TNR: Liberian dictator tied to al Qaeda
CoolHandDuke TheBlueDevilMan
Double Take
by Ryan Lizza
Post date 11.08.01 | Issue date 11.19.01
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/111901/lizza111901.html
On September 19, 1998, the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia, was
attacked by the forces of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. According to
an internal State Department report on the incident obtained by The New
Republic, Taylor's police, pursuing a local warlord seeking protection
at the embassy gates, laid siege to the building using AK-47s and at
least one rocket-propelled grenade. In the ensuing firefight, one
American embassy official was shot in the lower back. Although the
warlord and 23 of his men reached safety in the embassy compound,
Taylor, who had ordered the attack, apparently thought they were dead
and issued a statement of regret over the incident. When a Liberian
government official learned they were alive and about to be evacuated by
air, however, he informed the United States that Taylor would order his
forces to shoot down the helicopters. Taylor eventually relented, and
the men were flown to a third country.
Following the attack, some on the Hill called for closing the embassy.
But the Clinton administration didn't let the incident interfere with
its efforts to coddle Taylor, the man responsible for more than a decade
of bloody warfare in Liberia and its neighbors, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Here's one choice excerpt from the State Department's official response
to the attack: "The United States would like to sincerely thank the
Government of Liberia, and especially President Charles Taylor, for the
enormous cooperation and assistance we received in amicably resolving
the situation at the US embassy in Monrovia.... [W]e look forward to
continuing our close cooperation with the Government."
Why does this matter today? Because we now know, thanks to a detailed
report last week by Douglas Farah in The Washington Post, that something
else of great importance happened in Liberia in September 1998: Osama
bin Laden's Al Qaeda network opened shop there. According to Farah, one
of bin Laden's top aides, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, arrived in Monrovia
and met with one of Taylor's longtime lieutenants, Ibrahim Bah. Together
they flew in a government helicopter to meet with a senior commander of
the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the vicious rebel army controlled
by Taylor that has controlled the diamond mines of Sierra Leone for the
last four years. A few weeks later two Al Qaeda terrorists wanted for
the American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania arrived with
$100,000 in cash to buy the first pouch of diamonds from the RUF. Since
then, Farah reports, bin Laden has raised millions--perhaps tens of
millions--of dollars buying cut-rate RUF diamonds and selling them in
Europe. A European investigator told Farah that the Liberian diamond
connection has become so important to bin Laden, "that to cut off al
Qaeda funds and laundering activities you have to cut off the diamond
pipeline."
This is all very bad news for Taylor's apologists and business
associates in the United States--a motley crew that includes Jesse
Jackson, Pat Robertson, New Jersey Representative Donald Payne, and
former Massachusetts Democratic Party Chairman Lester Hyman. Until now,
they could argue that Taylor was just a garden-variety strongman, no
different than the dozens of others who dot the political landscape of
the Third World. But now we know that the Liberian dictator is not just
a menace to West Africa; he is a menace to the United States as well.
That Taylor has ties to Al Qaeda shouldn't be terribly surprising. Since
becoming president in 1997, Taylor has run Liberia like a giant criminal
enterprise, attracting South African mercenaries, Latin American drug
lords, and Ukrainian mobsters to Monrovia. Middle Eastern terrorists
were bound to find their way there eventually.
Indeed, even as the Clinton administration was treating Taylor as a
statesman in the 1990s, some observers warned that Liberia was becoming
a haven for transnational criminal syndicates. "When I met with
mid-level officials at the [Defense Intelligence Agency], they told me
they were sending one alarming report after another up the ladder at the
Department of Defense, but no one was listening," says Joseph Opala, a
professor at James Madison University and an expert on the region. "They
were warning of RUF/Taylor contacts with international crime groups in
France and the Ukraine. They were concerned about the RUF helping
international drug dealers launder their cash earnings via diamonds.
They were also concerned that [Sierra Leone] was being used as a
transshipment point for drugs from South America and Asia into the U.S.
and Western Europe. They urged me to write something for the newspapers
because no one in the government would pay attention to them."
