Amid Ebola Crisis, Liberian Army Sees Its Chance at Rebranding
By HELENE COOPER
OCT. 11, 2014
New York Times
MONROVIA, Liberia — For decades, Liberians have referred to the Armed Forces of Liberia as “soldiers them.”
As in, “soldiers them came and raped my daughter.” Or “soldiers them beat my husband at the checkpoint in Paynesville.”
Now, “soldiers them” — once responsible for toppling the government, killing civilians and setting the nation on a course toward a devastating civil war — have suddenly become a linchpin in the fight against the Ebola virus rampaging through their country.
Huddled with American military personnel in the capital, Monrovia, Liberian soldiers rehearsed their roles in the effort to build 18 Ebola treatment units across the country.
“At the Monrovia medical unit yesterday, over 100 citizens were out there watching the construction,” Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commander of U.S. Army Africa, noted pointedly. Be nice to them, he instructed the group.
Joseph F. Johnson, a deputy minister at Liberia’s Defense Ministry, nodded in agreement.
“We’re trying to rebrand the A.F.L. as a force for good,” he said. “Piggyback on this.”
That is no easy task. The room where the group was meeting is just a few yards from the beach where in 1980, drunken soldiers killed 13 top Liberian government officials after staging the coup — a chilling start to the military dictatorship under Samuel K. Doe.
One of the new treatment centers being built to fight Ebola is just a few miles from a refugee camp where uniformed soldiers wielding machine guns and cutlasses slaughtered 400 men and women and 200 children in 1993 — one of many atrocities committed during the civil war that began after rebels tried to oust Mr. Doe.
Replacing such images in the public consciousness with ones of Liberian soldiers working side by side with American troops and making nice with ordinary Liberians is a tough sell, even if the enemy now is a terrifying virus steamrolling through the country, killing more than 2,300 people in six months.
Many Liberians have a love-hate relationship with the military: they love the American military; they hate their own.
Beatrice K. Yates, 45, said that only last month, Liberian soldiers beat up her son, Titus, and a friend for standing on the porch of her family’s home in Caldwell in violation of a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Ebola curfew.
“Those soldiers them came and said, ‘oh, curfew now catch y’all,’ ” Mrs. Yates said. “Please tell the American military to help us.”
The faith in the American military is rooted in historical ties between the two countries that began in 1822, when Liberia was founded by freed American slaves.
Still, the relationship has been a complicated one. The American government openly supported Mr. Doe after the coup, despite the absence of elections for years.
After the civil war ended in 2003, the Liberian government disbanded the armed forces as part of an effort to demilitarize the country and soothe residents, showing that soldiers who had committed atrocities would no longer represent them.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office in 2006, promised a new, kinder and gentler army, made up of soldiers who had been vetted and actually went through basic training — something many soldiers, particularly during the reign of President Charles G. Taylor, had not done.
The American military has had trainers in Liberia for years to help reinvent the country’s army. Now, President Obama’s decision to send American troops to build Ebola treatment units has added another layer to these already complex ties.
On Thursday afternoon, four Marine V-22 Ospreys landed at Liberia’s international airport in a thunder of noise. General Williams, the American commander here, was making plans to buzz Monrovia with the $70 million aircraft, counting on the visual and audio impact to tell Liberians that they are not alone in the Ebola fight.
At every meeting and public appearance with Brig. Gen. Daniel D. Ziankahn, his Liberian counterpart, General Williams makes a point of mentioning the partnership between the armed forces of “our great country and your great country.”
General Ziankahn is using the same playbook, and even chided the Americans for using the names of American football teams on a planning map for treatment units across the country.
“Let’s make this a combined effort,” he told the soldiers participating in the joint drill — although later in the week it was unclear whether the country’s Mighty Barrolle or I.E. (Invincible Eleven) soccer teams would join the Baltimore Ravens on the map.
General Ziankahn, the Liberian military’s chief of staff, has suspended all other training and exercises so that he can throw his entire army into the war against Ebola. He is dispatching troops to each of the treatment centers under construction, and Liberian soldiers have deployed to the borders to enforce screening measures.
Today, there are only 2,000 enlisted men and women in the Liberian armed forces. They must have a high school degree, something that Mr. Doe, at the time a master sergeant, did not have when in 1980 he led the group of soldiers who stormed the Executive Mansion and disemboweled the president. Officers must now have a university degree.
Last year, a platoon of Liberian soldiers was dispatched for peacekeeping in Mali, the first time Liberian troops have been deployed to help in another country since 1962. The mission would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago.
Tall and athletic with a propensity for quoting obscure philosophers, General Ziankahn, 43, is the face of the new Liberian military. He got his master’s in military arts and science at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
He was 9 when Liberian soldiers overthrew the government and went on a reprisal spree of rape and killings. His first interaction with soldiers came when a group of them carrying M-16s showed up the day after the coup to arrest his next-door neighbor, who was a cabinet member.
