After the Takeover, Revenge

Victims buried in a mass grave as Doe consolidates his power

A crowd of angry Liberians shouted insults and hurled rocks last week at the body of their assassinated President, William Tolbert, which had been dumped in a mass grave alongside 27 other victims of a predawn coup d'etat the previous weekend. Pockets of loyalist resistance remained; there was at least one fight between opposing military factions. For the most part, however, the new government, led by a natty master sergeant named Samuel Doe, 28, appeared to be in firm control.

One of Doe's first acts after seizing power was to order the release of some 50 leaders of the opposition Progressive People's Party whom Tolbert had jailed early last month. One of his next acts was to order the immediate roundup of 91 officials of the Tolbert regime. Within days, eleven former ministers, including Tolbert's brother Frank, a onetime leader of the Liberian Senate, were standing trial on charges of "high treason, rampant corruption and gross violation of human rights." Several others, among them the slain President's two sons, were in hiding.

On arrival in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, late last week, TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Jack White found the country quickly returning to normal. Reported White: "On the 30-mile drive from the airport into the city, there were few visible signs of the revolution. A red-and-white banner draped on a building read, OUR EYES ARE OPEN: THE TIME OF THE PEOPLE HAS COME. At the modernistic executive mansion where Tolbert had died, security was minimal. A lone trooper stood watch at the gate, while a mere handful of armed soldiers milled around inside. At the seaside Ducor Inter-Continental Hotel, a sign in the lobby admonished guests to obey the dusk-to-dawn curfew. Its message: STAY OFF THE STREETS AND STAY ALIVE."

The coup set off a wave of elation among Liberia's native population, usually called "country people." Waving palm fronds and chanting anti-Tolbert slogans, thousands poured into the streets. Many of them flocked to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center to jeer at the exhibited corpses of Tolbert and the others who had been killed in the fighting. Later the bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave in downtown Monrovia as hundreds looked on approvingly.

Like most of his political predecessors, Tolbert was one of the "settlers," or Americo-Liberians, descended from the freed American slaves who founded the West African nation in 1847. Throughout Liberia's history, the settler group dominated both the government and the economy of Africa's oldest republic, despite the fact that it represented only about 3% of the country's 1.7 million people. Tolbert, a Baptist minister who had served 20 years as vice president, made a degree of headway in reforming the top leadership after he assumed the presidency in 1971. Alarmed by an outbreak of rioting last year over a government proposal to raise the price of rice as a spur to production, he supported a constitutional amendment giving most tribal Liberians the right to vote for the first time. But this reform came too late to assuage a growing civilian opposition to his rule as well as deepening resentment in his own armed forces. In the end, it was a band of country people in the enlisted ranks of the army who overthrew him.

Sergeant Doe, now Africa's youngest strongman, became enraged at Tolbert during last year's rice riots. A brisk, jaunty, slightly built man, he is the son of an impoverished farmer from the small Krahn tribe. He left school after the eleventh grade and joined the army. Last year he took an advanced training course from a U.S. Army special forces detachment in Liberia. Like Flight Lieut. Jerry Rawlings, 33, who led a coup in neighboring Ghana last year, Doe has a flair for the dramatic. During his first TV address as head of state, he wore sunglasses and a well-pressed fatigue uniform with a hand grenade dangling from one pocket. Newly installed in the executive mansion, Doe summoned the ranking U.S. diplomat, Charge d'Affaires Julius Walker, and sent his new Foreign Minister, former Opposition Leader Gabriel Baccus Matthews, together with a contingent of troops, to get him. Matthews showed up still dressed in the tattered shorts he had been wearing when released from jail only a few hours before.

Doe spoke last week of seeking good relations with all "peace-loving nations," and ended his speeches with the P.P.P. opposition slogan, "In the cause of the people, the struggle continues." Western diplomats believe his coup was motivated primarily by resentment against the long-dominant settler community. But Doe has said he is not out to persecute the Americo-Liberians, emphasizing: "I can assure you we are not for discrimination." He pledged himself to fight both the country's raging inflation and its 50% unemployment rate. One of his first decrees, which was both a gesture of gratitude and a bid for future support, was to raise the monthly pay of Liberian army privates from $85 to $250 a month. qed

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