Voice of Liberia
Fighting for Justice for all Liberians
PERILS OF THE GOLDEN RULE
-The Ellen Presidency, Determining the End From The beginning
By Mulbah K. Morlu, Jr. | December 6, 2006
On 24th December 1989, as Liberians eve on the usual euphoria characterizing Christmas celebration, a tragic page that was to unveil one of humanity’s darkest chapters in history, was about to read. Many had shopped as usual and jubilant kids hurried to their peers displaying whatever the salaries of their daddies had afforded in getting them ready for the public conviviality and wassail sure to follow the next day. Liberians had lived like this from time immemorial, enjoying a relatively peaceful atmosphere, though the usual life’s challenges remained. Traditionally, the few radio stations available would fill the airwaves with dingo bells and other songs of joy befitting the holiday. But, everything was about to take a different trend, a negative paradigm shift. And it did. On December 24th, 1989, towering far above the whispering echoes of the Christmas lyrics was the BBC broadcast of the voice of a man, Charles Taylor, whose determination to disrupt the civil stability, peace and democracy of the Liberian state proved itself months later.
Now that the entire country got dragged into the concoctions and whims of unscrupulous military campaigners disguised as “freedom fighters”, the aftermath failed to observe the rule of law, respect for international humanitarian law, adherence to the principles enshrined in various international protocols governing arms aggression, etc. Quite to the contrary, the vices and excesses that was said to have motivated the employ of such military activity cross-multiplied to reproduce a blood bath unparallel in the history of Liberia. Massacres, raping, maiming and the hacking off of innocent people’s limbs, ethnic cleansing, pillaging of resources, looting, summary executions and various other international abuses that could be amounted to war crimes, crimes against humanity, the crime of genocide and the crime of aggression, took center stage.
The ignominious and diabolic aftermath of Liberia in the hands of the “liberators” is a scene too horrifying to capture the imagination of any artist. For the first time, though unfortunately, evil geniuses and scalawags seized upon the time to launch Liberia into a “lake of fire”. There has been no time like it before in Africa’s oldest independent state. There were surpluses everywhere; depravity, heinousness, unpropitiousness, extreme criminality and accompanying vices seemed to be crossbreeding at astronomical speed. Children were thought the killing game to mastery, and for some, their own fathers suffered prey when their skulls were battered with brains dished out for refreshment.
Whole villages and towns crumbled under the weight of bandits and thugs running around in wigs and makeshift wears as though recruited from Satan’s capitol to punish the masses for their unquestionable submission to authority over a hundred and forty three years time span. The personality of evil grew so tall that some thought Liberia was a selected state for the unleashing of demoniac torturers foretold in the Bible under the caption of “the great tribulation”.
Churches and mosques were desecrated and despoiled as the remains of butchered bodies were common scenes. A dead woman’s body hung from a Lutheran Church window with brains scattered everywhere while her baby cried tied to her back after a massacre of over 600 innocent people. A two years old boy’s stomach was ripped open during a butcher practice in Duport Road; a hundred other bodies were discovered burned, severely chopped to pieces or, badly mutilated. The Tellewoyan hospital inVoinjama diametrically served as the roasting room for almost two hundred innocent people, mostly women and children accused of loyalty to a warring party; they were taken hostage, jailed in the hospital and the building set ablaze. The anguish and distress of those innocent women and children, their cries of indescribable pains from the furnace of consuming fire, the agony of dying at the hands of your own brother and sister, such torment, torture and affliction must awaken in us a new consciousness for justice.
I could go on and on detailing the egregious climate that engulfed Liberia for 14 years, leading to some of the most sinister acts man has ever seen. I could speak on the Sinje massacre where countless persons were chopped like goats being prepared for a feast; I could unravel details about the U.N compound massacre of over a hundred poor souls exterminated right under the shadow of the United Nations flag; I could even have a 16 year old boy take his turn in testimony, a survival of a systematic massacre of over 600 helpless souls in Carter Camp. Or I could recount the shelling of Monrovia during “World War III” leaving behind limbs detached from their bodies and babies separated from their unrecognizable slain mothers. I could discuss the plunder and looting of the state by schismatic burglars and furtive criminals whose coiffeurs overflow with valuables stolen from our national treasury. I could also go back to the beginning and tell you how it all started. I can tell you because the cast-blame-debate has been on for long and those masterminds and hatchers of the collapse of the state have been throwing blames and at the same time erecting bulwarks around themselves to stay clear from the hodgepodge. In the process, truths, contradictions and enormous historical resources have come up to the advantage of the serious fact-finder.
However, a few of the pioneers of doom and disorder in the Liberian affairs have submitted to their conscience by confessing their roles. Whether those confessions totalize their sincere involvement or not, at least, some one has accepted responsibility, a good start. For others, a self-righteous approach is indulged and not even the torment of an inner conviction will do though the flotsam and jetsam of a collapse state points to individuals that cannot escape identity. Not even the thickest curtain of darkness is sufficient enough to veil their faces from national recognition. These are the ones that obstreperously speak out the loudest on this “human right” and that “human right” while they protect the skeletons in their own wardrobe. But our own archive is replete with the evil chronicles of these phlebotomists, bamboozlers and pseudo-manumitters that brought our nation down to a new low.
This is Liberia anyway, the land where the wicked can form a cheering squad and the incorrigible misperceive justice a witch-hunting process. If such a mentality is not challenged, alas, the Liberian crisis goes in circle unabated! In fact, it is non compos mentis to think that the deaths of more than three-hundred thousand innocent people will pass off into the abyss of nothingness under the guise of “let’s move forward and forget the past”.
The fact is that Liberia can never be rebuilt on the blood of innocent and systematically slain war victims without their true killers, at least, accepting the apportionment of their roles in the annihilation process.