One reason the Clinton administration didn't pay attention was that here
in the United States, a circle of influential Americans was busy either
painting Taylor as a fledgling democrat or pursuing their own sketchy
economic opportunities in Liberia--or both. Jesse Jackson, Clinton's
envoy to Africa, befriended Taylor in early 1998 on a visit to Liberia
(see "Where Angels Fear to Tread," July 24, 2000). When he returned to
the United States, he held a conference in Chicago to help burnish the
warlord's image. He also encouraged Americans to invest in the war-torn
country. (According to Liberian businessmen, at least one of Jackson's
friends eventually used Jackson's connection to Taylor to get into the
telecommunications business in Monrovia.) Jackson compared the RUF to
Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, and just weeks after bin
Laden's terrorists made their first RUF diamond deal, he was in Sierra
Leone pleading with civil society leaders to "reach out" to the
notorious rebel group. Most importantly--and ruinously for the
region--Jackson helped pressure the government of Sierra Leone to
appease Taylor, and to sign a settlement with the RUF, the Lomé accord,
that gave the rebels amnesty and invited them into the government. The
agreement soon fell apart, when the RUF took 500 UN peacekeepers
hostage.
In Congress, Democrat Donald Payne of New Jersey, another American
official cultivated by Taylor, used his perch on the House Africa
Subcommittee to fend off legislative proposals that got tough on Taylor.
As late as 1999, when Taylor's links to the RUF had been amply
documented even by the Clinton State Department, Payne opposed language
in a House resolution accusing Taylor of supporting the rebels. One
Taylor acolyte who had Payne's ear was Omrie Golley, a RUF negotiator
and associate of Bah, the Taylor underling who brought Al Qaeda diamond
buyers to Liberia. On a visit to the United States in February 1999,
Golley met with Payne and Clinton administration officials and was
instrumental in gaining American support for the Lomé accord.
Democrats aren't the only ones who have reached out to Taylor, however.
Pat Robertson, the conservative televangelist and onetime GOP
presidential hopeful, actually went into business with the Liberian
dictator. In 1999 a Robertson company called Freedom Gold inked a deal
with Taylor to mine in a 900-square-kilometer section of southeastern
Liberia. The Liberian government even issued a press release in which
Robertson was quoted as saying, "I pray that this investment may become
a wonderful blessing to the people of Liberia."
In truth, investments in Liberia generally become blessings only to
Taylor. To an extraordinary extent, Taylor runs Liberia as a personal
fiefdom, deciding unilaterally what to do with the revenues from state
ventures. Indeed, his personal control over the country's resources was
codified last year in a new law that states, "The President of the
Republic of Liberia is hereby granted the sole power to execute,
negotiate and conclude all commercial contracts or agreements with any
foreign or domestic investor for the exploitation of the strategic
commodities of the Republic of Liberia."
In other words, Robertson is in business (Taylor owns 10 percent of
Freedom Gold) with a man who, through his underlings in the RUF, is in
business with Al Qaeda. And it is entirely possible that money washes
from one enterprise into the other. For as much as Robertson might like
to pretend that any profits Taylor accrues from the Freedom Gold
partnership are being used to buy Bibles for Liberian children, the
truth is that Taylor's top fiscal priority is arming the RUF and
maintaining control over Sierra Leone's diamonds--the same diamonds
whose sale funds Al Qaeda.
Out of all the American VIPs who have supported Taylor over the years,
perhaps none is as intimately connected to the dictator as Lester Hyman,
a discreet Washington lawyer renowned in Democratic Party circles. A
self-described "protege of John F. Kennedy" who once chaired the
Massachusetts Democratic Party, Hyman has been an adviser to eight
presidential candidates and helped Clinton vet nominees for his Cabinet
and the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton personally asked her husband to
appoint Hyman to the commission that oversaw the design of the FDR
memorial. And, on and off for the last decade, Hyman has been Charles
Taylor's representative in Washington.
The association started in the early '90s, after Taylor invaded Liberia
with a small force and quickly took control of much of the countryside.
From a command post in the town of Gbarnga, Taylor set up his
provisional National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government
(NPRAG). Hyman was hired to represent NPRAG in the United States, and
apparently became a great admirer of the warlord. In August 1991 Hyman
spent a week in Taylor-controlled territory. And while human rights
groups were documenting Taylor's mounting abuses, Hyman wrote a
Panglossian report on Taylor and NPRAG intended for American officials.
