Trappings of Comic Opera Masked Doe’s Ruthlessness : Liberia: The president reportedly died in rebels’ custody. His 10-year rule leaves the nation in ruins.

The end of the line for Liberian President Samuel K. Doe was as ignominious as most of his 10-year reign: reportedly killed after being shot and captured by a rebel force as he arrived to confer with the Ghanaian commander of a six-nation “peacekeeping” force in his capital of Monrovia.

A bare five months ago, Doe managed to mark his 10th anniversary as head of one of Africa’s oldest independent countries. That was April 12, when he provoked snickers at a thinly attended celebratory banquet by remarking: “We recall the events of the past 10 years with considerable pride.”

Doe, who was 38, has left behind him an economy in tatters, the complete dissolution of civil order amid vicious tribal warfare, and the near-evaporation of his country’s hopes, modest as they were, for democratic government.

The events leading to his reported demise began with an insurgent force about 200 strong that crossed the border from Ivory Coast last Christmas Eve. But by the time of his capture Sunday, there were four forces under arms in Monrovia: the remnant of Doe’s own army, thought to number in the hundreds; two separate rebel groups of several thousand men each, and the so-called ECOMOG, a force of between 2,500 and 3,000 men from six West African countries, sent in by regional leaders to try to establish and monitor a cease-fire. Each controls some portion of Monrovia or its port.

Doe’s reported death at the hands of the troops of Prince Johnson, one of the two rebel leaders, evidently further muddies the waters of Liberian leadership. No fewer than four individuals now claim to be president of Liberia, where nothing resembling formal government has functioned for much of this year.

Reports from Monrovia say that after capturing Doe and taking him to his headquarters, Johnson declared himself president. He said he would run the country until elections can be held.

To make that stick, he will have to continue to battle Charles Taylor, the onetime Doe lieutenant who led the original insurgent force from which Johnson’s band splintered in February. Taylor named himself president earlier this summer when he gained the outskirts of Monrovia.

On Monday, the commander of Doe’s mansion guard, David Nimley, was named by the guard itself as interim president.

Meanwhile, the leaders of six West African states sponsoring the “peacekeeping” force currently keeping a tenuous grip on the Monrovia port have named their own candidate for provisional president. He is Amos Sawyer, a former dean of humanities and social sciences at the University of Liberia who was jailed as a dissident by Doe in 1985, escaped the country in 1986 and became an exile leader in Washington. Sawyer was named president earlier this month at a West African summit meeting in Banjul, Gambia, at which none of the other Liberian leaders had a representative.

It was characteristic of Doe’s administration that his reaction to the rebel invasion made matters worse. In the first six months of this year, brutal army reprisals against civilians living in the path of the rebel advance drove thousands of people over to the rebel side. By late May, when the force reached the coast a few miles from the capital, it had 4,000 men under arms, almost equal to Doe’s own desertion-plagued army.

Because the army massacres were tribal-based, with the Gio and Mano peoples the main targets, retaliatory tribal bloodshed by the rebels was inevitable. They made members of Doe’s tribe, the Krahn, their targets, and thousands of Krahn flooded the roads out of Liberia toward Sierra Leone to escape the rebel advance.

Taylor, 42, was a government officer until Doe accused him in 1984 of embezzling $1 million. He escaped to the United States but was arrested in Boston. While awaiting extradition, he managed to escape again, this time by bribing prison guards with $30,000, he told associates. Recently, he said that the charges against him would be dropped in Liberia once he ousted Doe.

Johnson is a former Liberian army lieutenant who joined a coup attempt led by army officer Thomas Qwiwonkpa in 1985. The attempt failed, but Johnson escaped Qwiwonkpa’s fate, which was to be captured and dismembered by Doe’s forces.

Even with the best intentions, any of these leaders would have enormous difficulty rebuilding Liberia from the trough in which it fell during the Doe years.

At times it was tempting to mistake Doe for his own caricature as a buffoonish incompetent. Early in his regime, the South Koreans beguiled him into letting them mint a new Liberian coin to supplement what was then the country’s official currency, the U.S. dollar.

Liberia got a supply of thick, heavy and unwieldy $5 coins instantly dubbed “Doebucks,” and the South Koreans got millions of U.S. greenbacks held until then in Liberian banks and maintained as a valuable cache of foreign exchange. For his own part, Doe got an honorary doctorate from a South Korean university.

The Liberian dollar, until then officially treated as par to the American dollar, quickly sank to half the U.S. value.

A few years later, Doe and his vice president enrolled, to great fanfare, in a post-graduate political science course at the Ibrahim Babangida Institute of the University of Liberia. At the conclusion of the course, the head of the institute announced soberly that the semi-literate president had been the best student and the vice president the second-best.

From that point on, newscasters on the government broadcast stations routinely referred to Doe as “His Excellency, President Doctor Samuel Kanyon Doe.”

But the comic-opera trappings masked a ruthless administration. Doe, who came to power in a coup, marked the very beginning of his regime with a bloodthirsty display: He invited the public to a beach in Monrovia to witness the executions of 13 senior officials of the ousted government of William R. Tolbert Jr., who was killed during his overthrow. The victims, condemned after casual show trials, included six Cabinet ministers, the chief justice, the president of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Bloodshed was always common among the higher echelons of the Doe government. Often it was colored by a Liberian penchant for ritual killings, in which human beings take the place of the cows, chickens and goats routinely sacrificed to ancestors and spirits in neighboring West African countries. Reports of bodies found at roadsides, stripped of various organs and drained of blood, were standard fare in Liberia’s lurid press, and the perpetrators were often identified as members of the political elite.

