Voice of Liberia

 28th  January 2010

Press statement

A few days ago, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, during her fifth State of the Union address emblazoned from the plinth of the joint assembly of the National Legislature, committed the unpardonable political peccadillo; blasphemy against the rule of law, the constitution, and democracy. Amidst the warm cheers and applause of staunch loyalists transported to the venue for the purpose, she defiantly vowed to be a ‘Contestant and formidable force’ in Elections 2011, maliciously disregarding and trampling underfoot recommendations of the TRC, which was passed into law in the same room where the President now stood to tear it apart for the dustbin.

This sacrilegious action of Mrs. Sirleaf as national leader and President is a successful throwback in postwar democratic gains, and robotically establishes disturbing realities that indisputably erase any remaining distinction between the incumbent and her predecessors, whom she help to obviously dethroned on grounds of dictatorship. The heretic town-cry of the President could dangerously undermine stability and national recovery efforts on a number of identifiable fronts:

• It has sadly interrupted the process of nurturing and building genuine postwar democracy solely on the rule of law;
• The pronouncement reveals a grand conspiracy to crush penal actions against blood-shedders by suffocating and suspending activities on the TRC report for at least eight more years, an elastic tenure of the Sirleaf regime to allow criminals to complete their full cycle of thievery and plunder while afloat the wings of impunity.
• The Sirleaf parliamentary provocation unveils the birth of a right-wing dictatorship and totalitarianism in postwar Liberia, where the Head of State, and not the constituents determines which laws are to be obeyed by usually corrupt big shots, while poor civil servants are dismissed for stealing a loaf of bread;
• The Sirleaf defiance if permitted, radicalizes civil conflict and makes violence a tolerable method of political ascendancy, suggesting it as a pattern of the democratic process since punishments( in her context) are not necessary, no matter the extent of the bloodbath;
• The Independent Commission on Human Rights is blatantly compromised and robbed of its prosecutorial and implementation powers, thereby rendering the millions expended on the TRC process, a waste of national and international resources;
• Lastly, unless Mrs. Sirleaf is halted from her desecrating political apostasy, she has opened wide the floodgate for hardened war criminals, buffoons and armed robbers to seek the noblest of offices in Liberia, as made evident by the Prince Johnson teasing presidential aspiration, et cetera.

Additionally, the current horizon being threaded by President Sirleaf is a serious threat to peace and national security and therefore cannot be condoned; that the President prioritizes her presidential interests above the interests of more than 250,000 butchered victims of war, the slain on whose behalf the TRC prudently acted, translates into insensitive mayhem adopted to protect elites’ interests and class sympathies.

Needless to argue the immoral component of her declaration, which embarrassingly deviates from her one-term commitment, the current leadership has transgressed the morals of democracy and placed all warlords in one bracket, against the ordinary Liberian community; victims of rape, violence, massacre, torture and economic deprivation, in the other. This is a critical challenge that must be faced to move the nation away from the senseless violence that choked national growth and decimated human life while the majority of those now in power lived in the safety of oversea homes.

As we meet the challenge, we remain conscious that there have always been two frontlines, two sides of the coin, two sides in war; and it’s always the poor versus the rich, the weak against the strong, and now it’s warmongers against the sons and daughters; brothers and sisters of decimated war victims. With seemingly enormous peril confronting this endeavor, we elect to erect a fortress of resistance against these warlords’ second-term agenda.

In the days ahead, we will ensconce and expand this new nonviolent militancy approach, which we now declared under the banners of unspecified civil disobedience against the insensate political intrigues of Mrs. Sirleaf and her blood-lords. During this time, key government facilities will be targeted with assemblies of nonviolent crusaders who will gather daily to unrelentingly protest the imposition. Placards will be carried depicting anti-warlords’ election messages, while hunger strikes will be simultaneously held before strategic agencies. Hence, as President Sirleaf has defied the verdict of over 3 million Liberians, we, too have chosen to fearlessly defy in a nonviolent way any socio-political regulation or decree intended to protect the pleasure and comfort of public offices. This we shall not cease to do until the full implementation of the TRC recommendation is convincingly and unconditionally begun.

This statement, on behalf of the organization, was signed by:

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Mulbah K. Morlu, Jr.
National Chairman