I could tell you more on the Liberian terror. The various nefarious operations and how they started, right from the inauguration of the vampire crusade. It was a crusade whose incipience saw key players quite visible on the political stages giving military orders. They wanted power. They got it, each according to his turn. Through all this self-indulging power chess, the ransom for ascendance remained the same; hundreds of thousands of slain innocent babies, women and children.
For those who rebelled against the state and now seemed to be enjoying power, the carcass of innocently slain war victims is proverbially embedded in every stair used to climb the offices.14 years back had seen intense lobbies, campaigns and hustles for guns for the one reason of killing others so they (liberators) might live and govern.
And now, after more than 14 years of extreme mayhem and barbarity upon the peaceful people of Liberia, many are shying away from the history they actively help create when power was all that matter then, not the people. Charles Taylor, the one man amongst many that Liberia and Liberians will never forget for dragging a whole generation down the drain of wretchedness, commanded the fighting men or, the desperados. But he was not alone. Charles Taylor and his men, being messengers, had external actors pulling the power trigger as rivers back home overflow with the influx of the blood of the innocent.
These are the full truths I am set to decipher and to give a prophetic forecast of what may happen to Liberia if our past actions are not reconciled with our present endeavors. Under that burden, I am convinced that there must be no hiding place for political monsters and yesteryears’ insurgents who must accept their fair share in bearing the greatest responsibility for the Liberian nightmare. These are the crimes that weigh heavier than the victims they are inflicted upon. They don’t just render the past a scarring ghostly abyss full of innocent dead corpse with spirits starring at us with the high expectation of the transparence of justice, but equally creates a bleak future for Liberia which foundation runs weak in the absence of justice and the rule of law.
While the human community awaits a policy decision by a few in government to create an environment of justice for serious abuses committed in Liberia, natural laws will not be impaired by human frailties and prejudices in executing justice for deliberate wrongs that harmed a whole generation. Be it on a wider or limited scale, celestial or terrestrial, the world is governed by natural laws that are always in motion whether we realized it or not.
Whether you are like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American atheists who propounded disbelief in the existence of the supernatural and creation, or like biblical scholars who attribute the creative story of the earth solely to the artistic mastery of the divine, or like Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, one truth stands out tall: “the natural world runs a systematic course and responds to its surroundings in such a way that every action of man-a free moral agent, is bound to produce a reaction. The thing is that, whether such reaction is repugnant or otherwise is a factor of the involuntary or simultaneous function of “Natural laws.”
When we believe a law to exist independently of the ‘positive law’ (man-made law) and that said law is of a given political order, a nation-state, or society, we become adherents of ‘jus naturale’, or Natural Law as first introduced by Aristotle and later developed within the Christian context by Saint Thomas Aquinas.
By the elucidation of this theory, what these gentlemen actually confessed to is the fact that the moral standards that govern the behavior of man are objectively derived from his (man’s) nature. This is also the perpetual course of the natural world in which we all reside. That is, there are standards that coerce every member of the natural family into compliance for the continuity of the world. I call this the reality of natural laws in universal scheme of things. And we must not confuse natural law with the laws of nature, which science aims to describe.
This is the undisputable orderliness of the natural world though it may appear taciturn and sententious. The natural world cannot reside outside rudimentary and axiomatic laws. Likewise, since man himself cannot exist independent of the natural, he is equally affected by those laws governing that environment. Henceforth, it is factual to argue that man, a product of the application of basic laws, is subject to other natural laws inevitable for his success or failure. Therefore, success whether in sociopolitical terms or unspecified scheme of things, is a product of how these laws are embraced and treated (this does not disregard the place of other human laws but rather establishes homogeneity).
With such fait accompli, dipping deeper into a full dimensional understanding of the functional realities of our world, one comes to note that the law of reciprocity or, simply “The Golden Rule” is an unavoidable accomplice of every man.
The Golden Rule, Ethics of Reciprocity
As the new world ascends the pinnacle of technological advances, so are systems, religious groupings and non-theistic arrangements. And the multiplication of these systems and groupings run proportional to emerging controversies, especially as regards doctrinal and ethical issues. Hence, be it the theistic, the non-theistic, the philosophies and other systems, sharpening disagreements create an entrenched divide. This divide deepens even much deeper when considering the concepts of deity and other beliefs.
Notwithstanding, in a particular area, there is near unanimity of opinion amongst almost all religions, ethical systems and philosophies that “each person should treat others in a decent manner.” Almost all of the major world religions, systems and philosophies have passages in their ‘holy’ texts, or writings of their leaders, which promote this Ethic of Reciprocity. In some parts of the world, like North America, it is commonly called the Golden Rule of Christianity and is often expressed as “Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you.”
Fortunately, when we “do unto others as we wish them do unto us” in a positive way, it is almost certain that we will reap similar gesture in return even if it is variables unconnected to the actions that become involuntary vessels of reciprocation. The other side of this coin however is, the trade of a negative to another is a seed sown on fertile ground and is bound to yield its bountiful fruits to the excruciation and agony of the behavioral trader. This is the golden rule. It says, one good turn deserves another and; the evil that man does lives to confront him…
As already stated, almost all of the major world religions, systems and philosophies have passages in their ‘holy’ texts, or writings of their leaders, which promote this Ethic of Reciprocity. Let me bring you excerpts of some of these passages of world religions, philosophies and systems on “The Golden Rule”:
Some philosophers' statements on the golden rule:
Socrates: "Do not do to others that which would anger you if others did it to you." (Greece; 5th century BCE)
Epictetus: "What you would avoid suffering yourself, seek not to impose on others." (Circa 100 CE)
Plato: "May I do to others as I would that they should do unto me." (Greece; 4th century BCE)
Kant: "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature."
