The diamond war

With an American expeditionary force waiting offshore, and a body of Nigerian troops ready to move into Monrovia, the Liberian civil war may at last be reaching its end-game.

In recent weeks there has been a debate going on in the United States over whether to send troops into Liberia to impose order. The Americans have promised US$10 million in assistance to allow the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to send in a West African military force, but have not committed to sending their own men. The positions on each side of the question boil down to this: opponents of intervention say there is no direct American interest at stake in Liberia, while supporters say the U.S., with a long connection to the West African country, has a unique ability and obligation to set things right in a country gone very wrong.

Still, two thousand Marines on an amphibious assault ship is serious enough, and the acquiescence of Charles Taylor, the Liberian president, in the Americans’ request that he resign is a sign that the factions are taking notice. There can be no doubt that they are taking a lesson from a highly successful intervention campaign next door in Sierra Leone.

The Liberian civil wars — and the contemporaneous civil wars that afflicted Sierra Leone — were the wellspring of “blood diamonds,” the tainted diamond trade that Western governments now see the need to choke off. In the past, we have seen the West African diamond trade merely as a moneymaker for political or tribalist violence; but is it possible that we have it backward?

The reporter and political analyst John O’Sullivan (who has just resigned as editor-in-chief at United Press International) makes the case in recent columns that the civil violence chiefly a gang war for dominance in the diamond trade. If this is true, then the case for Western intervention would be better still; for the whole situation becomes more manageable. Put simply, if a combined Western and West African military force imposes order and puts the diamond fields out of reach of the gangsters, what point would there be in continuing the fight?

The reality on the ground, though, is likely a good deal more complex than either model supposes. There is no denying the tribalist basis of much of the violence along the Grain Coast, and no denying that the factions would be certain to exploit the diamond trade simply to get rich. And the solution is not as simple — but “not simple” does not mean insoluble.

The Liberian conflict is a stew of resentments and revenge that goes back to the settlement of freed slaves from the United States in the early 19th century. The educated and worldly Americans became, effectively, a colonial administration over a tribal West African society; the only difference between black and white colonists is that, in the 1960s, the white ones went home.

The indigenous groups finally took over in 1980, after a military coup led by the strange and half-educated Samuel Doe. The factions that had first supported the coup fell out in short order; first Doe’s regime instituted a reign of terror, then Doe himself was deposed in a 1989 coup, in which Taylor, an American-Liberian, was a principal.

Taylor’s ascendancy pushed the country into open civil war, in which about 200,000 people died. His forces prevailed, and in 1996 he was elected president in free elections — the voters having a narrow choice of evils at the time. From his base in Liberia, Taylor tried to destabilize both Sierra Leone (where he backed the Revolutionary United Front, the creature of the crazed and murderous Foday Sankoh) and the Ivory Coast.

Now Taylor’s past has caught up with him. Two rebel factions — backed by the two countries he tried to interfere in before — have established their own control over the countryside. Taylor is isolated in Monrovia, and the rebels have begun a final push into the city. The end will be ugly unless the outside world does something to stop it.

It can. Across the Mano River is Sierra Leone, a country whose society three years ago was every bit as riven as Liberia’s is today. The difference has been Western and ECOWAS intervention (led there by the British), and the rapid imposition of a political settlement.

While Sierra Leone today is still not a stable society, it has made great advances thanks to an adequate level of outside help. The eastern half of the ugly West African conflict may be just as amenable to treatment.

Part of that treatment must be careful control of the Liberian resource base. It is potentially a wealthy country, by West African standards; resource development gave it one of the region’s highest standards of living in the 1940s and 1950s. Poor as Liberia now is, its resources have been enough to finance the succession of coups and civil wars that has ruined the country.

Placing the resource industries under international supervision and using them to feed a trust fund that would ultimately go to a rebuilt Liberia may be the best way to put the wealth out of evil’s reach today, and put it into the Liberian people’s hands tomorrow.