The young Daniel and his friends had seen their neighbor flee into the swamp behind their house, where he hid in the water. The boys did not turn him in. “He was good to us; he gave us yams,” General Ziankahn recalled. “This was my very first lesson on the importance of being good to people.”
Thirty-four years later, General Ziankahn says he is still trying to instill in his fledgling force the importance of that lesson. It has not always sunk in.
Two months ago, with no warning, the Liberian government sent the army and the police to impose a 21-day quarantine on West Point, a crowded slum where tens of thousands of people live, many in two-room shanties.
Clashes broke out as angry residents tried to get out. Shots were fired into the crowd, killing a 15-year-old boy.
“All those soldiers them were shooting,” Nancy Jellehs, 76, a still-angry West Point resident, said recently.
General Ziankahn was doing a two-month course at Harvard University when the quarantine and shooting took place. He hurried home and opened inquiries into the behavior of the enlisted soldiers and the officers who gave orders, promising to punish those found responsible.
“Even if there had not been a shooting, we would still be investigating, because I saw the videos and there were other violations” from soldiers, he said. Residents say that during the 10-day quarantine they routinely bribed soldiers to let them through the barricades.
Former Liberian soldiers from the war say the episode shows that even with their own bloody history, they would do a better job.
“We just coming from 14 years of civil war, and you have a soldier without experience in war as the army chief of staff?” said former Col. Richard Boyle, who served in the Liberian Army during the Doe and Taylor years, arguing that disbanded members of the old army should be reinstated.
But the war memories remain fresh, even among the new crop of soldiers. While General Ziankahn has the ramrod bearing of a military man, his second in command, Col. Prince C. Johnson III, is slighter, quicker to smile, and appears very approachable.
But he has a rather glaring issue — his name. Another Prince Johnson, also an officer in the Liberian armed forces, splintered off from Mr. Taylor in 1990 to form his own group of rebels. They eventually abducted and killed President Doe, videotaping themselves slicing off his ear while Prince Johnson watched, drinking a Budweiser from a chair as an assistant patted off his sweat with a towel.
So when people see Colonel Johnson’s name on his uniform, they blanch, even though, at 38, he was only 14 when the elder Prince Johnson killed the president.
“Yeah, I know,” Colonel Johnson said. Then he laughed. “Because of that, my son is not named Prince. He is Philip.”
 |
| Liberian newspaper being read by resident. |
OCT. 11, 2014
New York Times
MONROVIA, Liberia — For decades, Liberians have referred to the Armed Forces of Liberia as “soldiers them.”
As in, “soldiers them came and raped my daughter.” Or “soldiers them beat my husband at the checkpoint in Paynesville.”
Now, “soldiers them” — once responsible for toppling the government, killing civilians and setting the nation on a course toward a devastating civil war — have suddenly become a linchpin in the fight against the Ebola virus rampaging through their country.
Huddled with American military personnel in the capital, Monrovia, Liberian soldiers rehearsed their roles in the effort to build 18 Ebola treatment units across the country.
“At the Monrovia medical unit yesterday, over 100 citizens were out there watching the construction,” Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commander of U.S. Army Africa, noted pointedly. Be nice to them, he instructed the group.
Joseph F. Johnson, a deputy minister at Liberia’s Defense Ministry, nodded in agreement.
“We’re trying to rebrand the A.F.L. as a force for good,” he said. “Piggyback on this.”
That is no easy task. The room where the group was meeting is just a few yards from the beach where in 1980, drunken soldiers killed 13 top Liberian government officials after staging the coup — a chilling start to the military dictatorship under Samuel K. Doe.
One of the new treatment centers being built to fight Ebola is just a few miles from a refugee camp where uniformed soldiers wielding machine guns and cutlasses slaughtered 400 men and women and 200 children in 1993 — one of many atrocities committed during the civil war that began after rebels tried to oust Mr. Doe.
Replacing such images in the public consciousness with ones of Liberian soldiers working side by side with American troops and making nice with ordinary Liberians is a tough sell, even if the enemy now is a terrifying virus steamrolling through the country, killing more than 2,300 people in six months.
Many Liberians have a love-hate relationship with the military: they love the American military; they hate their own.
Beatrice K. Yates, 45, said that only last month, Liberian soldiers beat up her son, Titus, and a friend for standing on the porch of her family’s home in Caldwell in violation of a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Ebola curfew.
“Those soldiers them came and said, ‘oh, curfew now catch y’all,’ ” Mrs. Yates said. “Please tell the American military to help us.”
The faith in the American military is rooted in historical ties between the two countries that began in 1822, when Liberia was founded by freed American slaves.
Still, the relationship has been a complicated one. The American government openly supported Mr. Doe after the coup, despite the absence of elections for years.
