I’ve recently discovered Chris Blattman’s blog. It’s awesome. He posted an entry called “The best civil war study you’ve never read,” which highlighted a 2004 article by former Liberian President and now head of the Governance Commission, Amos Sawyer. I discovered, just as Blattman predicted, that I had never read the article, which is called “Violent conflicts and governance challenges in West Africa: The case of the Mano River basin area.”
The article explains clearly the ways that Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, fueled conflict in the region. Below are some things I learned from the article. At points I copy language directly from the text. The bullet I bolded is my favorite line from the article.
- To bolster security, former Americo-Liberian President William Tolbert recruited unemployed and semi-literate indigenous youth for the military, and provided them with training at a new military academy. The first indigenous president, Samuel Doe, who killed Tolbert in 1980, was one of those who benefited from this training.
- Doe and Charles Taylor had different ambitions. Doe wanted to become the leader of a new Liberian oligarchy and be respected in West Africa and abroad. Taylor wanted Liberia to lead the Mano basin area, becoming a third power block in the region, with the other two being Nigeria and francophone West Africa. Taylor did not just want to control access to natural resources, he wanted to establish the sphere of control.
- Among the many foreigners who managed bank accounts for Taylor, one was a Lebanese trader named Talal El-Ndine.
- Changing his colors and becoming all things to all West African leaders, Taylor was able to present himself as an understudy to Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings, a son to Cote d’Ivoire’s Houphouet-Boigny, a francophile to Togo’s Eyadema, and a business partner to Burkina Faso’s Compaore. To the military commanders of many of these countries, he strove to become an admired acquaintance, if not a close friend. Thus, he was able to receive support from a diverse group of leaders, many of whom did not see eye to eye.
- Compounding the flaws of peace agreements was the fact that the political classes in both Liberia and Sierra Leone failed to elevate the debate about post-conflict governance reforms beyond issues typically prescribed in the good governance agenda promoted by the international donor community.
- The 2003 Accra peace agreement, and previous peace agreements, established a transitional government under a power-sharing formula that reinforced the struggle for spoils of war and lacked effective structures for accountability.
- During lulls in fighting Poro leaders and local Imams engaged in reconciliation initiatives among Loma and Mandingo communities on the Guinean-Liberian border.
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