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“Everything is Just Spoiled” A firsthand account of SIM missionaries during the Doe/Taylor conflict |
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People had asked us if we felt safe moving off to Africa
and we answered that we would probably be safer there than in parts of most
large American cities. People asked if we weren't afraid of coups and
political upheaval. We answered that Liberia was the most politically stable
country in sub-Saharan Africa. When we said those things, we were only saying what
everyone else in the western world believed to be true. No one had a clue that events were beginning to unfold
in Liberia that would make that country a bench-mark for the horrors of war
and the suffering of innocent people. Outside Liberia, a little known former government
official had been making preparations for this Christmas Eve for more than
three years. He had a holiday surprise for the nation and all those missionaries
whose celebrations unknowingly marked their last Christmas in Liberia as they
knew it. When Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and his
co-conspirators toppled the Americo-Liberian regime of William Tolbert,
Taylor was living near Boston in the United States where he was active in the
Union of Liberian Associations in the Americas. A part of the
Americo-Liberian class himself, Taylor quickly returned to Liberia and was
soon an official in the new government. He parleyed a 1977 degree from Bentley College in
Waltham, Massachusetts into a position as director general of the Liberian
General Services Agency, the government procurement office. By 1984, the
government of Liberia was accusing him of embezzling a little less than a
million dollars. Taylor, who ardently denies the charges, fled again to
the United States. There he was arrested and held in the Plymouth County Jail
in Massachusetts. In September of 1985 Taylor escaped and disappeared. His path crossed several African countries before
finally leading him to Libya in 1987 where his antagonism for the Doe regime
and Colonel Qaddafi's ongoing desire to destabilize Africa came together.
Qaddafi's school for terrorists and guerilla fighters undertook the training
of the "commando'' elite that would become the core of the Taylor army. On Christmas eve of 1989, on the very night we spent
packing to leave for Liberia, a small, initially disorganized and
under-supplied group of dissidents had slipped across the border from Cote
d'Ivoire into the village of Butuo where they struck the customs house,
killing a policeman and a customs inspector and dispersed almost as quickly
as they had come. With
that only semi-military strike, first blood in the disastrous Liberian civil
war was drawn. As I write, the last
blood is yet to be spilled. |