3 - The Liberian civil war: Interests, actors and interventions

Summary

The outbreak of the Liberian civil war

As noted in the previous chapter, the Liberian Civil War broke out on 24 December 1989 when Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) forces invaded Liberia through Nimba County from neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire. Finally, the contradictions that had existed in Liberian society right from its inception, through to the period of attempted modernization, to the years when Doe's authoritarian hold on the state appeared to have choked the remnants of statehood, unravelled. The ‘dualistic’ heritage and nature of the Liberian state – in terms of the fundamental divide between the indigenes and settlers, the dualistic land tenure and marriage laws systems, underscored by a history in which local people had been governed by customary laws while the settlers were governed by ‘Liberian law’ – appeared to have caught up with the country and would lead to dire consequences for the people of Liberia in particular and West Africa in general.

Charles Taylor started a brutal civil war that would span over a decade and destabilize the entire West African region, with the support of President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso, President Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Capitalizing on the animosity that was already nursed by the Gios and Manos of Nimba County towards the Doe regime, following the killing of Quiwonkpa and many people of Nimba County in the reprisal attacks that followed Quiwonkpa's November 1985 failed coup, Charles Taylor recruited 120 men from Nimba County, who were eventually trained in Libya (Sawyer, 1992: 25). Along with providing training for the initial NPFL troops, Libya also supplied arms (Kieh, 1992: 132).

Libya's rationale for becoming involved in the conflict included a perception of Doe as a neo-colonial puppet and, following the rejection of several overtures made to Doe by Gaddafi to join the anti-America group, an opportunity to retaliate for Doe's rebuff presented itself in Taylor's NPFL. The conflict was also an opportunity for Libya to challenge and retaliate against Nigeria, based on Libya's perception that the former was its principal rival for pre-eminence in Africa and that Nigeria had supported the USA's backing of Chad during the expulsion of Libyan dissidents from Chad (Kieh, 1992: 132).