Liberia History & Information

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2

Palava Hut: The Abuja Treaty indicates that factional heads should participate in the May 1997 elections. Some Liberians are vehemently opposed to that proposition. They say that any decision to go after an elected rebel would be far from unanimous, so they would “let principle count now for something at the risk of behaving like those they seek to exclude.” Those Liberians also argue that they have “300,000 reasons to give why armed bandits should be excluded from the elections,” and that it should not matter whether their reasoning makes sense to outsiders who do not share Liberia’s tragedy; that Liberians must resolve to exclude the marauders from any activity leading to the choice of Liberia’s next political leader. A classic analogy is being made to the United States that did not invite her rebels to theelections after the American Civil War of 1861-1865. Those rebels were said to have been denied the right to vote–let alone run for an office–for five years after the war. What is your line of reasoning?

Ellen Sirleaf

 Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf: When one looks at it in terms of what has happened to country, one can say that the exclusion of factional heads from the electoral process is a rational way to go. I share the view of ECOMOG that the Liberian situation being the way it is, that it is time to engage all of those who seek to run the country, who seek to lead the country, to give all of them the opportunity to test their own popularity by the vote–to do so in a peaceful way in which the people in the country will let them know whether or not they see in them what it takes to lead the country. To exclude tem a priori without the people’s choice, I think will lead us again to continued conflict in the country. I think that’s what everybody is trying to avoid.

Palava Hut: After the 1985 elections, you were held for sedition by the National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL) government. Reports also indicate that the government even refused you an exit visa. When you had the opportunity to leave Liberia, you traveled to the United States. While you were here in the late 1980s, it has been said that through the Association for Constitutional Democracy in Liberia (ACDL), you teamed up with Dr. Amos Sawyer, Clarence Simpson, Taylor Major, Richard Tolbert, Chu Chu Horton, A. Romeo Horton, among others, to rid Liberians of Samuel Doe who was perceived as a dictator. What is your side of the story?

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf: I’m sorry that people have a way of trying to misrepresent and misinterpret the facts. Yes, there was the Association for Constitutional Democracy in Liberia that was formed here in the United States essentially as a pressure group to try to bring the Doe Government back to where we were in 1985 when we had a successfully concluded election in which the NDPL did not win. So that group did not comprise the names you just called. Key members were people like Tom Woewiyu; yes, Amos Sawyer; yes, I was a member; Harry Greaves was, and many of us who had, in some way or the other, been a part of the 1985 electoral process. It was mainly a peaceful civilian pressure group that was going to mobilize Liberians and then mobilize friends of Liberia to again prepare for another round of political process in Liberia to challenge Samuel Doe. People have attributed all kinds of objectives to this. This was not any kind of a secret or closed group. It was open. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as they are open, above board, legal and are abiding by the rules and regulations of he country. We thought it was an effective thing.

Continued in Part 4