How a tyrant's 'logs of war' bring terror to West Africa He's a feared despot who has made Liberia a private fiefdom. Now he's defying the UN to spread terror in the region. Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor, in Monrovia investigates the sinister world of Charles Taylor Sunday May 27, 2001 The Observer When the Big Man comes, you get out of the way. We saw the police Land Rover racing towards the Salala checkpoint, an hour north of Liberia's capital, Monrovia. Soldiers with automatic rifles hung out of the windows waving us angrily aside. My driver, conscious of the danger, steered the car into the ditch, as is required by law, making sure all of the wheels were off the road. His Excellency Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia, you must understand, shares the tarmac of his road with no man. Next came the muscle: four-wheel drives with blacked-out windows and pick-ups with machine-guns on the back, packed with troops. Then it was the car of Taylor himself - a massive black Mercedes jeep flying two flags. Moments later a second presidential Mercedes, identical in every detail, sped by. In the paranoid world of Charles Taylor there is always a dummy car. There is always, too, the presence of the troops of his Anti-Terrorist Unit - the ATU - Taylor's feared Praetorian Guard, which has been implicated in political killings. Returning from Taylor's home base of Gbarnga, provincial capital of Liberia's Bong county, earlier in the day, we saw them everywhere along the road: soldiers stationed every 500-1,000 metres, covering every village and every path leading out of the vast area that is the Firestone rubber plantation. In the paranoid world of Charles Taylor, every one of his subjects is a potential threat. Taylor has become an African dictator of the old school. The 52-year-old warlord - who plunged Liberia into a civil war that rivalled Rwanda for the insanity of its violence, and whose forces posted severed heads on stakes to mark the limit of their territory - promised on his inauguration after elections in 1997 that he would not become another 'wicked President'. He lied. He has become one of the most wicked on a continent that has seen more than its fair share. He has appropriated his country's natural resources as his personal property. A Strategic Commodities Act - passed secretly last year - gives the President 'the sole power to execute, negotiate and conclude all commercial contracts or agreements with any foreign or domestic investor' for designated commodities, including timber, gold, oil and diamonds. Like the Zaire of Mobutu Sese Seko, Liberia has become a 'vampire state', dedicated to satisfying the greed of a single man. Unlike Mobutu, Taylor has become Britain's African pariah-in-chief, rivalling even Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, amid charges that he threatens to destabilise all of West Africa, from Ivory Coast to The Gambia. And Taylor is costing Britain money. The Ministry of Defence is spending millions of pounds deploying hundreds of British soldiers in neighbouring Sierra Leone to train and arm the Leonean army to counter the threat of Taylor's diamond-looting rebel clients in the Revolutionary United Front. And British aid money is also going to repair the damage done by Taylor and his friends: in Sierra Leone, and now in Guinea, where British Ministers blame him for Africa's biggest refugee crisis in recent years, when Taylor and the RUF switched their attention last year from undermining Sierra Leone to destabilising Guinea. They also accuse him of presiding over a regime that has become a one-stop supermarket for rebel movements across the continent wanting to buy and ship arms. It is a sub-text of any conversation with British officials: West Africa would be a nicer place if Taylor wasn't there. To this end, Britain was a prime mover calling for UN sanctions to be imposed on Taylor's regime. They came into force on 7 May. The animosity between Britain and Taylor is not one-sided. Taylor accuses Britain of being behind a conspiracy to depose him. His Ministers claim Britain and America are supporting a rebel uprising in the north. The Liberians say they have captured British-trained tribal militias and British-supplied arms, although neither has been produced despite requests by The Observer and other news organisations. The British media, says Taylor, are part of this conspiracy. Charles Taylor's capital, Monrovia, is one of the most unpleasant on the planet. There is something of the Duvalier-era Port-au-Prince about. It reeks of paranoia, random violence and superstition. Except, says a veteran of Baby Doc's Haiti whom I encounter in the bar of the Mamba Point Hotel, it is a poorer and more dangerous place. Its gutted buildings - bullet-scarred from the years of civil war - appear to crumble almost before your eyes, tottering into the muddy waters of the swamp around which Monrovia is built. Human rights abuses go with the territory. Press censorship in Liberia is stringent. Local journalists are regularly locked up; opposition papers and radio stations closed down. Dissent is brutally stamped out. In the countryside forced labour is not uncommon, while young boys are press-ganged from the streets to fight Taylor's enemies in the north. People have a nasty habit of dying in 'accidents' or disappearing. For all except the 'Toyota People' - the small elite of Taylor's family and entourage who shuttle around in shiny four-wheel