"Golden Rule" excerpts gleaned from the religious texts of various religions and secular beliefs:
Brahmanism: "This is the sum of Dharma [duty]: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you". Mahabharata, 5:1517”
Bahá'í World Faith:"Ascribe not to any soul that which thou wouldst not have ascribed to thee, and say not that which thou doest not." "Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself." Baha'u'llah
Buddhism:"...a state that is not pleasing or delightful to me, how could I inflict that upon another?" Samyutta NIkaya v. 353
Confucianism: “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you" Analects 15:23
Hinduism: This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you. Mahabharata 5:1517
Ancient Egyptian: “Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do." The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, 109 - 110 Translated by R.B. Parkinson. The original dates to 1970 to 1640 BCE and may be the earliest version ever written.
Islam: "None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." Number 13 of Imam "Al-Nawawi's Forty Hadiths."
"Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you" Analects 15:23; Tse-kung asked, 'Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?' Confucius replied, 'It is the word 'shu' -- reciprocity. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire"; Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence." Doctrine of the Mean 13.3
Native American Spirituality: “Respect for all life is the foundation." The Great Law of Peace."All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really one." Black Elk
Yoruba: (Nigeria): "One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts."
Taoism: Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss." T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien.
Sufism: "The basis of Sufism is consideration of the hearts and feelings of others. If you haven't the will to gladden someone's heart, then at least beware lest you hurt someone's heart, for on our path, no sin exists but this." Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order.
Jainism: “Therefore, neither does he [a sage] cause violence to others nor does he make others do so." Acarangasutra 5.101-2.
Judaism:"...thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Leviticus 19:18; "What is hateful to you; do not to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary." Talmud, Shabbat 31a. "And what you hate, do not do to any one." Tobit 4:15 6
Christianity: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." Matthew 7:12, King James Version. “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." Luke 6:31, King James Version…
This is but to list several among many as there are many other systems, religious beliefs and philosophies in whose literatures you will find adherence to the Golden Rule. Notwithstanding, it is wise to caution here that my reference to these various religious, systems and philosophical bodies must not be interpreted to mean that I share in their tenets and beliefs. As a Christian by spiritual identity, I had to necessarily make the references so as to unravel the enormous commonality existing amongst these segments.
“Perils of the Golden rule” as exemplified in Bible times
Henceforth, as emphasized in other passages given supra, the Judeo-Christian bible is replete with lessons of the Golden Rule so well taught in simplicity that only a nitwit-tomfool will fail to grasp. This rule is so fundamental in divine scheme of things that it comes at the very beginning of human affairs immediately after “the flood.” “Jehovah, the ultimate actor of the bible” lays the foundation of the Golden Rule in Genesis 8:22. Hear Him:
“…while the earth remains seedtime and harvest shall not cease…” This is a tremendous sum total of the law of reciprocity which, in other words, could be paraphrased as follows: “well, as you inhabit your natural environment (earth) you are at liberty to do whatever you deem right as a free moral being, but realize that your every action is like a potent seed sown which must yield corresponding fruits.” To buttress this reality, the Apostle Paul was to write later on in the Christian Testament book of Galatians 6:7 saying “Be not deceived…whatsoever a man soweth, so shall he also reap…” This substantiated reality of the physical and spiritual realms of our universe is so well proven that only wiseacres, dimwits, and ninny-deranges will not heed.
To this effect, let us board an imaginary flight back a few thousand years into time past. We are on board, wearing our safety belts of truth with the bible as compass for direction. We quickly arrive and will now touch down, being welcomed by desert tents, an elderly man and his wife and, a twin of disparity referred to as, Jacob and Esau. Jacob, the younger of the two, recollects memory of childhood days and quickly reminisced how he, together with his mother, deceived his father into obtaining a blessing traditionally reserved for his brother of seniority. Though his tale of deception was now way back in the past and appeared to be dwarfed by an overwhelming success in livestock and other areas, here is Jacob standing face to face with a quagmire of comparative deception that leaves him groaning in anguish and sorrow when his own sons traded his beloved Joseph to Egyptians and returned with deceiving tales beautifully wrapped up in a coat of many colors! Such is the game of life, lies birth lies, tricks multiply tricks, violence breeds violence, etc. This is the reality of natural laws. ‘The wise one’ (King Solomon) put it in a straight form: “you cannot make straight that which is croaked…” You can’t bend any law without trampling on truth.
We pick up from Jacob’s land and wing-soars into the land of the Pharaohs, numbering amongst the greatest empires of its time. This is Egypt, where a story about the enslavement and redemption of the Jewish people is general knowledge even to the unsophisticated kindergartener. It was here that a King gave orders that every Hebrew boy of 2 years and below be drowned. Such horrible and appall order, like similar orders given at Carter Camp and Lutheran Church, was carried out by men moribund and entrenched in evil. Back then it did not occur to Pharaoh that as those innocent babies were being ruthlessly swung and drowned in the Nile River upon his orders, so would he equally drown in a sea of rivers upon the orders of natural laws! The rest is history. How many warlords, facilitators, and masterminds presided over belligerent arrangements that had orders going out that amounted to the history of more than 250 thousand souls written in blood! For such messengers of doom, depravation and plunder to imagine walking away free because someone breaths power, is ludicrous and a mere whimsical mirage.
We are however hasten to flight by the historical significance of what is already unraveling in the camp of Moses, the liberator of messianic Israel. He has been given a mission to lead a people, some of who may have chosen to disregard natural laws, three of them and followers they managed to convert unto themselves. They promoted split in Moses’ camp and the reciprocity came splitting apart these rebels from the rest of the congregation of Israel. They led a rebellion that brought a split and so did the earth respond with a split in its belly, swallowing all rebel commanders and their featherbrained followers.
