7.21.2003
Monrovia revisited
[Posted 5:05 PM by James Panero]
The United States has long needed to reconsider its Africa policy, and not only because of Bill Clinton’s misadventure in Somalia in 1993. One must remember that it was none other than Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter who acquiesced to Samuel K. Doe’s bloody 1980 coup in Liberia–the one in which President William Tolbert was disembowelled at his seaside home. In the years since, Carter’s response to the worsening Liberian situation has been to author some bad poetry, write fulsome editorials, and praise progress made by the government of warlord-turned-President Charles Taylor even as Taylor curated a private collection of human arms and noses, destablized the Congo, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone, and forced children to kill their parents in order to make them into better soldiers.
If you are on the lookout for a different POV, Armavirumque would like to remind readers that New Criterion writer Anthony Daniels has written extensively on contemporary Africa, particularly in his book Monrovia Mon Amour. Here is a link to a recent piece on Charles Taylor.