Warlord Politics
Two decades after the civil war, Liberians wait for justice.
FEBRUARY 15, 2024
PHOTO: Supporters of then-President George Weah and the Coalition for Democratic Change gather at the party headquarters for a final campaign rally for the runoff vote in Monrovia, Liberia. November 12, 2023. (Clair MacDougall)
When Roland Duo, a former Liberian general, announced in August 2023 that he was running for Senate against an ex-warlord in the nation’s October general election, my mind immediately recalled gruesome footage of him and his soldiers that I had seen a few years earlier.
The video was from 2003, when Duo was one of the top commanders under Liberia’s rebel-leader-turned-president Charles Taylor. The footage shows Duo standing in front of journalists near the battlefront on the outskirts of Monrovia. At the time, an insurgent group called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) was gaining on the capital, where it planned to overthrow Taylor’s government. In the video, the young, mustached Duo tries to reassure the journalists of Taylor’s staying power: “This place here will be under control,” he says. “Charles Taylor is our father — if he is not our father, he is our guardian. We want to be with him. … One thing I want the Liberian people to know — it is good to be with the devil you know than [with] the angel you have never seen.”
After Duo finishes his speech, the camera cuts to show a government militia fighter waving a knife, its point thrust inside a severed human foot, torn flesh and muscle on full display. “I challenged him!” the fighter yells, claiming the foot belonged to a LURD rebel. “I took him out and I challenged the devil father!” He drops it on the ground.
Another fighter, wearing a black Bob Marley T-shirt and an AK-47, pulls back the torn flesh. “They say they want to fight us, and we’ll forever fight them and eat them raw!” he yells. Then a black pickup truck full of Taylor’s men pulls up. They appear draped in ammunition, dressed in red T-shirts, and pumping their guns up to the sky. The fighters run knives over the foot, before dropping it to the ground and kicking it back and forth on the dusty concrete.
That is where the footage ends. Duo is not in the frame when the foot was kicked, but he was there, according to the cameraman Teddy Pewee, a former TV repairman who filmed rebels throughout the Liberian civil war in the 1990s. Pewee had begun working for the Ministry of Information in the late 1980s, and later worked for a private television station. As colleagues sold off their tapes to foreign media outlets for quick cash, Pewee held on to his, knowing that his footage was part of the fragile historical record of the conflict. He first showed it to me in his living room in 2018.
Pewee also had wartime footage of Duo’s main political opponent, the incumbent Senator Prince Yormie Johnson. A former leader of the splinter rebel faction the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL), Johnson has served as a senior senator since 2005 and has been a major power broker in postwar presidential elections. In a gruesome video dated September 9, 1990, Johnson appears dressed in fatigues, drinking a Budweiser and ordering the torture of then-President Samuel Doe, who is shown sitting in his underwear, his ears gashed off. Doe later appears naked and dead on a hospital bed surrounded by Johnson’s men, who pose for a photo with his corpse.
The contest underlined that even two decades after the end of the war, former warlord politicians and ethnic alliances still reign in large parts of the country
This past fall, 20 years after the war ended, Duo and Johnson faced each other in local elections in Nimba in northern Liberia, the country’s second-most populated county, the outcome of which has determined the results of all of Liberia’s postwar elections. Duo backed the incumbents, former footballer George Weah and his vice president, Jewel Taylor, the ex-wife of former president and convicted war criminal Charles Taylor. Johnson supported the Unity Party’s Joseph Boakai, who served as the vice president under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from 2006 to 2018. Weah campaigned on roads, infrastructure and development, and Boakai campaigned on accountability and anti-corruption. Both Duo and Johnson made frequent mention of their wartime records. Duo argued that he’d fought longer and harder. “How many of you people here don’t know that Roland Duo fought for 14 years in this country?....” Johnson claimed to have saved Nimbadians from extermination in the early years of the war. He promised the country the presidency through his political connection with Boakai’s vice presidential running mate Jeremiah Koung.
Thirty-three years after Johnson tortured one president, he sought to lord over another. The contest underlined that even two decades after the end of the war, former warlord politicians and ethnic alliances still reign in large parts of the country. Over more than a decade of reporting on Liberia, I have witnessed Johnson’s power augment rather than diminish since the Civil War. Today, Johnson looms large over Liberia’s past and future.
