The unextended history of “Firestone”, Charles Taylor and Liberia tragedy

Authors: T Christian Miller, Jonathan Jones

The killers left the plantation under a red moon one evening in October 1992. They streamed from villages covered with tin roofs and jungle settlements, along streets of macadamia and red bushes. More and more people joined their ranks, until thousands of men in long range headed for the distant capital.

Welded men put artillery balls in old trucks. Weak teenagers dragged rocket launchers. Kids were wearing AK-47s. Some wore long choppers.

The killers wore torn jeans and short - sleeved T - shirts, farm wigs, and cheap rubber sandals. Grothic masks made them look like demons. They were hanging thalismans with feathers and bones to protect them from bullets. In the dark before dawn, they surrounded Monrovia, Liberia's capital.

They launched their attacks on the sleeping city. Artillery hit shops and houses. The pestilences flowed through thick walls, wet air that smelled like decay. Army boys came in canoes from the swamps. As they flocked, the killers forced men, women, and children to flee their homes. They killed civilians and soldiers. Falling shells were rescued without touching the US Embassy, located in a space set up by the Atlantic Ocean.

A new phase of Liberia's civil war had begun. It would be severely out of control over the next decade. More than 200,000 people would die or suffer terrible wounds, most of which would be torn out of civilians, eyes out. Half the country's population would become refugees. Five American nuns would be slaughtered, becoming international symbols of corruption of conflict.

Anarchy was organizing Charles Taylor, a devout egomaniac obsessed with taking Liberia back, the most trusted ally of America in Africa. For the October morning attack, he had built his army of butchers and believers in part with the sources of a well-known American business: the tire company “Firestone”.

“Firestone” ran the plantation Taylor used to conduct the October 1992 attack in Monrovia. In a state of labor since 1926, the rubber plantation was considered the largest of its kind in the world, a large cluster of trees, rivers of brown mud, low hills, and green shrubs that were then lying in approximately 570 square miles [570 sq km] of Chicago.

“Firestone” wanted Liberia for its rubber. Taylor wanted “Firestone” to help establish him in power. At an important meeting in Liberia's jungles in July 1991, the company agreed to do business with the military commander.

In the first detailed review of the relationship between “Firestone” and Taylor, an investigation by the proublica and ʹFrontline) shows the role of a global corporation in a brutal African conflict.

“Firestone” served as a source of food, fuel, trucks and cash used by Taylor's rebel army, according to interviews, corporate internal documents and declassified diplomatic information.

The company signed an agreement in 1992 to pay taxes to Taylor's rebel government. Over the next year, the company collected more than $2.3m in cash, checks and food for Taylor, according to a accounting file in court. Between 1990 and 1993, the company invested 35.3m USS on the plantation.

In exchange, Taylor's forces guaranteed security for the plantation that allowed “Firestone” to produce rubber and store its assets. Taylor's rebel government offered the lowest export taxes that gave the company a financial advantage for rubber remittances.

For Taylor, the relationship with “Firestone” was more than money. It helped him secure a political capital and recognition he needed and that he sought to create his credentials as Liberia's future leader.

“We needed the “Firestone” to give us international legitimacy,” said John Toussaint, “J.T.” Richardson, an American-trained architect who became one of Taylor's top advisers. We needed them for credibility. ”

While “Firestone” used the plantation for rubber business, Taylor used it for the war business. Taylor turned the warehouses and factories of “Firestone” into weapons and ammunition depots. He housed himself and his senior ministers at the homes of “Firestone”. He also used communication equipment on the plantation to broadcast messages for his supporters, propaganda for measures and instructions for his troops.

The secret messages of American diplomats of the time received Taylor's gratitude for “Firestone”. The “Firestone” planning was the blood throat” of the territory he controlled in Liberia, Taylor told a director of “Firestone”, according to a State Department message. Taylor later said in his sworn testimony that the sources of “Firestone” had been the most important “foreign currency” in the early years of his revolt.

In written answers to questions, “Firestone” accepted the agreement with Taylor, but said he had never willingly helped his uprising.

The company said Taylor's rebels had used the trucks of “Firestone”, food, medical supplies, fuel and other tools under “by violently threatening anyone who thought to stop them”.

“Firestone” had no role in setting up Charles Taylor. It had no role in his ability to retain power in Liberia,” said the company.

“Firestone never had a co-operation relationship with Charles Taylor,” said in the statement. The company's “targets were focused on the protection of employees and its properties. The company had no ability to prevent Taylor's forces from using plantations for any purpose. ”

At the moment of the October 1992 attack that became known as Operation Octapod, Taylor controlled much of Liberia. He faced a temporary government in Monrovia, supported by 7,000 soldiers largely untested by the Allied nations of West Africa.

Operation Octopod plunged the country into five more turbulent years, terrible years of eternal war. Taylor turned a civil war between his forces and the government of Liberia into a bloody battle, while more and more rebel groups joined the war for plunder - diamonds, wood, power. It lay in neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone, where the Allied rebel forces with Taylor cut off civilians in an uncontrolled campaign of terror and brutality.

