"THE TRIBE FROM AMERICA LOSES ALL IN LIBERIA"
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
c.1995 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE 5-10-95
MONROVIA, Liberia - Like most Liberians, Clarence L. Simpson does
not have to look far for signs of his country's collapse into chaos
and barbarism.
What sets Simpson, 62, apart is the distance he has fallen since
the 1980 coup that brought a young, semiliterate master sergeant named
Samuel K. Doe to power, an event that ultimately set Liberia on the
path toward seemingly endless civil war.
Simpson, the son of a former vice president, was a leading member
of the country's quasi-colonial settler class, the Americo-Liberians,
who from birth once enjoyed a standard of living that placed them a
bit above the lot of their West African neighbors.
Over the span of his public career, starting as a Supreme Court
justice at 31, and including jobs as attorney general, secretary
general of the long-ruling True Whig Party and scion of the Masonic
Order, the country's most secretive and influential institution,
Simpson was intimately familiar with virtually all of the power and
prestige that his country's elite had to offer.
Now, however, he is reduced to the status of a lawyer in a society
where law has hardly any meaning. This holds not just for the
illiterate indigenous people who were always treated as distinctly
second-class citizens by the recently freed black Americans who began
settling this country in 1821, but for anyone without a gun.
Although he maintains appearances, working in his neat downtown law
offices, surrounded by the shattered remains of a city that once liked
to think of itself as the Manhattan of West Africa, Simpson, who
returned from exile in the United States in 1991, literally cannot go
home.
Nowadays, no writ can win for him repossession of the large house
he once lived in, filled as it is by members of the Armed Forces of
Liberia, just one of the country's dozen or so tribal militias. Worse,
he says, were the killings of his peers and the brain drain that
followed, with the educated survivors and their children lost to
exile, mostly in the United States.
``I woke up one morning and most of the people I associated with
were dead,'' said Simpson, who was lucky to be abroad when Doe took
power, executing 13 government ministers by firing squad as one his
first acts. ``I wondered to myself, should I ever go back to
Liberia?''
Having chosen to return to contribute to the building of a peaceful
new society, nowadays Simpson says Liberia needs ``someone who can
lead without regard to tribal affiliation,'' preferably, he adds,
someone who is not an Americo-Liberian. The old elite, he says, had
already come to this conclusion when it was overthrown.
If Simpson betrays little irony in delivering his prescription,
most of his fellow Americo-Liberians here now acknowledge that their
behavior was the very study of tribalism - though, given their
origins, a most peculiar form of it.
Most agree that the settlers' mission, put forth in a Declaration
of Independence inspired by America's, ``to regenerate and enlighten
this benighted Continent,'' somehow never made it beyond the noble
word.
``They might have borne the idea of building a new society for all
Liberians on their lips, but that was not what they bore in their
minds,'' said G. Henry Andrews, a former newspaper editor. ``What they
had in mind was transplanting the feudal system they knew in the
States to Liberia, with themselves this time in the master's role.''
Driven by a resentment that accumulated over generations from
deprivation of everything from roads, schools, hospitals, to voting
rights and other benefits of citizenship, the first instinct of
Sergeant Doe and his young comrades was to kill their perceived
oppressors.
The second instinct, however, was to emulate them. Doe eventually
became a Mason, and made the transition from crude speaker to giver of
grandiloquent addresses. Finally, he packed the only institution he
fully understood, the army, with his fellow tribesmen, the Krahn, and
sought to set up his own ethnic hierarchy.
By the time civil war broke out, in 1989, with an invasion by
another ethnically based Liberian force from the Ivory Coast that had
been victimized by Doe's Krahn, each of Liberia's major tribes
seemingly had a grievance against another.
So far, the violence, carried out in village burnings and urban
guerrilla assaults, has taken at least 150,000 lives. Doe was himself
captured and killed by members of a militia in September 1990.
``It was no longer an affair of Americo-Liberians,'' Archbishop
Michael K. Francis, said, mentioning the country's other tribes. ``If
you were Krahn you were killed, if you were Gio you were killed, if
you were Mano you were killed. It was just senseless killing, and
before we knew it, our streets were just filled with skeletons and the
stench of death.''
Still, clinging tightly to the world he once knew, of hat shows and
gloved church ceremonies for women in yellow dresses and Masonic rites
for men in pinstripes, Simpson refuses to indict his own.
``History shows that people who try to liberalize after sustained
repression are generally swept away,'' he said. ``The pity is that so
many thought that the only thing that had to be done to get justice
was to get rid of the Americo-Liberian.''