After the civil war ended in 2003, the Liberian government disbanded the armed forces as part of an effort to demilitarize the country and soothe residents, showing that soldiers who had committed atrocities would no longer represent them.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office in 2006, promised a new, kinder and gentler army, made up of soldiers who had been vetted and actually went through basic training — something many soldiers, particularly during the reign of President Charles G. Taylor, had not done.
The American military has had trainers in Liberia for years to help reinvent the country’s army. Now, President Obama’s decision to send American troops to build Ebola treatment units has added another layer to these already complex ties.
On Thursday afternoon, four Marine V-22 Ospreys landed at Liberia’s international airport in a thunder of noise. General Williams, the American commander here, was making plans to buzz Monrovia with the $70 million aircraft, counting on the visual and audio impact to tell Liberians that they are not alone in the Ebola fight.
At every meeting and public appearance with Brig. Gen. Daniel D. Ziankahn, his Liberian counterpart, General Williams makes a point of mentioning the partnership between the armed forces of “our great country and your great country.”
General Ziankahn is using the same playbook, and even chided the Americans for using the names of American football teams on a planning map for treatment units across the country.
“Let’s make this a combined effort,” he told the soldiers participating in the joint drill — although later in the week it was unclear whether the country’s Mighty Barrolle or I.E. (Invincible Eleven) soccer teams would join the Baltimore Ravens on the map.
General Ziankahn, the Liberian military’s chief of staff, has suspended all other training and exercises so that he can throw his entire army into the war against Ebola. He is dispatching troops to each of the treatment centers under construction, and Liberian soldiers have deployed to the borders to enforce screening measures.
Today, there are only 2,000 enlisted men and women in the Liberian armed forces. They must have a high school degree, something that Mr. Doe, at the time a master sergeant, did not have when in 1980 he led the group of soldiers who stormed the Executive Mansion and disemboweled the president. Officers must now have a university degree.
Last year, a platoon of Liberian soldiers was dispatched for peacekeeping in Mali, the first time Liberian troops have been deployed to help in another country since 1962. The mission would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago.
Tall and athletic with a propensity for quoting obscure philosophers, General Ziankahn, 43, is the face of the new Liberian military. He got his master’s in military arts and science at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
He was 9 when Liberian soldiers overthrew the government and went on a reprisal spree of rape and killings. His first interaction with soldiers came when a group of them carrying M-16s showed up the day after the coup to arrest his next-door neighbor, who was a cabinet member.
The young Daniel and his friends had seen their neighbor flee into the swamp behind their house, where he hid in the water. The boys did not turn him in. “He was good to us; he gave us yams,” General Ziankahn recalled. “This was my very first lesson on the importance of being good to people.”
Thirty-four years later, General Ziankahn says he is still trying to instill in his fledgling force the importance of that lesson. It has not always sunk in.
Two months ago, with no warning, the Liberian government sent the army and the police to impose a 21-day quarantine on West Point, a crowded slum where tens of thousands of people live, many in two-room shanties.
Clashes broke out as angry residents tried to get out. Shots were fired into the crowd, killing a 15-year-old boy.
“All those soldiers them were shooting,” Nancy Jellehs, 76, a still-angry West Point resident, said recently.
General Ziankahn was doing a two-month course at Harvard University when the quarantine and shooting took place. He hurried home and opened inquiries into the behavior of the enlisted soldiers and the officers who gave orders, promising to punish those found responsible.
“Even if there had not been a shooting, we would still be investigating, because I saw the videos and there were other violations” from soldiers, he said. Residents say that during the 10-day quarantine they routinely bribed soldiers to let them through the barricades.
Former Liberian soldiers from the war say the episode shows that even with their own bloody history, they would do a better job.
“We just coming from 14 years of civil war, and you have a soldier without experience in war as the army chief of staff?” said former Col. Richard Boyle, who served in the Liberian Army during the Doe and Taylor years, arguing that disbanded members of the old army should be reinstated.
But the war memories remain fresh, even among the new crop of soldiers. While General Ziankahn has the ramrod bearing of a military man, his second in command, Col. Prince C. Johnson III, is slighter, quicker to smile, and appears very approachable.
But he has a rather glaring issue — his name. Another Prince Johnson, also an officer in the Liberian armed forces, splintered off from Mr. Taylor in 1990 to form his own group of rebels. They eventually abducted and killed President Doe, videotaping themselves slicing off his ear while Prince Johnson watched, drinking a Budweiser from a chair as an assistant patted off his sweat with a towel.
So when people see Colonel Johnson’s name on his uniform, they blanch, even though, at 38, he was only 14 when the elder Prince Johnson killed the president.
“Yeah, I know,” Colonel Johnson said. Then he laughed. “Because of that, my son is not named Prince. He is Philip.”
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