I could enumerate volumes on ‘King David’, the “man after God’s heart” and how he could not evade natural laws when he stole another man’s wife and sent the man in harm’s way to die. He was a war General who knew how to handle broken relationships with his God but failed to get bailed out of the dungeon of the backlashes of natural laws. He took a man’s wife and sent him into the jungles of war; his own son, Absalom took his wives, sexually assaulted them in public view while driving his father into the jungles of regret and reciprocation. How many wives were raped and murdered; how many teens were sexually sodomized; how many men in power today deserve jail sentences that can never truly account for their brutality against innocent people!
I could go deeper into graphic examples that should leave no man doubting the reality of the law of reciprocation. I could, except that our imaginary flight will run fuel dry. I could wing-soar into days after Jesus, the Savior of the world. And the story of the Judaist scholar, Saul would come to play. He was trained in the ways of the Pharisees who were too far off to see that Jesus was the ultimate and immediate fulfillment of everything the torah ever discussed. The zeal of Saul burned to monumental contradictions to his own peril. When the Christian message begun to spread, so did he also spread his hatred for that message and did it in no moderate terms. The hatred grew to breed murderous horns that left evangelists caught up in Saul’s web of arbitrary detentions, incarcerations, floggings and, deaths by stoning. Then a time came when he became Paul after converting unto the faith he sought to destroy. He preached the message like no other apostle of his time. He was even used by the divine to write 13 New Testament books of the bible. Notwithstanding, his persecution of the church of Jesus Christ was fully reciprocated; he was whipped, jailed, mocked and, beheaded! You can’t escape the clutches of natural laws. One may gain time, but you cannot outsmart natural laws.
“Perils of the golden rule” and tragedies of violent revolutions across Africa
The struggle for sovereignty in Africa was one that was so fiercely and vehemently fought by black patriots that it appeared, when the fight was won, Africa would be an oasis of flourishing prosperity and tranquility unimaginable anywhere! In those days, the endangered champions of liberation seemed to be so ingrained in the fight that they fought at their peril, loving death more than life if that was the required price to break loose from the chains of oppression and enslavement tied to our ankles. These were men and women of unquestionable valor who stood for a cause, it is said. And it is true, they stood for a cause. And that cause is the total liberation of the African continent. A few are alive today to relic a gargantuan continental blitzkrieg whose scars are still visible everywhere on the landscape of our individual states.
For others, the foundation of freedom was laid over their graves. Unfortunately, if it were possible for the chasm between the living and the dead to allow them a passage for a visitation back to the ‘freedom land’ they stood up for, they would collapse in utter shame and embarrassment. If the mess and rubbish in our homelands represent all that the fathers of freedom fought for, then they fought for nothing other than set the stage for the continuous exploitation of the continent by misfits and despots. But alas! They actually fought for something except that we are failing to manage the outcome of their hara-kiri.
This is the truest analysis of our present dilemma; they fought so that we and succeeding generations may live; on the contrary, instead of championing the cause of succeeding generations, we are fighting for ourselves, that we may live and not others after us. This is our tragedy and it is fast becoming our curse. We have departed from the aluta continual and are now renowned renegades to our peril. Hence, our inability to harness our resources and judicially utilize them for our own good and the development of our countries is the root cause of the African crisis.
When we analyze the history of Africa after World War II, the days that saw the wooing of the wind of freedom, till now, we will get scared! From the pedestal of statistics, it is written that from independence to now, the sixteen West African states alone have experienced more than forty-four successful military-led coups, forty-three often bloody failed coups, around eighty-two coup plots, seven civil wars, and other forms of unrests. And as far as these statistics show, there is no evidence of the decline in coups and military take over in Africa.
Just a while, “it was in Togo where Faure Eyadema rode on the horse of his late father's praise-singing military henchmen to capture power against the will of the masses who protested vehemently against father-son military imposed leadership.” And the fact that Africa still has some of the military juntas and rebel commanders who have transformed themselves into civilian presidents and leaders while still serving in the governments of their countries encourages many African military men to think of staging coup d'etats.
The irony is that, few days after President Obasanjo, the then Chairperson of the African Union, said that Africa would no longer be a place for coups, a new coup d'etat was staged in Mauritania! And that was a recent situation further suggesting that Africa still remains a place where ambitious individuals or group of disgruntled people can at any time create an unusual scenario by seizing power.
Patrick J. McGowan, a professor from the Arizona State University observed: “These data permit examination of coup behavior over the past fifty years. No evidence of declining coup activity is found. The major instances of war and conflict are reported, and it is shown that coup and conflict are reciprocally related…”
Again someone, a professor from Arizona state university, alludes to the “Golden Rule”. And not just the living will testify to this unchallenging realistically-established quid pro quo, men notorious for plunging their countries into frays and horrible frictions, left behind tragedies that teach lessons without expense.
We will retrospect the records of a few of these men of war and how the “Golden rule” spontaneously settled their destinies in unpleasant ways:
Laurent Desire Kabila, a political philosopher born in Jadotville in 1939, Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo), saw ascendance to power by used of force as the best alternative other than a democratic pathway. Whatever justification there might be for his actions, his life’s profile will always read as “Kabila, the one who led a national rebellion that unseated the government of Mobutu Sese Seko”. No matter what philosophical raison d’etre may be employed to justify this military execution which runs diametrical to the organic laws of the Congo, Laurent Desire Kabila is already a casualty of a violence he fashioned with his own hands. This is the “Peril” which accompanies the “Golden Rule.” Just as he unseated his predecessor in an unpleasant manner so was he likewise unseated in a more cruel and reciprocal style, a perfect manifestation of the “Perils of the Golden Rule.
Determined to avoid the practice of intellectual overload, for the lucidity and understandability of a wider audience, I will concise external examples though they rank in their numbers, and come home to my nativity.