Taylor "considers himself a believer in democracy" and "seems very
family-oriented," noted Hyman, adding, "His family, including his little
daughter Sharon, were with him often." Of Taylor's notorious child
soldiers--some not yet teenagers--Hyman wrote, "they are extraordinarily
well-disciplined. Their bearing is erect--they conduct themselves as
soldiers (saluting, coming to attention, responding to orders, etc.)."
In a personal letter to Jimmy Carter the following year, Hyman argued
that Taylor "has no extraterritorial ambitions whatsoever; his sole goal
is to restore peace, democracy and prosperity to Liberia." At the time,
Taylor was sponsoring the nascent RUF rebellion in Sierra Leone.
In early 1993 Hyman stopped representing Taylor (apparently because of
financial differences), but when Taylor took power in 1997, Hyman was
one of the first Americans he called. Taylor had just presided over a
war of incredible barbarity that left 85 percent of the Liberian
population dead, injured, or displaced. Yet, in August of that year,
Hyman wrote to him: "With your high intelligence, charismatic leadership
qualities and strength of purpose, I know that you are capable of
achieving great deeds on behalf of your country." In Washington, Hyman
worked tirelessly on Taylor's behalf. He had dozens of conversations
with senior Clinton officials and members of Congress with influence
over Africa policy. He arranged a meeting between Hillary Clinton and
Charles Taylor's wife, Jewel. In a major coup, the former Massachusetts
politico helped convince a Plymouth, Massachusetts, district attorney to
drop outstanding charges against Taylor stemming from his escape from
jail there in 1985. And, of course, Hyman urged the administration to
engage Taylor, which meant downplaying his government's human rights
abuses, and overlooking Liberia's transformation into a gangster state.
These efforts eventually paid off--for Hyman as well as for Taylor. For
many years, one of Liberia's most consistent and lucrative revenue
streams had been a U.S.-based ship registry company called International
Registries Inc. (IRI). This flag of convenience register allows ships
from anywhere in the world to sail under the Liberian flag irrespective
of where they are based. The register collects taxes and other dues from
the shipholders, keeps a profit and sends the rest back to the Liberian
government. During the civil war, the company provided some 90 percent
of Liberia's total state budget--but the money went to the
internationally recognized government in Monrovia, not to Taylor's
NPRAG. And so one of Hyman's first missions after Taylor became
president was to wrestle control of the ship registry away from the
company that had refused to recognize Taylor all those years. In 1999,
after a mess of litigation, IRI finally relinquished control of the
registry to a new U.S. company, Liberian International Ship and
Corporate Registry, based in Virginia. The chairman of LISCR? Lester
Hyman.
Which brings us back to the RUF and Al Qaeda. For 50 years, IRI operated
its ship registry at arm's-length from the Liberian government. But it
appears that under Hyman, the registry has worked hand in glove with
Taylor. A recent lawsuit against LISCR filed by IRI put it this way:
LISCR "is a major source of Liberia's income for [financial and military
aid to the RUF] and a handy honey pot for lining the pockets of
Liberia's current president, Charles Taylor." And two weeks ago, a UN
report confirmed these charges. It showed that in 2000, almost $1
million was paid directly by LISCR to entities involved in smuggling
weapons to Liberia (including 1,000 submachine guns from Uganda) in
contravention of UN sanctions. The United Nations has also documented
the registry's role in illicit diamond transactions. The recent UN
report concludes that the Liberian Bureau of Maritime Affairs--the
government entity that oversees LISCR--is "little more than a cash
extraction operation and cover from which to fund and organize opaque
off-budget expenditures including for sanctions-busting." In other
words, LISCR funds the Liberian maritime bureau, which in turn funds
illicit weapons purchases for Charles Taylor and the RUF. (According to
the United Nations, Hyman stepped down as chairman of LISCR earlier this
year, and it is unclear if he is still a shareholder in the company. A
Hyman spokeswoman told tnr that he was recuperating from hip replacement
surgery and unavailable for comment.)
September 11, and Farah's revelations about the RUF's links to Al Qaeda,
put all this in a rather different light. A financial relationship with
Charles Taylor no longer just supports a brutal African army terrorizing
far away people; it tacitly supports a terrorist organization dedicated
to the destruction of the United States. Last week the cruise line Royal
Caribbean appeared to concede as much when it announced it would no
longer use the Liberian ship registry for its large passengerships. What
will it take before Taylor's American partners and apologists do the
same?
[RYAN LIZZA is an associate editor at TNR.]
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