Let the Fighters Bring Peace

By 1996, Liberia’s civil war had already survived numerous peace agreements. In a final attempt to end the fighting, the country’s main warlords were brought together into a shared transitional government. The hope was simple: hold the peace long enough to organise democratic elections.

Instead, the experiment collapsed.

In this episode, Ged Naughton and Dr Aaron Weah examine the events that led to the Battle for Monrovia in April 1996—one of the most destructive episodes of Liberia’s first civil war. They explore why the power-sharing arrangement failed, how old rivalries quickly resurfaced, and why the fighting became known for “Operation Pay Yourself”, as thousands of fighters looted a city already exhausted by years of conflict.

Drawing on Aaron’s own research in Impunity Under Attack, they reconstruct the chain of events that turned political tension into open warfare and consider what the battle revealed about Liberia’s fractured politics. They also discuss the role of the transitional government, the appointment of Ruth Perry, and why many historians now see the exclusion of women from earlier peace negotiations as a major missed opportunity.

In this episode

* Why the Council of State was created—and why it failed.

* How a single incident triggered the Battle for Monrovia.

* “Operation Pay Yourself” and the looting of the capital.

* The role of Charles Taylor, Roosevelt Johnson and the rival factions.

* Why Ruth Perry’s appointment marked an important turning point.

* Lessons from Liberia’s final failed attempt to negotiate peace between warlords.

Transcript

Intro

Over the last few episodes, we took a side road that led us away from the front lines of Liberia’s civil war to something just as important: how do ordinary people carry on living during such times. We followed Aaron’s own journey through music, friendship and survival.

Now we return to the highway.

By 1996, Liberia’s latest attempt at peace had brought the country’s rival warlords into a shared government. It was an extraordinary experiment—but one that would end in catastrophe.

This is the Battle for Monrovia.

00:00:00 Aaron

So I would say the impasses—uh, war—was not, not so different from previous episodes of violence in Liberia, but this was just yet another peace agreement that had failed. It’s a seeder in bringing together—in an arrangement—something that appeared like a collective co-presidency that had Charles Taylor, George Boley, Alhaji Kromah, and other warlords together in an arrangement that was meant to carry Liberia through a certain patch of stability and then transition through elections.

00:00:43 Aaron

But then that arrangement collapsed, and it happened so much so that, for the first time since the war started, there were so many warm factions that were initially located in different parts of the country. But because of the collective arrangement—and this was really what made the April 6 War perhaps one of the most destructive in Liberia—because much of the war factions had converged on the city center. In fact, we’re all living there because they now had the head, the different head of the warm factions were now giving power through power-sharing arrangement, and so they were there.

00:01:22 Aaron

And because the agreement failed and Liberia went to conflict, and so you have all of these soldiers who were milling around in town, so in this collapse of yet another peace agreement, an opportunity to loot, and an opportunity to—to—to seek a revenge, you know, on so many different levels. And so part of the TRC report finding was that revenge killings in the Liberian conflict—so people who had personal ice to grind with each other—used that occasion to go at different people. And there were still, even though it was 6 years into the conflict, but there was still killing on based on tribal grounds, based on ethnic grounds, those who were of certain ethnic—perceived to be of some rival ethnic group, you were hounded and you were killed. And there was much looting. There were—the UN was there, there were vehicles, and I mean, it was—it was—it was a very violent, violent episode.

00:02:30 Aaron

And Stephen Ellis and other Liberian—and other Liberian academia refer to this period as the Battle for Monrovia, you know, where Monrovia became that single space that, in a way, had not been captured. It was occupied briefly before in 1990, but then because of Ecomog, because of the AFL, rebel forces who converged on the capitals were quickly—were quickly repelled. I mean, they were driven out. But April 6 became an occasion where every other warm factions who had previously been confined to the rural parts of Liberia were now physically present in Liberia. And because historically Monrovia has always been Liberia, it was a big deal.