As such, the 1980 military activity of Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe will be a good start though, our collective history points to other coups and conflict before Doe. There may be a number of interpretations unraveling when dealing with the PRC-led dethronement of the Tolbert Government. Whichever one is true, they all hold one factor true in their commonality of the bloody episode of 1980. They all agree that, seventeen enlisted men, headed by Master Sergeant Doe, killed Tolbert and executed 13 others soon after. A few days later, three other persons from the file of the Tolbert regime were also rounded and executed without any due process. In a few days, at least 17 persons had been maliciously murdered at the hands of the new government. Hence, the seventeen murdered victims from the belly of the Tolbert ruling class equally matched the total number of persons involved in the coup, seventeen enlisted men! And how many Liberians do remember that, just as Sergeant Doe gruesomely murdered the seventeen, so did all seventeen enlisted men perished at the edge of the sword! It is said that only the man, Abraham Kollie died naturally amongst the original seventeen.
More revealing is the fact that as Sergeant Doe presided over the torture and brutal murder of the late President Tolbert, so was he (Doe) murdered in similar fashion. Tolbert was sliced to pieces by Doe and his men; Doe was sliced to pieces by a notorious ravisher, General Prince Johnson and his desperados; Tolbert’s murdered body was cast away in full public domain by Doe and his men; Doe’s sliced body was laid waste in public view by Prince Johnson and his men; Tolbert was murdered while in office as President; Doe was also murdered while in office. The objective and farsighted mind will immediately see the manifestation of the “Golden Rule” in the Doe mistreatment of the Tolbert administration. Whatever he instituted against Dr. William R. Tolbert, he lived to reaped bountifully, a hundredfold! This is the mystery of the “Perils of the Golden Rule” I am set to unravel.
To these things, it is heartbreaking how our nation stands to moan the lost of great men, and by the current trend of events, there is no evidence that the mad game has ended. The brutal and barbaric slaughter of Dr. Tolbert is one of the saddest in our chequered history. No sooner had Sergeant Doe returned from the cannibalization and dehumanization of a seating president did he meet his hoodooed demise at the hands of one of Africa’s most brutal men, belligerent war general Prince Y. Johnson.
He is another man whose memory remains a sharp pain in the back of the motherland. A renegade rebel general on the chase from the cul de sac of Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson managed to gather other rebels of like mind, formed them into an INPFL and roam the country side leaving behind a trail of blood as the carcass of the innocent remained scattered everywhere at the mercy of dogs and flies. Trained in Libya for the one purpose of ruining the land, we must agree that General Johnson took his training seriously as proven by the enormous results left to his credit: he successfully looted the Freeport of Monrovia and would however kill a hungry man who attempted hustling a bag to keep his children alive; as the master of central Monrovia, he vandalized major banking structures and left no stone unturned in his bid to amassed the best at his Caldwell Base. For those who lived on Bushrod Island during those days, the presence of Prince Johnson was more frightening than the appearance of Satan! The devil may have been worried that the General was using too much of his power beyond even the imagination of the dark world of wickedness! He abducted Lebanese nationals and used them as slaves in his rebel home (I have the video tape that proves this fact). Why would molatto ladies flee at his presence? It is said that he abducted them and had them raped! The unlucky ones, like the case of a lady referred to as “Lala”, would be butchered after coercively providing sexual pleasure for the sexual monarch.
For people like Prince Johnson, the “Perils of the Golden Rule” will remember him more, not as a Senator, for such is ludicrously incongruous when compared to his nature of inhumanity, but as a ruffian Rebel general, the despoiler of the innocent; the man who celebrated with Budweiser the gruesome murder of others. Prince Johnson may hide behind the façade of legislative immunity for a while, but when he considers the justice of the “Golden Rule” he will realize that he is amongst the most vulnerable and pitied men with the knot gradually tightening around their neck.
And one can understand why the men of war have staged a counter fight against a justice mechanism intended to prosecute criminals of plunder and murder in the Liberian affairs. For these men now riding the golden horse of prominence after demising and decimating a whole generation, justice is not an option. How can we be talking about justice when they want to live long enough to enjoy their acquired wealth and power? But is it not strange these men of blood will see the setting up of a court as being counterproductive! From the outburst of the crisis, was it not their declaration to fight to establish a functional democracy and the rule of law? Why will they now perceive a judicial procedure as being unnecessary?
Yet, how many innocent infants were sent to their early graves without mercy. Men wearing wigs and makeshift dress code roamed the country side, annihilating whole villages and burning towns, right before their commanders. Diamond mines were disinterred to total depletion while our valuable rain forest suffered the most in an exasperating log hunt. For 14 years, a new classroom surfaced. It was one that taught the children new lessons on how to be drugged, armed and made to fight a ruinous and patricidal fracas. And they learned these compelling lessons with ease and executed to the fullest. The result is the ruining of a whole country with a history of more than two hundred and fifty thousand persons written in blood!
This is the legacy of a group militarily led by the man, Charles G. Taylor who, 
as far as the Liberian civil fracas is concerned, is still at large. He may have successfully been caged in some far away land, but obviously not for the turmoil he created Back home. To say this is not to concede that Taylor alone is responsible for our backwardness. Alas! How can any one imagine that! There are the politicians who recruited and propelled Charles Taylor for the one reason of using his hands to roast a palm nut that was meant to be his taboo. As soon as this did not happen, there were other plans, but more innocent people died. Then there are ruthless accounts of other warriors who came as the sent messiahs shouting the battle cry of “let my people go” and became even harsher slave masters. Notwithstanding, Charles Taylor rises above them all and could rightfully be called the father of the Liberian immedicable vulnus.
