G.G. Peterson October 2002

Just got back from this place--thought you'd like some visuals, Geoff style.

The driver explained to me that the bombed out apartments on the left, growing green and mouldy in the endless tropical rain, were filled with the ATU, Taylor's "Anti-Terrorist Unit"

It is harder to imagine a more terrorist looking group than the ATU.

Picture a mix of gangsta rappers meets the Guardian Angels meets the RUF. They pick off IDP girls in camps and rape them, usually gang rape, and most recently killed a man on President Taylor's orders for scratching one of his black Landcruisers. They are not paid, nor do they need to be. They simply take what they need, for now.

The light fixtures and electric wires are all gone in the streets of this capital. Old street lamp posts on the main road stand like metal decapitated palm trees, with small wires fingering into the grey sky, like some wisps of hair, from the truncated tops. The Nigerian ECOMOG soldiers ripped out the copper electricity wires, the lamps, and sold them on the market in Lagos. They took all the wiring in the country, most of the tiles, and a few women. The Nigerians also controlled the dope market. Kind and powerful shit, of whatever stripe, was referred to as "Ecomog"

Educated Liberians all sound like Jesse Jackson. "LYEBEERIA" is what the country sounds like in the mouths of Monrovia's elite. It is disconcerting that in some forgotten shithole on the Malaria coast there is an entire population of people with southern American accents, living in towns named after dead, mediocre US presidents--Monroe and Buchanan. A tribute to US colonialism that Liberia is the second poorest country on earth, the poorest being Sierra Leone -but statistical comparisons are meaningless in places like Monrovia. Monrovia is much, much worse than Freetown. It is more troubling that in the shambolic downtown, full of bullet holes, scorched concrete and growing algae, the scent of untreated human sewage, with open cesspools and the occasional bloating corpse of some small uneaten animal, that a place like New York City exists in the same time. That the United States will spend 10 billion a month (Pentagon figures) in Iraq to oust a dictator accused of crimes against humanity, will do nothing to alleviate the suffering of a people under another dictator, who could be removed with a phone call, a few Toyota four runners, and just about anyone from the ATU who likes cold cash.

The US will retort that it has supported UN sanctions on Taylor.

Sanctions against Taylor haven't worked of course-except to make life even more miserable for the average person. Turns out that France and the United States colluded to exempt two of Liberia's products from sanctions--timber (for the French hardwood salons in Paris and Lyon--and rubber- for the Firestone plantation owned by US interests). I am not sure if the sanctions on the hardwood remain--but Firestone is still exporting its product at will.

What the hell else does Liberia have except for timber and rubber? Fucking whale meat?

I went to tour the Firestone rubber plantation and factory-the largest in the world and curiously--the only thing that survived the civil war (Taylor was backed by the US, and the new rebels are also backed by the US--halleluiah brotha!!)--and am struck by the early colonial 20th centuryness of it all. Endless rubber trees with cups collecting the latex sap, and an old factory to melt the sap down, rusted roof straining in the heat with an old red brick smoke stack like some relic from a Charles Dickens novel. The fields and fields of semi-processed rubber from the factory looks like an alien incubation scheme, with gobs of whitish brown clumps on the outside, black and spongy on the inside-for export to tire factories elsewhere, the fumes of raw rubber rising in the heat.

That the people could earn far more manufacturing the tires, the rubber balls, the condoms, the gaskets, the rubber bands, the waistband elastics, the medical prostheses, etc... which are made from their raw product seems laughable to anyone in business, government, the UN. But why should that be so?

Because the sheer nakedness of the power imbalance in the world can be found in that latex collecting under the canopy of tropical rubber trees, the enormity of the challenge smells as strong and as vaguely toxic as the fields of bulky rubber waiting to be sent to the the interconnecetd worlds of Global North and Global East--far away from this tragic corner of the Global South.

I felt the entire foundation of the world I came from rested on material I saw there. The shirtless black men working the fields to extract the wealth of their nation for the benefit of others--adding to a polluted world hell bent on mindless consumption. Tell me, what has changed over the years, what? What the fuck has 100 years of this shit taught us?

But my experience has taught me that comparisons in an unfair world are pointless exercises in moralizing, red meat for the innocent humanitarians and outraged liberals and the spiritually earnest. Power can only be shamed so much, and usually not at all when nobody knows, and fewer care. Still, the scene stands as an individual challenge to ones sense of justice, to whatever moral code one lives by. Is cynicism ever really justified? But somtimes I want to puke at my own sense of outrage.

Yeah, tell it tha judge mister.