Africa The Would-Be President

By Bruce W. Nelan

President Samuel Doe claims that he has put down more than 30 coup attempts since he seized power, as Master Sergeant Doe, in an army uprising ten years ago. But the dictator's string of victories seems to have run out. A force of some 5,000 rebels last week captured the Roberts Field International Airport; occupied the Firestone rubber plantation, the country's largest private employer; and drew up on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital. Refusing to resign or flee, Doe barricaded himself in the executive mansion with several hundred members of his Israeli-trained elite guard. He vowed that the insurgents would take the city "over my dead body."

That is, of course, a real possibility in a rebellion as bloody as this one. Aspiring to succeed Doe is Charles McArthur Taylor, a former Liberian official who led about 150 guerrillas across the border from the Ivory Coast last Christmas Eve. Recruits flocked to the rebel ranks after the army, headed by members of Doe's minority Krahn tribe, staged a series of reprisal attacks on the villages of the Gio and Mano tribes in Taylor's base area.

Human rights organizations refer to Doe's decade in power as a reign of terror. His government was brutal and corrupt; the country is nearly $2 billion in debt and virtually bankrupt. It is not certain, however, that Taylor will be an improvement. While he talks about free elections, he does not specify when they might take place.

Short, stocky, bearded and a teetotaler, Taylor, 42, is the son of a Liberian mother and an American father. He was born and grew up in Liberia but attended Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. After earning a B.A. in economics in 1977, he continued to be active in emigre Liberian organizations and worked as a mechanic in Boston.

Doe's coup in 1980 made him the first head of state who was not an "Americo-Liberian," the local term for descendants of the freed slaves from the U.S. who founded the country in 1822. Although Doe promptly executed many Americo-Liberians, Taylor returned to Monrovia to volunteer his services. He was appointed head of the General Services Administration, the government's purchasing agency. In 1983, after hearing that Doe was about to try him on charges of embezzling $900,000, he fled to the U.S. He was arrested near Boston and held for extradition but escaped from jail and found his way back to Africa. In recent years he has lived in Burkina Faso and has visited Libya, where he and his original group of about 15 rebels received military training.

Because of those Libyan links and uncertainty about how effectively Taylor might govern Liberia, Washington distrusts him. All American citizens have been urged to leave. Four U.S. warships are stationed off the coast to evacuate them if necessary. Taylor says U.S. suspicions are misplaced. He describes himself as "a cold-blooded capitalist" and has said that his heroes are "Tricky Dick Nixon" and "good old Ronnie." State Department analysts believe that there is in fact little ideological difference between Taylor and Doe and that their struggle is simply for power. The U.S. provided Doe with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid over the past ten years, but last week it turned down his pleas for intervention.

Meanwhile, the war grows more brutal. In Buchanan, the country's second largest city, the rebels are believed to have killed at least 100; many were reportedly lined up and shot. Most of the victims belonged to the Mandingo tribe, considered a Doe ally by the guerrillas. The government's hands are also bloodied: dozens of Gio and Mano tribespeople have been abducted in Monrovia, and every day decapititated and disemboweled bodies are discoverd in the streets.

Although he is winning, Taylor may not firmly control his own forces. Diplomats in Monrovia have detected splits in his National Patriotic Front. There have been reports of fire fights between rebel units, which are made up of poorly trained and undisciplined volunteers. Making things even tougher for Taylor, his principal military tactician, Elmer Johnson, a U.S. Army veteran, was killed in a skirmish with government forces last week.

In spite of these setbacks to the rebel side, most Western diplomats in Monrovia are convinced that Doe is finished. The question is whether Taylor deserves to succeed him half as much as Doe deserves his downfall.

With reporting by Gerald Bourke/Monrovia and David Cemlyn-Jones/Nairobi