A campaign poster for Roland Duo in Nimba County, Liberia. October 3, 2023. (Clair MacDougall)
Liberian senator and former warlord Prince Yormie Johnson and supporter of presidential candidate Joseph Nyumah Boakai calls on his supporters to rise up should the elections not be free and fair. Ganta, Liberia. October 7, 2023. (Clair MacDougall)
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Between 1989 to 2003, the Liberian Civil Wars killed more than 250,000 people. These were wars without heroes, except for those who bore witness — those who spoke out and survived. The roots of the conflict stemmed from the founding of the nation: Liberia was established by freed slaves from the United States, known as Americo-Liberians, in 1847. Upon arriving in what is now Liberia, the settlers had subjugated the native population, excluding them from economic and political power.
In the 1970s, there was a strong desire for change: Educated and progressive Liberians campaigned in the countryside and poor communities throughout Monrovia. Some advocated for Pan-Africanism and revolutionary change while others sought genuine democracy in a country that had been ruled as a one-party state. In 1979, pro-democracy groups called for peaceful protests over increased rice prices, but as the demonstrations swelled and became violent, so too, did the state’s response. Hundreds are said to have been killed by state security forces, and opposition leaders were rounded up and arrested. A year later, 17 soldiers from the army executed then-President William R. Tolbert, marking an end to Americo-Liberian rule. Soon after, they tied 13 government officials to stakes and publicly executed them, marking the beginning of a bloody chapter.
In 1985, the military leader Samuel Doe ran in civilian presidential elections against Jackson Doe, a former schoolteacher and politician, in a race that was supposed to mark the transition to democratic rule. (The two were not related.) Samuel Doe claimed a first-round victory with 50.95 percent of the vote. Liberian election laws require that if no candidate claims 50 percent plus one vote in the first round, the vote must go to a runoff between the top two candidates. Jackson Doe said the elections were rigged and protested the results, only to be thrown in jail. The United States acknowledged irregularities in the vote, but endorsed the elections.
A former ally of Samuel Doe’s named Thomas Quiwonkpa — who was a member of the Gio, a major ethnic group from Nimba — attempted a coup soon after the elections. Massacres of Gio and Mano people followed. Members of the victimized communities joined a group of 100 or so rebels led by Prince Johnson and Charles Taylor. While Johnson and Taylor split and formed separate factions, their forces in turn targeted members of Samuel Doe’s ethnic group, the Krahn, and members of the Mandingo ethnic group, who were seen to be allied with Doe. Johnson, who belongs to the Gio ethnic group, says he has saved many of his kinfolk in Nimba County from government forces, a claim which some dispute. Part of the problem is there is no agreed upon history of the war and its causes. Twenty years after the conflict’s end, it is still not taught in schools.
Roland Duo claims to have joined Taylor’s rebellion in Nimba in 1990, at the age of 17. He then rose through the ranks of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPLF). When Taylor became president in 1997, Duo became head of the National Port Authority. He was a frontline commander in the second civil war, which started in 1999. The Liberian Catholic Justice and Peace Commission accused Duo and another general named Benjamin Yeaten of leading a 2002 massacre of an estimated 175 civilians suspected of being rebel collaborators at Maher Bridge, not far outside of Monrovia. He denied involvement.
Later he warned that a war crimes court would “plunge this nation back into chaos because no one will be free.”
In 2003, the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement brought an official end to the second Liberian civil war. This led to the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission, which listed both Duo and Johnson among the “most notorious perpetrators” and recommended them both for prosecution.
When Duo appeared before the nation’s truth and reconciliation commission back in 2008, he denied committing, commanding or knowing anything about abuses or atrocities perpetrated by the NPFL or the militia under Taylor’s government. But the footage of the severed foot and of Duo accompanied by children with AK-47s, coupled with his senior role in the command structure, undermined his denials.
In the five hours of Duo’s testimony, broadcast live throughout Liberia in 2008, the former general, who at the time held three university degrees and owned housing estates, spoke with a quiet confidence. Dressed in a brown suit, Duo pushed back against the commissioner’s questions about his age and level of education at the time of rebellion and said he joined willingly and without regret. While acknowledging that he was among the highest-ranking generals in the NPFL and in Taylor’s war against rebel groups LURD and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, he referred to himself as a “front-line supervisor” rather than a commander. He emphasized the unconventional nature of Taylor’s forces, whose chain of command he vaguely sketched, suggesting only that Taylor was the head, and chief of staff Benjamin Yeaten and the Minister of Defense remained senior to him.