History will forever remember Charles Taylor, not only as a rebel leader who managed to become President of Liberia, but more as the disreputable character who brought his country down to an unimaginable lowness. And those who will argue that Charles Taylor came from no where to become something in the Liberian Affairs, will need to remember that he came from somewhere; prison. He took command of the military wing of a properly calculated plan to destabilize Liberia for one reason. Power. After ruining the countryside a few months, with villages and towns bearing the brunt of his mad campaign, he saw himself as a papa god amongst little gods and became more demanding at peace conferences than ever, with every demand meant to bring him closer to the power he wanted. Sometimes the demands were resisted and he would go to war and innocent victims were the price payers for another conference. This is the course he chose to follow until he got “what he wished for” when, in 1997, he won the Liberian presidential election landslide.
Many antagonists of the former president can’t still get over how could Liberians in their overwhelming numbers vote in power the man who butchered them. To them, it is an unsolved puzzle, but not for me. There are two cardinal constituents largely responsible for the Taylor victory in the 1997 pool. The first constituent is, eight out of every ten Liberian feared the return to war. And to them, the one man that possessed the power to detonate another war was Charles Taylor. Hence, many such thinkers reasoned that giving power to him was the only way out of the carnage we were all subjected to. As a matter of fact, they may have thought, for a man like Charles Taylor, power is everything while freedom remains at a secondary place.
The second and perhaps, the most powerful tool at the command of Charles Taylor which was well utilized during his military campaign, was not his fighting men, but rather his ability to convince his victims that he was “Sorry for the goats, chickens…my fighters stole from you…” The day Charles Taylor drove his convoy down Monrovia’s Congo Town from his Gbarnga headquarters, the reception he received rhetorically separated him from the massive destruction he carried out in Liberia. The attitude of the jubilant receptors did not signal the return of a destroyer but the triumphant entry of a hero! How could a brutal character, a man of murder receive such an ovation in the face of the facts surrounding his heinousness, you ask? The answer is found in Mr. Taylor’s numerous “I’m sorry messages run by his Gbarnga radio station. And these messages depicting his confession of responsibility and regret for the lost of lives and resources in the Liberian affairs, moved the people to believe him and took him as a sincere individual ready to repair the damages his own hands and those of others, helped fashion. More to this, these broadcast messages went beyond the bounds of factional territories; they were heard and affected residents in Monrovia and other parts aswell.
And as soon as Mr. Taylor understood the strength of the tool he had, he quickly set up another propaganda radio station (Kiss F.M). On this station, the voice of Aaron Kollie regularly sung the “I’m sorry” messages in grand style and even had music to match. This is how Mr. Taylor won the hearts of many prior to the ’97 elections. The electorates and the ordinary people may have been wrong in their decisions but the impact of a monster’s confession and constant plead for forgiveness should remind us of the reality of the power of confession, accepting responsibility and seeking forgiveness in the wrongs that we do.
You see, there is so much power in admitting to wrongs and seeking to be forgiven for those wrongs. This is said to be the beginning of genuine reconciliation. Confession in its truest sense has so much healing power for our individual soul, spirit and national psyche. And I believe this is why, as wicked as Charles Taylor is said to be, he still lives though, behind bars. I would imagine his current condition as being far better to him than if he had been caught and killed like the man he came to unseat. This is so because, while held behind bars for the second time, he will have a second opportunity to ponder his errors in the sojourns of life and help warn his adherents to move away from war and acts of violence that ruins its practitioners.
Notwithstanding, Mr. Taylor may have mesmerized an entire population but could not jump out of the catch of the “Golden Rule”. Let’s see how the law of reciprocity affected the Taylor quest: he used the daughter of the Ivorian President to make his way into Liberia to unseat doe’s government; after his election victory, another ruthless character, Sekou Damante Konneh, used the influence of Lasana Konteh’s spiritual daughter, Aicha Konneh to work his way into Liberia; Taylor employed military tactics to unseat Doe, so did Damante Konneh to unseat Taylor; Taylor enjoyed enormous external support so did Mr. Konneh; as Taylor came to power through violence, so did he leave power through violence; and so on and so forth. This is the “Peril of the Golden rule”, every man reaps what he sows, and every human action is a seed sown that must yield much fruits.
To many, the election of Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as President of the destroyed Republic was the best to ever happen in the history of a country still suffering from the hangover of a rancorous fracas. Though the electoral process that ascended Madam Sirleaf proved highly controversial, leaving its own hitches of impediments at the reconciliatory roundtable, many still boast of its transparent free and fairness. While I do not share this opinion of the professed credibility of an election result I know to be shrouded in obvious fraud, I cannot condom how political realists of yesteryear will now assume the pharisaic garment of charlatans and pusillanimous scoundrels in endorsing an unsophisticated fraud comparable to the C. D. B. King messy affairs of the 20s.
But we have some answers coming. That they are all working and seeking to work within the ranks of the present power is indicative of the fact that the progressives have departed from their own cultural heritage. This is so because, except they will debate from a Scaramouch pedestal, none can stand up to the conversation of objective political uprightness in view of the facts of fraud they have transformed as free and fair. All we now have on the landscape is a passing fantasy of a failed grouping of aged obloquies whose only purpose for mounting the political rostrum had just been made known to all. These are the tuft hunters whose 1970s conversation of a new Liberia could only be compared to the whimsical creation of a state with its pillars erected upon the tentacles of utopia. They are the campaigners of multiparty democratic Liberia who rejected the 1985 elections result on grounds of fraud but could not go to court to prove it; instead, they hurried to Libya, Burkina Faso and other secret places in search of a solution that was laid bare in the constitution they wrote with their own hands.