drives - it is a miserable existence. The filthy flats, houses and shanties are bare of possessions. Without running water, women wash their cooking pots in the street. Civil servants have not been paid for seven months. There are streetlights only if you live in the vicinity of Taylor's palatial bunker. The lack of light is not much of a problem for visitors. Expats, foreign aid workers and reporters are discouraged from being out after dark 'for their own safety'. Diplomats are subject to an evening curfew and must not travel more than 25 miles from the capital. The sense of danger, however, comes not from the ordinary people, who are almost universally courteous and polite. It comes from Taylor's police and soldiers: the ATU with their yellow-and-red scorpion patches; the black-uniformed policeman of the Task Force; and the men and women of the State Security Service (SSS) you encounter in every street and at every rural checkpoint. What is most puzzling is that the roads are well maintained for a place collapsing into ruin. Smooth highways - almost empty of traffic - crisscross the country, linking up to a network of immaculate dirt roads that disappear into the forests. The answer to this mystery can be found stacked high at Monrovia's main pier where the iron ore used to go out before the war and before the smelters were cut up for scrap. It is also to be seen at Liberia's other ports and beaches, and moving in a constant traffic of heavy lorries along the main roads: stacks of tropical hardwood - some 8ft in diameter. It is Taylor's 'pepper bush'. It guarantees his grip on power. They have been called the 'logs of war'. Since United Nations sanctions were first threatened against the regime last year for trading in 'blood diamonds', looted by Taylor's Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone (speciality: chopping off the limbs of children) Taylor has moved his main business out of diamonds and into logs. Liberia's logs are keeping Taylor in power. They provide his personal wealth - estimated at more than $400 million. They provide the money for the cars for the Toyota People and for the little presents for his cronies. They represent the salaries of his police, his spies and soldiers. They pay for the weapons they carry, and for the guns he exports to arm the rebels destabilising his neighbours. Now they are paying Taylor's soldiers to fight a new civil war that threatens to escalate into one as vicious as that fought in the early 1990s. On 7 May UN sanctions were imposed covering Liberia's trade in stolen diamonds and banning foreign travel by members of Taylor's inner circle. The trade in timber - to the exasperation of Britain and the United States - was exempted at the insistence of France, which imports up to a third of it. 'The UN ban on selling diamonds isn't going to bother Taylor,' says a British official, 'when it is the timber trade that is keeping him in power.' Now, a six-week investigation by The Observer has established that the same cast of men who organised the trade in 'conflict diamonds' and running weapons into Sierra Leone is behind the companies exporting wood and shipping back the same inevitable guns. According to the environmental pressure group Global Witness, which is campaigning to have the timber trade included in the UN sanctions, at the current rate of felling in Liberia the largest virgin tract of tropical forest in West Africa - home to the pygmy hippopotamus and scores of other endangered species - is in danger of being obliterated within six years. At the centre of the timber trade that fuels Taylor's destabilisation of the region are two companies, both personally linked to Taylor and his immediate family: the Royal and Oriental Timber Companies. 'The new UN sanctions regime is utterly pointless,' complains a European diplomat, 'while Taylor is still able to keep exporting timber and bringing in guns.' It is a business run with military efficiency. The port of Buchanan has been handed over to the Oriental Timber Company - to run as its private city. The 108-mile dirt road from Buchanan to Greenville has been upgraded to a four-lane highway allowing logging to continue every day of the year. But the centre of gravity of Taylor's new trade in misery is not to be found in Buchanan but at Monrovia's Hotel Africa. In the 1980s, before the savage civil war that made Liberia notorious, Gus van Kouwenhoven's hotel was one of the swankier places to stay and place a bet. Its heyday has long passed. Looted and damaged by Nigerian soldiers of the Ecomog peacekeeping force, who came to separate the factions of the Liberian civil war, only one floor is still in occupation. For all its decrepitude, however, it occupies a critical place at the heart of Taylor's bandit state. It is not the sort of place you would want to stay unless you are Ukrainian or Russian in the business of running guns, smuggling diamonds or providing muscle. It is also not the kind of place to go asking awkward questions about Van Kouwenhoven - Charles Taylor's most important business ally. One of the key players in trade in conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, he and his friends have now sewn up Liberia's logging. The kind of businessman he is is described in the UN's Expert Panel Report on Sierra Leone, published last year. 