00:03:14 Aaron

People wanted to go to some of these plush places, break it down, take out the loot, and pay themselves. And paying yourself was an important phenomenon in the Iprasis War because many of the fighters took on arms for different reasons. They were not being paid. Occasionally, maybe they and their commanders went out on a particular operation and they got some spoils. They got some spoils from whatsoever the operation was. But April 6 War represented the rare opportunity for Monrovia to be torn apart and people could make a way with whatever they had.

00:03:51 Aaron

I mean, that was really the sad part of the conflict. And you can’t—you can’t miss an opportunity to act, based on a close assessment of the April 6, to say, “What was the Liberian Civil War really about?” If fighters, senior official military officials, saw in Monrovia an opportunity to—an op—and that’s a part of April 6 that is referred to as Operations Pay Yourself. Operation Pay—yeah, Pay Yourself.

00:05:47 Ged

Before we continue, I asked Erin to go back to something he wrote more than 15 years ago. This is his account, and the account of the book Impunity Under Attack, of how the Battle for Monrovia unfolded.

00:06:01 Aaron

“One Ulimo-J forces in Kakata heard that Johnson’s home had been searched by Ecomog. Some of the forces, largely loyal to Johnson, saw it as an humiliation of the leader. In protest, they went wild in the city, which lies some 45 km from Monrovia, placing roadblocks along the Kakata Highway, the main route connecting Monrovia to the interior of Liberia, including the NPFL stronghold of Gbarnga. Taylor had found his opportunity. On March—on 8 March 1996, NPFL forces launched a massive attack on Ulimo-J positions in Kakata, Bong Mines, and Todee, with the stated aim of keeping the Kakata Highway open. There is strong suggestion that Charles Tiller brought over some high-ranking Ulimo-J officers in Kakata, who were not loyal to Johnson, and induced them to surrender territory to the NPFL forces. With the acquiescence of these officers, NPFL began a move—NPFL began to move their men and heavy guns into positions previously controlled by Ulimo-J forces, easily routing those who resisted.

00:07:15 Aaron

At the same time, Ulimo-K forces were launching renewed attacks against Tubmanburg and other places in Bomi and lower Liberia, now in Gbarpolu County, which were under the control of Ulimo-J. But these attacks did not lead to significant shifts in the territorial control. All these attacks provoked strong protests from Roosevelt Johnson and his loyalists, but probably because of the poor standing with Ecomog, the peacekeepers practically ignored his position. In the midst of all this, elements of K5, a Ulimo-J unit commanded by Ama Yulo went around the vicinity of Roosevelt Johnson Beach House residence in the Sinkor district of Monrovia during the night of the 19th to 20th of March 1996. It is not clear why the fighters wandered around Johnson’s house, but in the altercation that ensued between them and Johnson loyalists, one of the K5 men was killed, identified later as Due Bowo. He was found dead the next morning, a few blocks up the road from Johnson’s house. Charles Taylor seized the moment, invoking this authority as a member of the presidency, and enlisting the support of the Ulimo-K’s Alhaji Kromah, who had his own axe to grind with Roosevelt Johnson.

00:08:40 Aaron

Taylor urged on the police to arrest Johnson on murder charges. Incidentally, the director of police, Joe Tate, was an NPFL appointee and cousin to Charles Taylor, and lived on the same block with Johnson. Under the guise of providing protection to Joe Tate’s home, schools of NPFL militiamen now recycled as police special forces began to deploy in the vicinity of Johnson’s home, practically setting up a command post in advance of their move to arrest the Ulimo-J leader. Seeing the situation their leader was in, Ulimo-J fighters began a rapid mobilization at his home to prevent his arrest. The stage was now set for a showdown. Around this time, George Boley, LPC leader and member of the presidency, boarded a plane at the Spruce Fin Airfield in Monrovia on his way out of the country. Before the plane could take off, Charles Taylor arrived at the airfield at the head of a train of heavily armed followers.