Paradoxically, Professor Amos Sawyer, Chairman of the National Constitution Committee, turned out to be a part of an armed insurgency that violated Article76 which defined treason against the Republic as “attempting by overt act to overthrow the Government, rebellion against the Republic, insurrection and mutiny; and abrogating or attempting to abrogate, subverting or attempting or conspiring to subvert the Constitution by use of force or show of force or any other means which attempts to undermine this Constitution.” This is the pity of the Liberian affairs. Those masterminds of a diabolical process that opened the theatre for our tragic past want us to believe that the election of Madam Sirleaf (the end) justifies the murder of more than 250 thousand innocent souls and the collapse of a whole state (the means). For such friends of power, once power is attained, everything else can wait or, go to hell! In their frantic efforts to push the facts under the Liberian carpet already stained and soaked in blood, they want to change the conversation to reconciliation without truths! God forbid this casuistry. There can be no true reconciliation without the full revelation of things that occurred within the context of the farce. And since President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is amongst those that started the 14-year war, and fortunately is the seating president that appears poised to end it, why will she not break the confession grounds with her own versions of how it all started?
Perhaps, to help her do this, which is the best way forward for the reconciliatory process in Liberia, we must all objectively reminisce the archives and remind our leaders of their roles just in case any amongst them is consign to oblivion. This is cardinal because, if the truths are not confessed from the mouths of the actors, the “Perils of the Golden Rule” has its own natural ways of dealing with such unreasonable reluctance. This is the “Fatal Crescent of the Ellen Presidency”, a missing link that may keep us all in a circle of wars unless someone is wise to break the chains. And we are all tired of wars of any sort.
In an effort to help bring out the truths, I will disagree with President Sirleaf over the pretense she brings to the conversation of the Liberian affairs dating back to the eighties. First and foremost, only modicum minds will buy the conversation that the rebellious strategy to unseat former president Samuel K. Doe was a state agenda. Never was it. The quest to unseat the then government was an option of a few in the elite clique who felt it was the easiest corridor to ascend to power. And for Madam Sirleaf, her struggle against former president Doe was a personal one by far detached from the 1985 electoral experience. When objective brains reflect Madam Sirleaf’s castigation of the Doe regime even before the 1985 Presidential elections, to the extent that she went out of the way to ridicule Mr. Doe personally, then it will be realized that President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf had something personal against the then President. Calling a seating president “idiot and fool” is not a way of correcting a system, but a perfect way of undermining it and exposing ones hatred for the leader of that arrangement. And this was not after the elections of 1985; it was a year before elections. The hatred of Madam Sirleaf against ex-President Doe was not restricted to politics, it stretched down to the suits he wore, the cars he drove, etc. On occasions, Madam Sirleaf discussed Doe’s clothes with utmost displeasure and deep-rooted malice.
It would hence be an ultimate deception for anyone to make-believe that the name Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is in anyway traceable to the true quest for Liberia’s freedom. Nay, it is not! Like many political fame seekers and power brokers, Madam Sirleaf only interest in our body politics has always been to become President, whether through chaotic means or not, is something we are now left to decipher. Truly, there is nothing wrong with one’s quest for the presidency. It is a noble quest, except that when deceptions and schemes are employed to achieve an agenda to the detriment of the entire state and its people, then the purpose for which such power is sought becomes a matter for national debate. And the fallacy that the end always justifies the means remains a high quibbling sophistry with no place in the domain of realistic intellectualism. In the school of politics, the end becomes justified in light of the practice of the rule of law and moral ethics along the way in the execution of a particular political pursuit. Without an intention to stretch that conversation any further, it is necessary to detour for a while since we are dealing with a leadership that claimed the finest credentials over the years.
Subsequently, as I watch the Liberian affairs from a vantage scaffold, I am not surprised the least at the numerous foreign trips President Sirleaf continues to make unabated. And the magniloquence and enrapturing speeches during these trips does not also come as a surprise to those of us who have cared to acquaint ourselves with the true disposition of Madam Sirleaf. These are the encomiums and cajoleries that portray Liberia to the west as a heaven-on-earth while the ordinary Liberian can no longer afford the price of a 100 lbs bag of rice. Anyway, rising prices should be expected since basic commodities must be priced upwardly to match the up-guys in power! Paradoxically however, this government is fast becoming a “down” government instead of the “UP” it is supposed to be. Market stalls, down! Civil servants, down! Transparency, down! And so forth. I have never seen such numerous protests under any government in so short a time as it is with this regime. Yet, President Sirleaf’s blandishing foreign speeches paint paradise in Liberia. What a pretense of palpability!
Getting back on the towpath of the Madam Sirleaf heirloom, all Liberians must realize that the contrariety of the President in her war role unveils that she is not an element of reconciliation. How can the President expect truth-telling at the national level when some of her past actions and discussions represent deceit and lies? For example, let’s unearth some of these embarrassing contradictions about her record of rebellion:
Mrs. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has always denied her active involvement in the NPFL-led war that turned Liberia into rubbles. During an interview with the "Palava Hut" published in the online COPLA website,
she accused Liberians of misrepresenting facts as
shown in an excerpt from that interview:
" 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."
Again, here was an opportunity for Mrs. Sirleaf to have been truthful about her actual role in the Liberian catastrophe instead; she employed chicanery and mendacity, choosing rather to blame the Liberian people for “misrepresenting facts”. For god sake, how could Madam Sirleaf describe the NPFL/ACDL as a “peaceful civilian pressure group” when she is fully aware of the unscrupulous military campaign they carried out in Liberia under the banners of the institutions named supra!
In another interview, this time with the Daily Observer, captioned: “Liberia has come full circle”, an exclusive interview with Mrs. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Mrs. Sirleaf was, as usual, questioned in regards to her relationship with Mr. Charles Taylor. Hear the question and hear her response:
"Daily Observer: Speaking of Mr. Taylor, a lot has been reported about the once close ties you had with the now exile former president. In fact some have suggested you instructed Mr. Taylor to burn Monrovia down and you would build it back up. Is there any truth to that story?
