No Sharing of Wealth for Liberian Chief

President Charles Taylor glides into the gilded reception room of his seaside executive mansion, smiling benignly. He’s wearing an exquisitely tailored blue suit with a red tie and carries a carved wooden scepter.

Years after his war ended, some of the mansion’s windows are still pierced with the circular blisters of bullet holes. A couple of them are nothing but tangled webs of cracks, waiting for a push to finally shatter and scatter pieces across the chipped marble floor.

Plainclothes bodyguards in wraparound sunglasses, hands conspicuously poised to reach into their jackets, watch the exits. Soldiers in jungle camouflage cradling assault rifles and rocket launchers stand guard just outside.

Taylor looks over the silent room, filled with Liberia’s moneyed elite, summoned to listen to him. Few look comfortable, and most squirm in well-upholstered chairs.

In his gravelly preacher’s voice, Taylor sways from inspirational sermon to harangue. He lambastes profiteers--”Everyone wants to leave from here with a suitcase full of money”--then lectures on rice imports.

But he has one point he really wants to make. He’s emphatic on this, and pronounces each word carefully: “I am not a businessman,” he says.

There’s only one problem: Charles Taylor is very much in business. U.N. investigators, diplomats, rights activists and other local businessmen agree on that.

He’s in the timber business. He’s in the diamond business. He’s in the gun business.

But business hasn’t gone well lately for Taylor--onetime gas station attendant, Massachusetts prison escapee, former warlord and now president of this deeply fractured West African nation, founded in 1847 by freed American slaves.

His investments have been investigated, his leadership castigated by the international community. He faces a rebellion along the border with Guinea. On June 5, to pressure him to cut links to Sierra Leone’s barbaric rebel movement, the United Nations banned him, his wife, two ex-wives and nearly 130 other officials and close associates from traveling abroad.

Suddenly, Taylor’s Liberia is also Taylor’s prison.

The country already had been hit with a U.N. ban on its diamond sales, and an arms embargo, because of Taylor’s ties to the Revolutionary United Front--the Sierra Leonean rebels who turned amputation into a savage symbol of power, purposely hacking off the limbs of thousands of civilians.

In a country where unemployment, illiteracy and poverty rates all hover around 75%, many Liberian schools and clinics remain closed. There are few signs of improvement, and discontent is growing. Taylor goes nowhere without an army of soldiers around him.

“These are very trying times,” the president concedes to his audience, arguing that the sanctions will harm Liberia’s poor. Anyway, he insists, he has cut all ties to the rebels.

But he knows that the United States backs the sanctions, and that it has enormous sway at U.N. headquarters.

“C’est la vie,” he says, to a ripple of nervous applause.

Still, life isn’t so bad for Taylor.

“Let nobody fool you,” said Benedict Sannoh, a Monrovia-based human rights attorney. “Taylor is extravagant. He loves to spend money. . . . He has many, many businesses around.”

It’s difficult to find where Taylor’s personal finances end and Liberia’s begin. The forestry service is run by his brother, Robert, with many contracts going to timber companies that aid groups say are stripping rain forests bare.

Those aid workers, speaking on condition of anonymity, say enormous logging profits disappear into an official ether, although a December report by a U.N.-appointed panel found the timber industry “provides a large amount of unrecorded extra-budgetary income to President Taylor.”

When it comes to mining, some executives seeking concessions barely bother with bureaucratic channels. Instead, as one put it, they make “arrangements” with Taylor at his mansion.

He has surrounded himself with an international assortment of murky businesspeople, men with multiple identities and interests in everything from guns to airlines--men like Leonid Minin, whom the United Nations identifies as a weapons broker with at least 11 aliases and passports stretching from Israel to Brazil.

The report presented to the U.N. Security Council delves exhaustively into the web of connections linking Sierra Leone’s rebels, Taylor’s government, various other African nations and diamond and weapons dealers.

It said Minin “was, and may remain, a business partner and confidant” of Taylor. The report noted a plane owned by Minin that was used to ferry weapons destined for the Sierra Leonean rebels was also Taylor’s presidential jet for a time.

