allAfrica.com: Liberia: Liberia: A Casualty of the Cold War's End (Page 1 of 9)

Half a decade ago, with the Berlin Wall coming down and the Soviet Union entering its final days, a small-scale conflict in West Africa quietly put post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy to an early test.

Liberia's civil war, which began with a cross-border raid by a tiny rebel band in late 1989, has claimed the lives of one out of every 17 people in the country, uprooted most of the rest, and destroyed a once-viable economic infrastructure.

The strife also has spread to Liberia's neighbors, contributing to a slowing of the democratization that was progressing steadily through West Africa at the beginning of the decade and destabilizing a region that already was one of the world's most marginal. U.S. taxpayers have footed a sizable bill -- over $400 million to date -- for emergency aid that arguably never would have been needed had their government used its considerable clout to help end the killing.

As fighting escalated in early 1990, the Bush administration faced a serious conundrum. Western Europe and most of Africa looked to the United States to take the lead in seeking a peaceful resolution of the Liberian crisis, since the country's history bears an unmistakable "made in America" stamp. But senior administration officials, determined to limit U.S. involvement in what was viewed as a "brush fire," rejected the notion of inherent American interest or responsibility.

"It was difficult to see how we could intervene without taking over and pacifying the country with a more-or-less-permanent involvement of U.S. forces," Brent Scowcroft, President George Bush's national security advisor, said in a 1993 interview with the author after leaving office. In addition, Scowcroft continued, U.S. attention was "dedicated towards other areas most involved in ending the Cold War." There was the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990, the build up the war in the Gulf. "You can only concentrate on so many things at once," Scowcroft said.

But a range of senior U.S. officials did focus considerable attention on Africa's oldest republic. During a crucial period of increasing carnage in mid-1990, Liberia was a regular item on the agenda of the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council, where most major foreign policy problems were handled. Later in the year as the crisis deepened, the Deputies dealt daily with both Liberia and Kuwait, according to participants in the sessions.

"We missed an opportunity in Liberia," Herman J. Cohen, assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Bush administration, said in an 'exit interview' (CSIS Africa Notes, Number 147, April 1993). "We did not intervene either militarily or diplomatically."

The fate of a West African country, about the size of Tennessee with a pre-war population of 2.6 million, was of scant interest to most American. But Liberia was the first of a series of once-stable countries whose disintegration has seriously strained the world's peacekeeping capacity and tested international commitment to humanitarian relief. By an accident of timing, crisis management in the new age had its trial run in Africa.

The following account of the U.S. decision-making process during Liberia's disintegration is drawn from some 30 interviews with policymakers at all levels in Washington and abroad, and from a review of historical materials and public records. Some of the interviews were on the record, but most were with officials who agreed to talk only if their names and positions were not cited.

Born in the U.S.A.

Liberia's relationship with the United States is the most extensive and long-standing of any African nation. The first settlers to reach Liberia's shores arrived on a U.S. Navy ship supported by grants from the U.S. Treasury. Comprising freed slaves and a few African Americans who had been born free, the group was sponsored by the American Colonization Society (ACS), which had been established in 1816 to spearhead black resettlement on Africa's west coast.

Among the founders of the ACS was the incumbent president, James Monroe, as well as Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington (nephew and heir of the nation's first president) and such other notables as Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The motives of these Society organizers were "decidedly mixed," according to Indiana University political scientist J. Gus Liebenow, author of Liberia: The Quest for Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Wealthy southern plantation owners who feared the impact on their slaves of free African Americans lent backing, as did a number of church leaders, "who saw American blacks as a beachhead in West Africa for Protestant Christianity."

Among the earliest settlers were Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist missionaries. "The first missionaries to go directly from the United States were blacks, and their efforts were directed toward Liberia," wrote Peter Duignan and L.H. Gann of the Hoover Institution, in their history, The United States and Africa(New York: Cambridge University Press and Hoover Institution, 1984).

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