In July 1997, Taylor won his war, not on the battlefield. He was elected president, receiving 75 percent of the vote. For many Liberians, one vote for Taylor was a vote of resignation. Many believed this was the only way to stop the killing. After Taylor became president, more groups were created, more bloodshed, more revenge. Liberia and her people suffered again.

In 2003, Taylor was indicted by an international war crimes tribunal committed in Sierra Leone. He resigned from the presidency. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison, the first head of state to be convicted of crimes against mankind since the Nazi era.

The path to co-operation was neither fair nor easy for “Firestone” and its leaders, according to interviews and documents. Some company officials effectively opposed working with Taylor and his warriors, even in the face of real threats to physical violence.

Other senior officials felt the company had no choice but to surrender Taylor's demands. They believed that working with him was the only way to protect thousands of poor Liberians living and working on plantations.

“Firestone” also received a conflicting guide from the United States government. An ambassador called on the company to work with Taylor. In Washington, diplomats warned leaders “Firestone” of the dangers of doing business with him.

But in the end, “Firestone” as a corporation and a group of men made the decision to co-operate with a man whose forces were publicly denounced as violent, fierce and cruel by the US government and human rights groups.

The U.S. State Department had published a report blaming Taylor's forces for killing civilians, raping women, and forcing thousands of people to become refugees. Human Rights Watch said Taylor's forces were engaged in a murder campaign that put “at risk of genocide” to a certain ethnic group.

Today “Firestone” claims that by the time she made the deal with Taylor, guerrilla leader “had no good data defined” of human rights violations. She said many other companies and world leaders had treated Taylor as a legitimate political figure. Other companies operating in Liberia then chose to leave. But some stayed with violence.

Do you believe Fireston did the right thing? Yes,” said “Firestone” for its decisions in Liberia. “Do we regret working with the former Presidents of the United States, the US State Department, the United Nations and many other leaders around the world who worked with the war criminal in which he returned? Yes.”

The decision faced by “Firestone” faces many American companies operating nowadays in war-torn regions in an increasingly globalised economy. Everyone's aiming to make money. All should weigh, on one scale or another, their hierarchy of obligations to their shareholders, to their foreign employees, to their host countries, and to their sense of right and wrong.

Donald Ensminger was director of the plantation “Firestone” when Taylor invaded Liberia. He was a direct witness to the violence. Taylor's rebels killed and imprisoned his workers. They threatened to kill Ensminger by running a rocket launcher.

Ensminger was allowed to leave the company in October 1991. Over the next 23 years, he kept silent about choosing “Firestone” to make an agreement with a military commander. He now told Frontline and Proublica he wanted to explain.

He said he warned “Firestone” Taylor was a murderer. He told the company that working with him could be a crime. He urged them to avoid agreements that could legitimise the guerrilla leader as Liberia's ruler.

His decision was clear. And “Firestone” got it wrong.

“Of course that in the name of our employees, those who were killed and suffered, it was necessary that we now have to admit that this man did exactly that,” he said in an interview.

Gerald Rose, who served as the mission's deputy chief in Liberia at the time, has an equally unhurried opinion of the choice he made “Firestone”.

Do I think they have blood on their hands? Yes, ” said Rose. I wouldn't have made the decisions they made. I believe they helped a military commander in his uprising and in the atrocities he caused. ”

Over the years, Liberia has hesitated to analyze her past. For example, Taylor was judged only for the damage he caused in Sierra Leone rather than Liberia. In 2009, the country's Commission of Truth and Conciliance recommended sanctions for a variety of perpetrators. He mentioned “Firestone” that he had helped Taylor commit his rebellion and called for more investigation. The Liberian government has never acted based on these recommendations.

The amazing truth is that no one has ever been punished in Liberia for the civil war that destroyed the nation. In fact, some of the people who helped destroy the country are now the same people responsible for rebuilding it.

Senior officials of former warring groups are now politicians who pass laws in the legislature. They are pastors who preach from the local cathedrals. They are leaders who run some of the country's biggest businesses.

The damage that they caused Liberia to persecute the country even today. Liberia's destroyed infrastructure and poor health systems have tried hard to cope with the spread of the Ebola virus, which has killed thousands of Liberians.

In an interview with Frontline and Proublica, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf acknowledged that Liberia had not yet managed to shake up the Taylor regime or the demons of its history.

The effect of that regime and the regimes of the past are still with us today,” she said. “Today we have a traumatic nation. ”

The efforts made over many months to contact Taylor through lawyers and his family were unsuccessful.

Johnson Sirleaf seemed thinking when asked to describe Liberia's relationship with “Firestone”. Nobel Peace Prize winner Johnson Sirleaf said the company had provided Liberia with jobs and revenue.

Indeed, during its decades of work, the company “Firestone” had built a nation within one nation. The company guaranteed housing, schools, food and health care for workers and their families. About 80,000 Liberians lived within its borders. “Firestone” presented the currency, built roads and expanded the rural interior.

At the same time, Johnson Sirleaf said, “Firestone” has sometimes failed to meet its obligations to the country, whose people gave it many over many years. Over the decades, the company has faced charges that it has exploited its employees, received unfair concessions, destroyed the environment, and exacerbated corruption.

Johnson Sirleaf said: “is a confused story. ”

This investigation is... Republica)