"We're deeply concerned that the condition of the Liberian people is getting worse and worse", US President George Bush declared on July 25, announcing that he had ordered three ships, with 2500 marines aboard, to the war-ravaged west African country.
The Bush administration has come under considerable public criticism from US liberals and humanitarian organisations for its apparent reluctance to intervene in Liberia. However, the humanitarian disaster in Liberia is the product of a long history of US intervention.
Liberia had its origins as a US colonial enterprise. It was set up in 1822, not by "freed US slaves", as most of corporate media claims, but by the American Colonization Society, an organisation run by rich US slave owners with the aim of settling black Americans in Africa rather than according them equal citizenship rights in the US.
When Liberia was granted formal independence in 1847, its US-created constitution accorded citizenship only to the country's black American immigrants and their descendants (who at the time numbered no more than 13,000 people). The indigenous inhabitants — 95% of Liberia's population — did not get the vote until 1951.
Throughout most of its history, Liberia was ruled by an oligarchy of Americo-Liberian landowners closely linked to US corporations which controlled the country's principal exports — rubber, iron ore and diamonds.
In 1980, President William Tolbert — who had moved to strengthen Liberia's ties with other African countries, including those aligned with the Soviet Union — was overthrown in a CIA-engineered military coup that brought Master-Sergeant Samuel Doe to power.
In exchange for military assistance and loans from Washington, Doe implemented a program of public spending cuts dictated by the US-dominated International Monetary Fund. This led to rising unemployment, falling export revenue and spiralling public debt. By 1987, almost all of the government's income came directly from the US.
Doe's regime was propped up by Washington because Liberia provided a key base in Africa for US covert operations during the Cold War — for example, being the conduit for arms to the US- and South African-backed UNITA mercenaries in their war against the radical Angolan government.
Beginning in December 1989, Charles Taylor — a former official in Doe's regime — led a rebel force against Doe's regime, which reached the country's capital, Monrovia, in July 1990. Washington, reluctant to lose an "asset" in which it had invested millions, encouraged Nigeria and other members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to occupy Monrovia with 6000 troops.
After Doe was killed by the rebels in September 1990, ECOWAS organised the appointment of exiled opposition politician Amos Sawyer as interim president and a six-year civil war ensured, in which at least 150,000 civilians were slaughtered and country's economy and social services completely collapsed.
In 1997, Taylor was elected president in UN-supervised elections and ECOWAS forces withdrew a year later. In September 2000, Liberia was again plunged into civil war, after Taylor was indicted by a UN-sponsored tribunal for "crimes against humanity" based on his support for the Revolutionary United Front, one of the main factions in neighbouring Sierra Leone's civil war.
Liberia is a text-book example of how the rich capitalist countries' imposition of neoliberal austerity and privatisation programs upon the poor countries has led to a growing number of "failed states".
Denied access to modern technology (which is monopolised by the corporations of the rich countries) and therefore unable to compete in a global market permanently rigged against them, underdeveloped countries are caught in a vicious spiral of mounting foreign debt and cutbacks on health, education, housing and job creation in order to pay the interest on foreign loans and in order to import products from the rich countries.
This spiral pushes them toward total economic collapse and social disintegration. Then, under the cover of providing "humanitarian aid", the rich countries and their servile agents in other poor countries, dispatch troops to "restore law and order" or "keep peace" — when, in fact, their aim is to strengthen Western corporate control over the poor countries' natural resources and labour force.
A humanitarian disaster has existed in Liberia for more than a decade. Washington's decision to intervene at this moment is not motivated by concern for the welfare of the Liberian people, but to politically rehabilitate its use of military force in more economically important areas of the Third World after the political debacle of its unwelcome "liberation" of the people of Iraq from their oil resources.
From Green Left Weekly, August 13, 2003.
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