Mrs. Sirleaf: You know I'm just so fatigued with this Taylor propaganda that he put out during the period when we were trying our best to get the regime change, to get Doe out of the country. So the first thing is I never had any close ties to Mr. Taylor. I think I've met Mr. Taylor only three times in my whole life. I was working with institution here (in the United States) which on the urging of Tom Woeiyu was a part of that institution, the Association of Institutional Democracy in Liberia decided to give Mr. Taylor support when he started his movement on the basis that all of our efforts were not working so we needed like the South African experience to have some kind of a military pressure on Doe for Doe to respect Democracy and human rights and so we started that support and the minute Taylor did things that we thought were leading in the wrong direction, for example our colleague Jackson Doe and Gabriel Kpolleh, those people were killed by him. These people were close political allies of ours in the 80s. As soon as those things happened we distanced from Taylor right away and from that time I have been actively involved in mounting the campaign to make sure that Taylor did not become president that's why I went to Liberia and challenged him in the elections, of course I lost but nobody can say I had close ties to Taylor, that's just not true.”
In the first place, I would like to unravel a major contradiction in the Madam Sirleaf response to the Daily Observer question. In the previous interview, she amounts the ACDL as a civilian pressure group. To the contrary, she now acknowledges here that, in fact, it was actually intended to be a military operation. What a sad disparity. Besides, you heard Madam Sirleaf in her frantic attempt to disassociate herself from Mr. Taylor. According to her, “I have met Mr. Taylor “only three times in my whole life”. But how true is this statement? Let’s find out.
In 1999, Madam Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf attended the National Summit Conference on Africa held in Washington, D.C. While in attendance, she granted an interview with the Perspective magazine. It was later published under the heading: “Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf challenges GOL…” She was asked:
”The Perspective: You are one of Liberia's prominent politicians who have had your share of controversy as well. How would you respond to your critics who charged that you and others helped provide both the intellectual and resource foundation that helped create Taylor and ushered in the tyranny that now prevail in Liberia today. Could you comment?
Mrs. Sirleaf: .....”As for the personal relation with Mr. Taylor, I have been in his company only four times in my entire lifetime - the first time in the capacity of Finance Minister when he along with other ULAA officials visited Liberia early 1980 upon the invitation of President Tolbert. The second time was when Tom brought Mr. Taylor to meet me at an Amsterdam hotel while I was transiting through Europe sometime in 1988. The third time was on the occasion of the 1990 Annual meeting of the ADB in Abidjan. ....the fourth time was in April 1998 when officials of Unity Party and I met with him and some of his Party officials to discuss possible means for working together in the national interest."
here we stand at the crossroad of no where as far as our reconciliation drive is concerned. For how can we move away from the past when the true actors of our national calamity are presenting a fake portrait of themselves. At one point, Mrs. Sirleaf says she met Mr. Taylor only three times and at another point, “I have met him four times in my whole life”. But far from this, Mrs. Sirleaf is here giving a lot of credibility to Mr. Tom Worwoiyu as a “key” functionary and deep insider of their struggle. With such unfolding, I can now understand why she withdrew her law suit against him though he remained firm on his allegation that she knew something about the Jackson Doe murder, the Quiwonkpa episode, etc. I now understand.
In my deepest conviction, now is the time for Liberians to demand the full account of a fray that destroyed everything in our country in the last several years of unrest. And I do not think for once that the falsification, conundrum and simulacrum of President Sirleaf and others is helpful in any way. President Sirleaf must come to the full realization that her role in the hijacking of our nation-state is public knowledge that cannot evade the spontaneous scrutiny of the “Perils of the Golden Rule”. If the claim that the foundations of our freedom were erected upon the principles of Christianity is anything to go by, then we must stop the pretense and preach the message of sincerity and uprightness. For how long will we continue to flatter our leaders to the harm of the motherland!
The fact cannot be caviled that this government, like its predecessor, is a government of high profile leaders whose hands are stained with the blood of innocent babies, women and children who had to be murdered just so that they could ascend to power. And that Madam Sirleaf is showing no genuine attitude towards adjudicating justice for those poor victims is what that is setting the course for the “Fatal Crescent of the Ellen Presidency. By “fatal Crescent” I mean, the deadly circle of violence that becomes repetitive when one interrupts a democratic culture for power through the use of unconstitutional aggression. It’s a natural course beyond the control of anyone. Madam Sirleaf and others rebelled against a democratic culture, which is a fact that must always be stated. And if the justification for the rebellion was “electoral fraud” as they claimed, then they are all apostles of lawlessness because the constitution does not say one should rebel in the face of fraud. Professor Sawyer knew this, he wrote it. And they all knew it but chose to push the law aside for the inordinate quest for power. And they now want to change the conversation so the past can remain buried deep in mystery. Nay! We demand their confessions, nothing personal, just the truth. I wish they understood how much true healing awaits our scarred country just by their telling the truths! And if this point is missed, the natural course may run an unpleasant end for the Ellen Presidency, and all of us will suffer again; this is the end that could be determined from the beginning, depending on the option to be employed by President Sirleaf and her friends. Lord, save us from evil!
Therefore, our failure to unravel the truth about our chequered history sets in motion a precedence that may haunt us forever. And I have already established elsewhere that there is a law of reciprocity that executes justice in such matters as the butchering of our people with impunity. And just as you can never escape the conviction of your conscience, so is it with the “Perils of the Golden Rule”. You can’t run from it. Samuel K. Doe, Charles Taylor, Foday Sankor, Slobodan Milosevic, Laurent Kabila, Thomas Sankara, John Garan, Augustus Pinochet…they all tried but failed. Let others attempt.
The actor is Mulbah K. Morlu, Jr. and can be reached at
godsprince2001@yahoo.com. Cell: 00231-77-268-265. He resides in Monrovia and Accra and is Chairman of the Forum for the Establishment of a war Crimes Court in Liberia.