But today, a growing number of Liberians are calling for a war crimes court, including Pewee, the cameraman who captured the incident with the severed foot. “We need to get these guys off our back,” Pewee told me.
During Johnson’s testimony at the truth and reconciliation commission, he saluted LURD and other factions such as the Movement for Democracy in Liberia and the Liberia Peace Council. “God first, second you!” he said. He denied responsibility for the killings of which he had been accused, among them, that of a musician suspected of being gay and a famed military singer named Robert Toe.
“Moses was a murderer — when you fight war, you kill,” Johnson said, referring to the Old Testament figure. “Moses was a murderer, but he became a leader, so don’t take people by their past. From the day I knew God fully in Nigeria, and that kind of thing as an evangelist, my past is over.” Later he warned that a war crimes court would “plunge this nation back into chaos because no one will be free.”
The truth and reconciliation commission’s final report, published in 2009, recommended that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, then the sitting president of Liberia, also leave political life. Because it was so politically controversial, the report’s recommendations were not enacted by the legislature or followed through by the government.
But today, a growing number of Liberians are calling for a war crimes court, including Pewee, the cameraman who captured the incident with the severed foot. “We need to get these guys off our back,” Pewee told me.
August 18, 2023, marked the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the end of the conflict. That day, in a cramped hotel conference room in Monrovia, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, who led women’s peaceful sit-ins and prayer sessions during the civil war, appealed to Liberians to stop electing former war figures.
To date, no one has been prosecuted, nor have those at the top of the chains of command on either side of the conflict, such as Duo and Johnson, apologized or acknowledged any wrongdoing.
But attempts to pursue prosecutions in Liberia have largely failed, in part because of the presence of former war figures in the legislature. The two postwar governments of Sirleaf and Weah allied with former war figures such as Johnson to win elections. The political strategy has been to sidestep prosecutions locally. Liberians involved in the war have been prosecuted in European, American and international jurisdictions. Taylor was arrested in 2006 and prosecuted in a U.N.- and U.S.-backed court in Sierra Leone. In 2012, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Yet the Liberian state itself has yet to hold anyone accountable. To date, no one has been prosecuted, nor have those at the top of the chains of command on either side of the conflict, such as Duo and Johnson, apologized or acknowledged any wrongdoing.
In October, I traveled to Ganta, Nimba’s largest city. Situated in northern Liberia between Guinea and Ivory Coast, Nimba County is made up of hills of lush, verdant rainforest. In its southern half is Yekepa, a mining town once known as “Little America” for its neat cream-brick houses, swimming pool, tennis courts and cinema that once offered a country club lifestyle for expatriates.
There, I met Edith Gongloe-Weh, whose brother, Tiawan Gongloe, a human rights lawyer from Nimba was running in the presidential race. She said Johnson has continued to win elections because of Liberia’s strongman political culture and the collective trauma Nimba County suffered during the conflict. “People are still living with the scars today,” she told me.
Many believe that Johnson saved them over the course of the war. During the first civil war, then-President Samuel Doe’s forces went on a killing spree of Gio and Mano people, who are native to Nimba. As the fighting continued, Gio and Mano people took refuge in St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in the center of Monrovia. The church was allegedly attacked by soldiers loyal to Doe on July 29; months later, in September, Johnson’s forces killed Doe.
“He’s the hero that took down the man who killed us,” Gongloe-Weh said about Johnson. But she raised questions about his wartime credentials and his claims to being the savior of Nimba County. “He ran through Nimba and did his fair share of killing Nimbadians,” she said. “The reason why Nimbadians look to him as a hero is because of what had happened from the onset of the war, how Doe had targeted citizens of Nimba — the Gio and Mano ethnic groups.”
Johnson’s house and concrete yard in Ganta are sealed off behind a heavy iron gate and guarded by statues of lions with open mouths. On Oct. 5, five days before the election, I waited on the balcony, alongside his supporters and staff, who were sitting in plastic chairs around a table. Johnson, whose hair and beard have long gone gray, entered and invited me to sit down and start the interview. I asked if we could speak one on one, and he requested everyone leave. A staff member from his radio station, Voice of Faith, remained and recorded the interview on his phone. I asked Johnson how he responded to Duo’s claims that the people of Nimba should vote for him because he fought in the war for longer.