'Gus van Kouwenhoven,' the report summarised, 'is responsible for the logistical aspects of many of the arms deals. Through his interests in a Malaysian timber company project in Liberia, he organises the transfer of weaponry from Monrovia into Sierra Leone. Roads built and maintained for timber extraction are also conveniently used for weapons movement within Liberia.' He appeared on the Liberian scene in the late 1980s during the time of the late President Samuel Doe, who was slaughtered during the civil war. His business then was gambling and hotels. Now he is chairman of the Oriental Timber Company and also managing director of the Royal Timber Company. Crucially, he is on the board of the Liberian Forestry Development Authority - the organisation charged with monitoring the industry and preventing the kind of environmentally and socially disruptive practices undertaken by his companies. This authority, more than any other organisation, represents the corruption at the heart of Taylor's regime. For Van Kouwenhoven is not the only member of its board to have been named by the UN as having been a prime mover in the war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Fellow board member Talal El-Ndine, a Lebanese businessman who has an office on Monrovia's Old Road, was named as the man who paid the RUF soldiers fighting in Sierra Leone and personally paid the pilots and crew involved in arms shipments. Managing director of the FDA is Charles's brother, D. Robert Taylor. 'As long as people like Gus and his kind are involved in the logging operations, the money will go back to Taylor and none of it to ordinary Liberians,' says a diplomat familiar with both Taylor and Van Kouwenhoven. 'Taylor makes no bones about the fact he does not want anyone sticking their noses into his business. Last year he told people that they were not even to talk about it.' A businessman familiar with Taylor's business says: 'Look, it is an open secret. Gus fronted Taylor up $5 million for his logging concessions. They split the profits. Gus's ships take out the logs and they bring in the guns. It was the same deal with the diamonds.' Five months ago, almost unnoticed by the world, a small insurrection in Liberia's Upper and Lower Lofa counties took an unsettling turn. Liberia has long been used to raids from dissidents armed and trained by neighbouring Sierra Leone, which has many reasons to wish Taylor ill, and from the borders of Guinea which has also accused him of sending rebels to destabilise it. In the past they have been quick raids lasting a few weeks. This time the raids have been backed by artillery from the Guinean side, and by Kamajor tribal hunters attached to the British-trained Sierra Leonean Army. A real war is being fought in Liberia's north. 'There has been trouble in Lofa for three years now,' says a European aid worker in Monrovia. 'Five months ago, however, we noticed that the fighting had become of an entirely different order. We were hearing terrible stories of rape of women and abduction of young men by government forces to join the fighting. What has been noticeable in the last few weeks is that the displaced people allowed through by the government forces to the camps near Gbarnga are women, infants and old men. Boys and young men of fighting age are not being allowed through.' Publicly, Taylor says there is nothing to fear. It has not stopped him, however, from announcing that he is to call up 15,000 former fighters from his faction from the last war. Taylor claims too that he is winning against the rebels. Few believe him. There are reports of heavy casualties on the government side, including one of up to 80 bodies laid out in the barracks of the Barclay Training Center in Monrovia. Inevitably, the timber trade is paying for Taylor's latest war. Van Kouwenhoven is bringing in the guns. And one of Taylor's oldest allies who fought by his side during the civil war - 'General' Kuku Denis - has been recalled to bolster Taylor's defences. Kuku Denis's speciality was raising and running the notorious Small Boy Units, who press-ganged boys as young as eight into Taylor's NPFL faction. After the war, Taylor rewarded his old friend by granting him logging concessions on the Liberian border with neighbouring Ivory Coast, through which much of his timber is moved. Now Kuku Denis has been ordered to organise the defence of Liberia's northern counties. The evidence is that Denis is up to his old tricks. Ten days ago in the town of Gbarnga - which has become an armed camp since the Lofa rising gathered steam - I saw a pick-up truck full of armed young boys in civilian clothes driving at high speed through the centre. How they got there is not hard too hard to guess. One evening in Monvrovia I was told the story of 'Albert', a 13-year-old boy who had got up at 5am to do his homework on the porch of his house in the cool of the morning. 'Two soldiers from the Anti-Terrorist Unit approached and tried to drag him away,' says Albert's guardian. 'They told him they were taking him to join the army. He screamed so much he woke the neighbours. He was beaten but he got away.' Few ordinary Liberians feel comfortable talking to strangers, but as I left Monrovia one ventured to speak frankly. 'Do you think that Taylor is winning the war? I don't and I am very frightened,' he told me. 'Everything in this country is being carved up by Taylor and his cronies. There is nothing left here for the rest of us. Now I am afraid I will be told to go and fight in another civil war. I keep my passport with me all the time these days. I need to know that I can run at a moment's notice.'
