On Mon, 23 Oct 2000 18:17:42 -0400, kilopascal wrote:
>Civil war. Overthrow of government from that run by descendants of
>ex-American slaves to that of natives. Occupation by forces of neighboring
>metric countries. Continued civil unrest to this very day.
You forgot the best part: the (nominal) Republic of Liberia is now
Charles Taylor's personal fiefdom and piggybank. You won't find that
spelled out in the _World Factbook_ (which, incidentially, is entirely
metric apart from a mi/km scale on maps), but _The Economist_ pulls no
punches:
CAN a brutal and crooked warlord go straight if you give him a country
to run? Charles Taylor was elected president of Liberia in 1997. The
poll was flawed but he probably won anyway. His election message was: if
you want peace, vote for me. The implication was that, if he did not
win, he would send the country back to war. Many people, cowed and
exhausted after eight bloody years, took the hint and voted for him.
Mr Taylor likes being president. At one time he was wanted for allegedly
embezzling $1m of Liberian state funds in 1984. Now that he is head of
state, he is unlikely to be prosecuted for this, or for the much larger
sums that he and his fighters looted during the civil war. He now
appears in a ubiquitous official portrait, dapper in white tie and
bedecked with sashes and medals. He zooms around Monrovia in a
ten-vehicle convoy, bristling with goons in dark glasses who gun down
the odd driver who gets in their way. Recently he addressed a conference
on children sponsored by Unicef. The goons stepped aside for a moment to
allow the children to cluster round the president who, during the war,
used to empty classrooms to swell the ranks of his army. [...]
("Reformable", in _The Economist_, 8 January 2000.
URL: <http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=271632>)
As long as his bank balance continues to increase, Charles Taylor doesn't
give a damn what system his people use -- or anything else about them,
for that matter. Oh, and if you had any respect for Jesse Jackson,
consider that he and Mr Taylor are extremely good friends. Meanwhile,
the State Department claims that Germany's recognition of Scientology as
a business with designs on world domination is somehow wrong. (See
<http://www.xenu.net/>: if anything, that's an understatement.)
--
Brad Ackerman N1MNB "It is in fact our contention that...the U.S.-Canada
[EMAIL PROTECTED] border is likely to disappear before any politician
PGP: 0x62D6B223 finds the political courage to negotiate its removal."
http://skaro.pair.com/ -- Papademetriou and Meyers, ceip.org, June 2000