“It is in chaos that these people are going to thrive,” said a deputy Cabinet minister who often must work by candlelight in an office that reeks of sewage. Like many in Liberia, he asked that his name be withheld for his safety.

Few prominent people criticize the president openly, fearing retribution.

This is a country where you can have an hours-long conversation about Taylor and never once hear his name. Even in innocuous conversations, some Liberians instinctively refer simply to “him” or “the man,” or just nod toward the mansion.

No one wants to tangle with his brutally loyal security forces, many of them ex-child fighters who grew up during the war he launched in 1989. The war finally ended in 1996, after Liberia’s near-complete destruction and 150,000 deaths. Taylor was elected president the next year, largely because voters believed he would restart the war if he lost.

Since then the political opposition has largely disappeared, frightened into silence or exile.

Taylor’s road to the presidency was an odd one. The son of a struggling lawyer, and a descendant of the former slaves who founded Liberia, he moved to Boston in the early 1970s and studied economics at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. That was when Taylor, now 53, began his political life, seeking office in Liberian expatriate organizations.

He returned to Liberia as a government bureaucrat during the regime of Samuel Doe, a semiliterate sergeant who seized power in a 1980 coup. Accused of embezzlement, Taylor fled to the United States. Arrested near Boston on an extradition warrant, he and four other men cut their way out of prison with a hacksaw and dropped to the ground on a rope made of bedsheets.

He wound up in Libya, where he and a core of fighters--training alongside the Sierra Leoneans who would become the Revolutionary United Front--formed a militia to unseat Doe.

What Taylor began with a small invasion on Christmas Eve 1989 quickly descended into anarchy. For seven years, Liberia was torn into feuding fiefdoms by venal warlords and their dizzying alphabet of militias: NFPL, INPFL, Ulimo-J, Ulimo-K, LPC.

Entire towns were reduced to rubble. Cities reeked of corpses.

Five years after the war ended, Liberia remains a shattered nation: Electricity and water service are almost completely unknown; civil servants go unpaid for months; state-supplied medical care is effectively nonexistent; hundreds of thousands depend on foreign food donations. The road system has largely collapsed.

It’s a life that one Western diplomat calls “trickle-down misery.”

It’s a misery, though, that barely touches Liberia’s elite.

In the U.N. report, which recommended sanctions on Liberia, investigators said Taylor “and a small coterie of officials and private businessmen around him are in control of a covert sanctions-busting apparatus that includes international criminal activity and the arming of the RUF [rebels] in Sierra Leone.”

The rebels sent Liberia diamonds, and Liberia sent back guns, the report said.

Ian Smillie, a Canadian diamond expert and one of the authors of the report, said when it was released that evidence of Taylor’s involvement in diamond smuggling and gunrunning was “100%” solid.

Taylor, widely believed by Liberians to be the nation’s richest man, does little to hide his wealth.

He has built a sprawling personal mansion--complete with tennis court--in a city where most homes still carry the scars of combat. He’s building another home in the small town where he grew up. He has a farm near the city of Gbarnga, his wartime base, where tractors till his 4,000 acres.

So if Taylor isn’t a businessman, where does his money come from?

“That’s an unreasonable and rude question,” Information Minister Reginald Goodridge said in an interview. “The president of Liberia is the president of Liberia. It’s nobody’s business where the money comes from.”

He’s a charismatic figure--a charmer, when he wishes, and a powerful speaker. He was widely believed, during the war, to have magical powers, and those beliefs linger. For years he was acceptable because he was seen as the only man powerful enough to keep war at bay.

But as the years passed, bitterness built. Increasingly, people focus on his militia’s conduct during the war--the attacks by drug-addled child soldiers, the burned buildings, the raped women, the looted lives--and they see how little his government does for them now.

In a small Baptist church, in a settlement not far from Taylor’s mansion, a Sunday service ends with a prayer for this nation’s future. It could be in rural Alabama. Except for the prayer.

“Lord, we pray that you turn Charles Taylor’s heart of evil to good,” he says, and as “amens” fill the building, the preacher adds one more sentence:

“Someday you will judge his stewardship.”