“My war was to remove the dictator that was troubling the people,” he told me. “When that was done, I left the scene. So anyone who fought after that for years to prolong the suffering of our impoverished people has a negative motive — that was the war he was involved with,” he said, referring to his rival Duo.
Johnson was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2021 on corruption charges, which he denies. He told me that if the government cheated, people would take to the streets. “If you do that in Liberia here, people will take over all of the counties and prevent the government from exercising authority there — I can see it,” he said. I asked him what he had achieved in 18 years, and he told me that he had built the university and ensured the central government bought roads and a hospital here.
Duo refused to speak with me. A third candidate in the Senate race, Nya Twayen, called Johnson “entitled” and complained that even though Nimba County supplies Liberia’s pivotal trade goods — timber, iron ore, diamonds and coffee — it had not benefited from its natural riches.
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As I reported on the presidential race, I shared a yellow taxi to Broad Street, Monrovia’s main drag. As the car emptied, I asked the driver, Timothy Toe, whom he had voted for. “Weah,” he said. He told me that Johnson had killed his father, a singer in the state military band, when he was 4 years old — Robert Toe, the same man who had been mentioned by a commissioner during Johnson’s testimony.
He said he picked up a rock to throw at Johnson’s car, but then he thought about his faith in God. “I just let it be,” he said. When I asked him if he thinks former war figures should be involved in politics, he said: “No, no, no, no. Let them be prosecuted. You can’t keep them in politics. I can never vote for them.”
Toe, a well-known public figure who sang for Samuel Doe at football matches, was captured and killed, allegedly under Johnson’s orders. Toe had known he could be a target because of his closeness to Doe, so he left his son with a friend. Timothy Toe said he still doesn’t know where his father is buried. Three years ago, he saw Johnson outside the state radio station. “I felt like doing something to him,” he told me. He said he picked up a rock to throw at Johnson’s car, but then he thought about his faith in God. “I just let it be,” he said. When I asked him if he thinks former war figures should be involved in politics, he said: “No, no, no, no. Let them be prosecuted. You can’t keep them in politics. I can never vote for them.”
Later that week, a man from Nimba who asked to go unnamed told me about his uncle, a soldier whom he said had been decapitated by Doe’s men. I asked him why people in Nimba continue to vote for former fighters. He said he himself doesn’t like Johnson’s loudness and manner and was angered by Duo’s statements. “Fighting isn’t something you should boast about,” he said. “Those are not good statements to make — they bring chaos.” He said he believed that Liberians should take the path of forgiveness rather than punishment through a war crimes court. “They talk about peace and reconciliation and the palava huts where people can apologize and life will go on,” he told me, referring to a project, which sought to use traditional dispute resolution methods but has remained dormant for almost a decade.
“An estimated quarter of a million of our people perished in the war,” the speech read. “We cannot forever remain unmoved by this searing national tragedy without closure.”
Johnson won the local race in Nimba on October 24, with over 50 percent of the vote. At the National Elections Commission announcement, I asked Henry Karmo, a reporter who covers the legislature for FrontPage Africa what he thought. He said he was unsurprised by Johnson’s win. “People still vote for their own,” Karmo said of the role of ethnicity in politics. He told me he thought death might be the only thing that would break Johnson’s political hold over Nimba County and Liberia as a whole.
A few weeks later, Johnson’s political ally, the presidential candidate Boakai, won the presidential race. On January 22, inauguration day, Boakai was sworn in under the sweltering heat. During his remarks, he became too faint to continue and had to be whisked offstage. The full text of his speech was later published online. Boakai had planned to say that he would be setting up an office to determine the feasibility of establishing a court for war and economic crimes. “An estimated quarter of a million of our people perished in the war,” the speech read. “We cannot forever remain unmoved by this searing national tragedy without closure.”
As Boakai takes the reins, after promises to look into accountability for atrocities, questions remain about how far Johnson’s influence will extend over the future of the nation. That week, during a sermon at his church, Johnson lashed out at Boakai. “We have thousands of people who are prepared to defend if you get after us,” he said. The next day, Boakai delivered his State of the Nation speech, laying out his administration’s plans. He made no mention of a war crimes court.