By the time you read this, the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague should have sentenced Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia. Last week, Taylor was found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes, committed during his six years in office between 1997 and 2003.
Perhaps the most famous moment during the trial concerned the involvement of the former supermodel, Naomi Campbell, who was said to have received a diamond as a gift from Taylor. The matter was relevant to the trial since it would establish a connection between Taylor and “blood diamonds”.
Sometimes also called “conflict diamonds”, the gems get their name because they are one of the currencies of choice of warlords and terrorist groups. When Al Qaeda found its cash deposits were being frozen, it invested in diamonds in order to have a portable source of wealth. In Taylor’s case, he used to be paid in diamonds for his involvement in the civil war of Sierra Leone, an involvement that eventually found him guilty of all 11 charges brought against him.
Only a month before he was found guilty, I had to make an unplanned visit to Liberia. Having just been monitoring the elections in Dakar, Senegal, I could not leave as planned through Mali, as a coup d’etat had just been staged there. Eventually, I travelled to Liberia and found myself testing my “airport road theory”, namely that the road from the airport tells you a lot about the state of a country and the resourcefulness of its people.
I was particularly curious about Liberia for reasons other than wanting to know how the country was faring nine years after the notorious Taylor stepped down. The country has a special historical relationship to the United States, which is why Liberia’s flag is similar to the American one.
When slavery was abolished in 19th century America, some 20,000 freed slaves were resettled in Liberia. They did not get on well with the indigenous population. A dual caste system emerged reflecting almost the situation in pre-abolition America, complete with plantations and mansions. Today, the hollow structures of the former remain.
One other curiosity is the imprint of freemasonry. Three former prime ministers were freemasons. Constitutional changes have since forbidden such a reoccurrence.
This then was the special history of the country that circumstances had brought me to. As soon as we landed I could see that the UN peace force was still deployed. Large numbers of white helicopters and military vehicles occupied a good portion of the airport. Peace was evidently still fragile.
The drive to Monrovia, the capital, took almost an hour as it is just over 40 km from the airport. At $35, the cost of the taxi was reasonable and suggested a modicum of stable order, otherwise prices were more likely to be opportunistic. I modified this view, however, when we stopped to fill up the car at a petrol station.
It was guarded and the guards were from a private security firm. I realised it was a guard for every pump, not per station. However, it was not an entirely tense situation.
The sight of the road was a paradox. On one side I could see a long wall mounted with barbed wire, a scene which would prevail throughout my visit to Liberia. On the other side, there were clusters of small traditional homes with no boundaries. The homes were made of all types of materials (some having bamboo cages) but with a large open space in the middle.
At the periphery of the roads Liberians carried goods on their heads, mostly in bright plastic containers. Many were children who could not have been older than ten: barefoot, in well worn T-shirts and shorts.
One thing that struck me was the number of vehicles which had crashed and been abandoned on the side of the road. The road itself was good, marked in yellow in the middle and straight all the way to Monrovia.
The vehicle of status is the shiny steel polished motorbike, which are displayed like racing horses and proudly protected by their owners. I was surprised that many of motorcyclists were teenagers. Once we closer we got to Monrovia, I noticed that schools had finished and children and teenagers, mostly girls, were just returning home.
Perhaps the picture that will stay with me most of the country is the number of audacious girls, hair plaited back in the African style, riding on the back of the motorbikes, flaunting attitude.
It is of them that I will think when I follow the efforts of Liberia’s President, Africa’s only woman in the position, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. A co-winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Sirleaf is 73, in her second term and determined to alleviate poverty and improve the health and education system. She has renegotiated most contracts with the multinationals and is now looking at oil exploration.
Notwithstanding its diamond mines, Liberia is one of the poorest countries in Africa. The diamonds should have been the economy’s ace but were soiled by conflict. Sirleaf is now attempting to construct a legitimate diamond industry, which would deal the country a new deck of cards.