Short of murder, Doe used a large arsenal of intimidating measures to keep political opponents and critical journalists at bay. In 1984, he unleashed his army on the campus of the University of Liberia, where students were protesting campus conditions and political repression. The wave of looting, flogging and rape that followed left the campus community stunned for years.

The editor of the opposition Daily Observer, Kenneth Y. Best, was jailed four times; the day after his latest release in 1986, the paper’s offices were torched. Best rebuilt and resumed publishing, but the offices were burned again last March 17 by four men in military uniforms, according to a night watchman.

Two other newspapers, Footprints Today and the Sun Times, were banned, and last year Doe shut down the Roman Catholic Church’s radio station, the only source of nongovernment broadcast reports reaching the countryside. The newspapers and radio station were allowed to reopen earlier this year, when Doe was desperate for good publicity on human-rights issues.

Strong political opponents were also jailed. They included Gabriel Kpolleh, head of the Liberian Unification Party, also recently released after two years in prison, and Sawyer, who had been chairman of the National Constitutional Drafting Commission and head of the banned Liberia Peoples Party.

By all accounts, prison conditions for the detainees were brutal. Most were incarcerated at the infamous Belle Yalla prison, located in a remote part of the country.

“This is a place that in the 20th Century should not exist in the world,” said Rufus Darpoh, a Sun Times editor jailed there for six months under conditions of hard labor.

Doe’s 1980 coup was not universally deplored when it ousted Tolbert, who did not have the popular support that had helped keep his predecessor, William V. S. Tubman, in power for 27 years. Tubman and Tolbert were both descendants of the American ex-slaves, a class known popularly in Liberia as “Congos,” who had ruled the country since they arrived on its shores in a “back-to-Africa” movement in 1847.

By 1980, the successive Congo regimes had enriched a corrupt and feckless Liberian elite while the rest of the country suffered.

By contrast, Doe, who kept his existing rank of master sergeant at first but later promoted himself to general, was the first descendant of native Africans to run Africa’s oldest independent state.

In 1985, Doe made a show of keeping his promise to return Liberia to civilian rule by legalizing political parties. But he chose to run for president himself. Two weeks after the vote, the government announced that Doe had won the presidency with 50.9% of the votes cast. An attempt by a coalition of opposition parties to challenge the results as transparently rigged was undermined when the U.S. State Department, in a report to Congress, accepted the outcome and even praised Doe for resisting the typical dictator’s impulse to claim a majority of more than 90%.

By last year, the government was almost entirely out of business, unable to enforce even the few regulations or laws it tried to promulgate.

“The atmosphere here is like a gold-rush town,” said one international banker in Monrovia, remarking on the flood of business charlatans infesting the streets and the inability of the government to police any activity.

Government revenues seemed to exist only for the purpose of getting stolen. Much of the $24 million a year charged for Liberian registry of ocean-going merchant vessels--which puts the Liberian flag on thousands of ships and nominally gives the tiny country the world’s largest fleet--disappeared, provoking a major reshuffling last year in the country’s maritime administration.

A country blessed with potentially rich agricultural land--the Firestone-Bridgestone concession just outside Monrovia is the world’s largest rubber plantation--was unable to feed itself: Crowds jammed Monrovia’s streets whenever shipments of emergency American rice arrived in the stores.

Throughout the 1980s American aid flowed in at a rate of $100 million a year, making Liberia for a time the largest per-capita recipient of foreign aid in sub-Saharan Africa. The almost complete absence of rural or urban development in the country raises the question of where the money went.

“Most of it was poured into projects that are completely useless,” former Finance Minister David M. Farhat said recently.

The collapse of Liberia’s government budget led the United States in 1987 to send a team of 17 “operational experts” to put the country’s fiscal house in order. The team had the authority to co-sign government checks, veto official expenditures and draft departmental budgets. They discovered that there was little they could do to keep Doe and his ministers from ordering fleets of Mercedes-Benz automobiles and spending wildly and imprudently on anything they wanted.

“They discovered that as fast as they established controls, someone found a way to get around them,” said one prominent Monrovia businessman. Halfway through their two-year contract, the experts packed up and left Liberia.

Doe’s fiscal misadventures made it even more difficult for Liberia to overcome the real pressures on its economic well-being. Among these is the depletion of its iron ore mines, which have been managed for decades by foreign concessionaires and traditionally supplied about half the country’s foreign-exchange earnings. The mining companies have lately begun to close the increasingly empty mines, in part because a slump in iron ore prices makes it pointless to dig farther.

Overall, Liberia’s gross domestic product fell in virtually every year of the Doe regime, dropping from $400 per capita in 1983 to $185 in 1988.

Such straitened circumstances made it ever harder for Doe to maintain a professional army. His unpaid, ill-equipped and untrained soldiers deserted at a high rate this year in the face of the rebel advances.

“They are a frightened, illiterate, superstitious bunch expected to put their lives on the line for $1.50 a day,” remarked one diplomat in Monrovia recently.

The surprise, say some observers, is that Doe was able to survive for so long.