00:09:45 Aaron

He ordered the plane not to take off until he had inspected the occupants. Incensed by this, LPC fighters, who had gone to escort Boley, surrounded the entrance of the plane. Guns at the ready, and they fired anybody to go on board. Boley himself intervened to end a standoff by ordering his men to allow Taylor to board the plane. Taylor went on the plane, took a closer look around, and disembarked. He left—he left when the plane took off shortly afterward, but some of his men stayed at the airfield. As Boley’s LPC escorts were leaving the airfield, they entered into a row with Taylor’s men, who had stayed behind.

00:10:32 Aaron

Within moments, heavy gunfire erupted. The brief firefight that ensued since the violence in the area running helter-skelter, Monrovia was on edge. Meanwhile, a tense standoff ensued for the next few days between Roosevelt Johnson’s men and the police special forces. The police encircled the area around Johnson’s home to prevent his escape and tried to inch toward his house to enforce his arrest. But the Ulimo-J fighters had set up a defensive cordon around the house. Every time the police came within the range, the Johnson men found too uncomfortable, they would assume a more hostile posture, brandishing cutlasses, threatening and taking up fighting positions. The police would then pull back.

00:11:26 Aaron

This seesaw continued onto the presidency issued an ultimatum to Roosevelt Johnson. It announced that if Johnson did not turn himself in to the Justice Ministry by 4:00 p.m. of Friday, 5 April, on charges of murder, he would be arrested. Johnson did not turn himself in, arguing that he was not prepared to surrender himself to be slaughtered like a chicken by Kromah and Taylor’s men, posing as state police. On the night of 5 April 1996, the police launched a massive attack on the home of Roosevelt Johnson to secure his arrest. The Ulimo-J fighters beat back the police and burned down the home of the police director, and seized control of the entire street. By next morning, commuters were passing the Ulimo-J fighters at the junction where Johnson Street joined the main motor road from Eastern Stop Bridge to Central Monrovia. Some of these fighters were stark naked, wielding cut lieses and other weapons, as they heard profanities at Charles Taylor and Alhaji Kromah.

00:12:39 Aaron

These were elements of the Butt Naked Brigade, men and women who went into battle without articles of clothing. Images of the fighting were soon to dominate the international media. Realizing that the police could not arrest Johnson, Taylor, and Kromah began trucking their fighters from the bushes into Monrovia. Ecomog decided to play spectator to these events. With the emergence of the NPFL, Ulimo-K Alliance—against the Krahn dominated Ulimo-J, and the skirmish between the LPC and NPFL at the airfield, still within recent memory, members of the AFL, predominantly Krahn, the LPC, mainly Krahn and Sapo, decided to go into to the aid of Johnson. Thus, AFL and the LPC fighters began to move toward Johnson’s home. There they joined up with the Ulimo-J fighters and made the decision to move Roosevelt Johnson to the Barkley Training Center, home of the AFL in Central Monrovia.

00:13:41 Aaron

As the crown forces made their way toward the BTC, Tiller’s police, backed by NPFL and Ulimo-K guerrillas, tried to intercept them to capture Johnson. The crown fighters fought their way through the police cordon, many of them stark naked and using only cutlasses. This is how Milton Blahie of the LPC, Alliance General Butt Naked came to prominence. With the crown forces regrouped at the BTC, the Ulimo-K and NPFL artillery pounding the military parade while waves of their troops launched incursions and assorted to capture it. But the crown forces proved too formidable. Fighting was fierce and vicious. Lasting many weeks, Monrovia was comprehensively looted.

00:14:33 Aaron

Some 2,000 persons lost their lives, and millions of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. Still, Roosevelt Johnson was never captured or arrested, as Taylor and Kromah would describe it. The international community finally emerged from its slumber to pressure the warm factions into a truce. Forces of the Ulimo-K and NPFL withdrew from Monrovia, and Ecomog returned to the streets. The parties were hastily assembled in Abuja to reaffirm the Abuja Accord and agree on an addendum to it.

00:15:07 Aaron

Civilians were left to sort out the total mess the warlords and their fighters had made of their lives. The warlords were restored to power to continue business as usual.”

