on the capital.

The question of what the United States owes Liberia—brought to the surface once again by civil war—is so complicated that it may be unanswerable. But Liberians certainly feel that Americans bear some responsibility for their country's decades of conflict. "They built up expectations and then abandoned the forces for democracy," a Liberian official told Berkeley in 1992. "Always in the crunch they are not there. Then it becomes a Liberian problem."


—Alexander Barnes Dryer

[Thomkal]

Excellent article Fritz-it's a shame that Liberia became a tragedy instead of a shining example of a modern-day African country. But then again why the ACS and America in general thought they should "resettle" African Americans back in Africa as a tragedy in itself.

[Buccaneer]

shining example of a modern-day African country

Do you have an example of one?

[QuikSand]

before the partisan battle lines are drawn

Heh. I know what you meant, but that phrase just gets to me.

I get the sense that plenty of the political squabblers here just check to see what the standard position of their selected "wing" of politics is saying, and then find ways to think that's the right thing.

The Bush-haters will look at this issue (or most any other) and immediately try to think of how this is all Bush's fault. Others on the other end of the spectrum will probably pin this on a presidential blowjob.

Not much happens "before the partisan battle lines are drawn" in politicla debate, it seems.

[Fritz]

Originally posted by QuikSand
Not much happens "before the partisan battle lines are drawn" in politicla debate, it seems.

Thats just it, I am hoping to get information out before we fall into debate. This is an excellent opportunity to formulate an opinion before it becomes siding with or against the administration.

[ice4277]

Originally posted by QuikSand
Heh. I know what you meant, but that phrase just gets to me.

I get the sense that plenty of the political squabblers here just check to see what the standard position of their selected "wing" of politics is saying, and then find ways to think that's the right thing.

The Bush-haters will look at this issue (or most any other) and immediately try to think of how this is all Bush's fault. Others on the other end of the spectrum will probably pin this on a presidential blowjob.

Not much happens "before the partisan battle lines are drawn" in politicla debate, it seems.

That's funny you mention this, because I was just thinking about this the other day. I always find it funny how much bashing goes on along purely party lines when in many circumstances the other party probably would end up doing something very similar if it was their call.

[CAsterling]

Originally posted by Thomkal
Excellent article Fritz-it's a shame that Liberia became a tragedy instead of a shining example of a modern-day African country. But then again why the ACS and America in general thought they should "resettle" African Americans back in Africa as a tragedy in itself.

Not attempting to pick on this particular quote, but it uses one of the phrases I detest.

African American - I'm sorry but I consider putting these two words together completely illogical - you are either American or African, and whilst this designation gives an indication of race, I think it should never be used.

They are Americans plain and simple, people aren't English American, or European American, so why should this phrase ever be acceptable.

Ok, I will stop ranting now, have a nice evening

Even before I was born stability in African nations had not been achieved, so I don't care about ths one - except that some people I have met in 'independant security companies' (othewise known as Mercenaries) will probably make a lot of money either during or after the current crisis.
It was interesting reading about Firestone and their influence, rather like BP and Nigeria.

[QuikSand]

Originally posted by CAsterling
African American - I'm sorry but I consider putting these two words together completely illogical - you are either American or African, and whilst this designation gives an indication of race, I think it should never be used.

They are Americans plain and simple, people aren't English American, or European American, so why should this phrase ever be acceptable.

Is your argument semantic, or substantive? I really can't tell.

Let's say that we instead used a phrase (to describe the same people) that was a bit clearer- something like "Americans of African descent."

Would this be okay with you, as it doesn't raise the cloudiness issues that you have a problem with?

Or would you insist that it's simply inappropriate for people to be recognized (or to recogniz themselves) in part based on their ethnic or geographic heritage?

[Fritz]

I think Thomkol was alluding to the lost opportunity for Liberia to develope into a model nation.

[Buccaneer]

Or would you insist that it's simply inappropriate for people to be recognized (or to recogniz themselves) in part based on their ethnic or geographic heritage?

What would you call yourself to recognize your ethnic or geographic heritage?

[Easy Mac]

I don't even think the administration wanted to get involved in this in the first place. Bj seemed to want to avoid this at all costs. I agree with the man. Not everything is our fight. There's a reason there was an American Civil War (yes, each side probably received a llittle foreign help, but still). Sometimes people have to get through their own shit.

[Buccaneer]

Some much for the power and influence of the UN.

[mckerney]

Originally posted by QuikSand
The Bush-haters will look at this issue (or most any other) and immediately try to think of how this is all Bush's fault. Others on the other end of the spectrum will probably pin this on a presidential blowjob.

Though this is where I really see things to be a situation where Bush/America can't win. Being bad things happened when no US forces were sent in, it's America's fault for not intervening. Though if US troops were sent in to take care of thing, the evil empire of America is at is again, occupying and running another country.

[QuikSand]

Originally posted by Buccaneer
What would you call yourself to recognize your ethnic or geographic heritage?

Does that matter?

What if I'm Laotian-American, or rather an American of Laotian descent? (Or Hungarian, or Ukrainian, or 'European,' etc.) Is the argument that we should be so wrapped up with being Americans that there shouldn't ever be a whisper of my ancestry, either by myself or others?

[Fritz]

Originally posted by QuikSand
Does that matter?

What if I'm Laotian-American, or rather an American of Laotian descent? (Or Hungarian, or Ukrainian, or 'European,' etc.) Is the argument that we should be so wrapped up with being Americans that there shouldn't ever be a whisper of my ancestry, either by myself or others?

Is "African American" a whisper or a shout?

[Thomkal]

Originally posted by Fritz
I think Thomkol was alluding to the lost opportunity for Liberia to develope into a model nation.

Frotz,

Yes that's what I meant-thanks for cleaning up my botched sentence.

[Buccaneer]

Originally posted by Fritz
Is "African American" a whisper or a shout?

If it's a shout, does that imply that their heritage is more important than others? Shouldn't it be what we are now without prejudice since all of us have a geographic or ethnic heritage?