00:17:14 Ged

When you look at it now, you kind of wonder, what on earth were they thinking, putting all those warlords and faction leaders together?

You’re right. You’re right. I think it was an experiment. And you have to also put that in context. In that period in West African history, you have to see that democracy was not fully a concept that was embraced. Nigeria was still pretty much a military state, was being ruled by military generals. Ghana was still under the clutches of Jerry Rawlings.

00:18:23 Aaron

Côte d’Ivoire, with Houphouët-Boigny, has been the political big man. And these were the influences. These were the power blocs within the West African politics. And these were the people who had their own biases for different warlords or the other, where everyone knew Houphouët-Boigny provided a lot of support, logistical, political, and otherwise, for Charles Taylor.

00:18:53 Aaron

Rawlings, it’s not really clear what leaning he had, but at some point he became the chairperson for ECOWAS, and he made decisions as he saw fit. And then, of course, Nigeria was into all these playing all sides at some point. So the collective presidency was, in lots of ways, a reflection of the state of the state of politics in West Africa at the time.

00:19:23 Aaron

Much of the big players in West Africa were still in that space of military rule, were then. So experimenting with different power-sharing models was still on the cards, was still part of the different strategy they had envisioned for Liberia. And also by ‘96, you can see that we have had the Yamoussoukro, we’ve gone to Bamako, we’ve gone to Banjul, and I think we did Cotonou at some point.

00:19:53 Aaron

And you can see that the negotiators were really running out of options. And so why not put all of these guys together, sort of running the country as a co-presidency? So they were running out of options because they’ve tried here, they’ve tried there.

00:20:11 Aaron

And so that was just one throw of the dice.

And I think if you look at it, I thought it was another responsible way for the West African leadership to say, “Listen, you guys sort this out yourself.” It was a moment of maybe in the minds of the West African leaders and say, “You are all Liberians, and the country is in flames, the country has been destroyed. Come together and see the good in each other for the first time.”

00:21:44 Aaron

Look at—maybe you’ve never sat in the room with Taylor beyond some of these agreements, but this collective presidency gives you an opportunity to reach out and see this person for the first time differently.

00:21:55 Aaron

And I thought, if you look at that, inasmuch it was a gamble, inasmuch it was a wild experiment among adversaries, you can still not think for a moment the opportunity that comes with sitting in the same office with someone and being optimistic, even when you have a lot of violent history between you, but just to see. And somehow that opportunity was squandered. It was never really carefully.

We have, in fact, we had Chairman Wilton Sankawulo. He was a writer. He was—he’s one of—if you’re reading Liberian folklore, if you’re reading Liberian short stories, he’s one of those persons. He’s one of the persons that you—so he was chosen as the neutral person who would be—who would serve like the spearhead..

00:24:22 Ged

That’s got to be the ultimate poison chalice.

00:24:35 Aaron

Yeah. Well, I mean, again, you can see that the negotiators were trying to experiment. I mean, we had in total 17 peace agreements. The Accra Agreement began the 18th. The negotiators were running out of options. They were trying to experiment with an impossible model that they could use, that they could—and so they brought in a writer, a well-respected university lecturer among these adversaries to say, “We’ll throw you in the mix. Maybe something’s good to come out of this.” But they were wrong. It never worked.

00:25:19 Aaron

In fact, I did a course when I was doing—this is a very interesting story about—a professor told me this. We were doing—so I was doing a political science course for my master’s degree, and this professor of mine used to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time. And he told me the challenges that Wilton Sankawulo had in adjusting to such a new life. He was a writer, he was a creative person. He was never—he was not conditioned to function in such a hostile environment.

00:25:55 Aaron

And diplomatically, I got to know that once you—as Wilton Sankawulo was the head of this collective presidency, so he had to receive every morning a briefing on the state of security in the country. I think it was a two to three-pager every morning he had to receive that. And what was in this briefing? It was scary. According to my lecturer, he said, “This briefing would say, ‘Well, we saw a group of—we saw a group of heavily armed men somewhere in the Sinkor area, but we lost trace of them.’” It

00:26:29 Aaron

is clear that it may be of just something, perhaps an attack. And these briefings were—this was the spirit of this briefing, and he would read them. And this professor of mine told me he had to carry those briefings to Wilton Sankawulo every morning. And so on this particular morning, he took this briefing to Sankawulo, and Sankawulo told him, “Just stop right there at that door and go and read those briefings yourself. Don’t you know I don’t sleep? Every day you come into me with these briefings. What am I supposed to do with them? You are seeing some armed men that you’ve lost track of.”

00:27:05 Aaron

And I mean, he was trying to say, “Some people are not meant to operate in certain environments.” And here was Sankawulo, who came from a more intellectual tradition of writing, of creativity. He’s been thrust into the complex works of trying to help navigate and resolve Liberia’s complex civil war. And he was being given these briefings that were so scaring, were so scaring. And he—and this was meant to be a sort of comic relief, but you can see in it the personality of the head of state for this collective presidency and how it really unraveled him.

So going back to April 6th and seeing this new alliance between two forces, you wonder, how deep does this go? Or is it just a marriage of convenience?

00:36:31 Aaron

But then you have Roosevelt Johnson and LPC have formed a much stronger alliance. In my view, that alliance was much stronger because what you had in Ulimo-K and LPC were all remnants of the AFL. And not just the AFL, but people who were loyal to President Doe and those who had come from predominantly ethnic Krahn, ethnic Sapo, and mostly of Southeastern identity.

00:36:58 Aaron

And Southeastern identity is much closer to the identity of President Doe. That alliance, I would say, was a lot more genuine. And you can see how when the April 6th came about, how it became a playout. Johnson and LPC quickly came together. And then somehow Ulimo-K and NPFL sort of worked it out, worked together in a way.

00:38:08 Ged

In this fight. And it was severely violent and bloody. And I think 3,000-plus people died as a result of the fighting. And tens of thousands left Monrovia, left Liberia even.

00:38:25 Ged

And it was, as you say, or as described earlier, it’s been taken as some of the final—finally the battle for Monrovia that never took place earlier.

00:38:35 Ged

So after all of this and this terrible moment, how did it dissipate? How did the whole thing come to an end?

00:39:41 Aaron

So how did it play out? Well,

00:39:48 Aaron

I think there was a great deal of coming back again to Operation Spirit itself. All of the heads of war and factions required from their soldiers a certain level of loyalty. And in exchange for that loyalty and commitment, they had to play a blind eye to the plunder of Monrovia. It was calculated. The strategic objective there was to sort of further create a situation where there was another peace agreement that favored, that pushed President Taylor.

00:40:31 Aaron

Taylor was always, whenever he was displeased or unsatisfied with a certain arrangement, he created a new condition that brought him closer to his objective of becoming president. So the entire April 6th conflict was indeed a calculation by Taylor to push himself much closer to his ideal objective. But then in that grand scheme of things was to have the soldiers get for themselves. But these war and factions were unable to pay them.

00:41:06 Aaron

After six years of dedicated military service in an environment where you were not on payroll, you were just living off the land, living off vulnerable people, living off intimidating, harassing people, and stealing and that sort of thing. Monrovia was the final place where soldiers who carry arms thought that, okay, this is the time to get something for myself. And this is the time to really—I’ve seen places here that have a lot of things. And so vehicles were looted.

00:41:43 Aaron

UN offices were broken into safes, jewelry shops containing diamonds and gold. Soldiers got into them and looted them and sort of paid themselves. And then eventually, there were interventions by ECOWAS to have yet another peace agreement. And this is where we have Abuja Accords.

00:42:08 Aaron

The Abuja Accords brought the hostility to an end, set a realistic timeline on the need for an elections. And then this is where we have Ruth Sando Perry. Ruth Perry used to be a senator from Grand Cape Mount County. She was a respected Liberian stateswoman. She was interestingly the only female head of an interim government in Liberia.

00:42:33 Aaron

So Ruth Perry, you can see the search for prominent Liberians were running out. They started with Dr. Emma Sawyer, and then it went on to Wilton Sankawulo. And then now we have Ruth Perry, a prominent female leader who was given the task to basically steer the affairs of the interim government until we went to elections. And elections that we saw in the President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf coming a distant second to Charles Taylor, who won overwhelmingly.

00:43:07 Aaron

But anyway, coming back to the initial question, how did this play out? It played out basically on the authority of these warlords so that the soldiers got something for themselves. I mean, you have to remember, we’re dealing with non-conventional militia groups. Most of them kids. They were my ages. Some of them far younger than I was. Some of them older.

00:43:35 Aaron

And they saw Monrovia as the place to feed off the land, to get things done. Until then, these were guys working in the rural past, surviving on people farms. They were feeding off people farms. And what do you think would be the attitude when they came to Monrovia?

00:43:52 Aaron

And so an environment that was much more plush, better than the rural parts where you have plantations of bananas and plantains. You’re not standing in a boutique where the total cost of that boutique is about close to maybe 200,000 or more. So that was the attitude.

00:44:13 Aaron

And so there was a deliberate—there was a deliberate part of these warlords to have the soldiers just get out and do as much as they could. And then, of course, ECOWAS comes in, AU comes in and say, all right, enough is enough. Let’s go back to the drawing board.

00:44:31 Aaron

Let’s now re-look. Let’s look at the old agreement, see where we can revise and improve upon, and then maybe come up with a more realistic timeline on elections. I was in Africa when the elections were held and Taylor began to say that.

00:44:47 Ged

So the next things that we’re going to—oh, the next main topic I think is the election and—and I will come to that shortly.

00:44:55 Ged

Ruth Perry, you just mentioned Ruth Perry, and I think it’s quite significant that at this point she became the chair of this council. And it’s part of a very strong thread in Liberia’s recent history of these very effective and strong women in government.

00:45:18 Ged

What was she—how did people respond to her? Was she popular? Was she—you know, would she seem to be a good leader? How did it feel when she was in charge?

00:45:41 Aaron

I think

00:45:45 Aaron

I recently reviewed an article on the peace agreements in Liberia. And the spirit of that article was that women—there has been a missed opportunity in Liberia not to involve women in peace negotiations much earlier and only at critical periods.

00:46:08 Aaron

And this author was arguing that using the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the significant role of women, the women played led by Leymah Gbowee and there’s some references made to Ruth Perry. I mean, looking at that and in hindsight, there is a point there that much of the earlier agreement was just done in an old boss club, sort of, where guys were coming together. And so women have a way of changing the dynamics.

00:46:43 Aaron

And so you see Ruth Perry brought us closer to an election. All the other peace agreements didn’t do that. All the agreements prior never really brought us to an election. Ruth Perry brought us to an election, unfortunately. It produced Taylor, who had two years of stability, and then we went back to war.

00:47:01 Aaron

And then in the Accra Peace Agreement, we had an agreement that was significantly shaped by the role women played in the Accra Peace Agreement. So Ruth Perry was a respected stateswoman, and she enjoyed a great deal of support from the women rights community. And then people said, well, this is a new opportunity. And so I think she was really well respected, even long after she died. She was always—she was always there and talked about in lots of different ways.

00:47:37 Aaron

So looking back at that, I would say there’s a missed opportunity not to have included women much earlier in these peace agreements.

00:47:45 Ged

We’ll talk about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf coming up when we go through the post-war presidencies. But something around that, around Leymah Gbowee and this moment in Liberian history.

Outro

The Battle for Monrovia was the final proof that Liberia’s civil war couldn’t be ended simply by sharing power between the men who had fought it. One last peace agreement followed, a new transitional government was formed under Ruth Perry, and this time the country finally made it to elections.

But that only raised an even bigger question. After everything Liberia had endured, why did its people overwhelmingly vote for Charles Taylor? That’s where we’ll pick up next time.

Next time: after years of war, Liberians finally went to the polls. But why did so many vote for Charles Taylor?

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