Twenty-one years after Liberia’s political elite acquiesced to “negative peace,” the US now champions the fight against impunity. Except when their own companies are involved.
At a hearing this summer about a war and economic crimes tribunal for Liberia, US Rep. Chris Smith twisted the history of Africa’s first republic. Ignoring that many of the Black emigrants who established Liberia were not born enslaved, Smith claimed, “Liberia was founded by free American slaves.” Ignoring Washington’s perennial imperialism against Monrovia, he extolled “attention by Congress to Liberia” as “helpful and appreciated.” Ignoring Black settler rule under an anti-Black world order, he asserted that Liberia “vigorously rejected” not only slavery but also “all of the evils associated with it.” Ignoring Liberia’s Indigenous populace and sovereignty alike, he touted its “relationship with the better aspects of the ‘old country.’”
It is no coincidence that Smith used the occasion to peddle such falsehoods. The movement to prosecute those who committed atrocities during Liberia’s successive civil wars (1989–2003) is gaining momentum. In May, Liberian President Joseph Boakai signed Executive Order 131, establishing the Office of a War and Economic Crimes Court for Liberia. Fifteen years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia (TRC) urged that an extraordinary criminal court prosecute perpetrators, accountability could finally arrive.
Liberia’s tribunal, however, has already come under attack. It is the latest theater where US policymakers are wrestling for neocolonial control. Smith epitomizes the threat. He has pressed Liberia to give Alan White—a lobbyist registered with the US government—influence over the proceedings.
White’s conflicts of interest are as numerous as they are naked. He and his business partner have lobbied Congress on behalf of Liberian powerbrokers, including a client whom the TRC urged be prosecuted. White’s firm pledged that its lobbying would “take advantage of the US Government’s leadership role in the establishment of the Liberia War and Economic Crimes Court.” While promoting his dubious agenda, White has impugned human rights defenders in Liberia and the US.
The US State Department, meanwhile, is also backing the tribunal. Beth Van Schaack, the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, has visited Liberia repeatedly and offered to conditionally fund the tribunal. Though attacks against her by White and his associates are scurrilous, Van Schaack’s support has its own strings attached.
“I want to emphasize,” Van Schaack said in an address to the Liberian public, “that the creation of a war and economic crimes court is not about laying blame or dredging up a painful history.” Her remarks beg the question: What, exactly, is the court about if not blame?
No one trying to steer Liberia’s tribunal from Washington has admitted that the US and its corporate interests fueled the mass violence, which killed as many as 250,000 Liberians. While purporting to champion accountability, Washington has neglected its own complicity.
Dolo’s Town, a community surrounded by the Firestone rubber plantation, attests as much. Its corrugated roofs give way to an immense lattice of rubber saplings. I traveled there last year to speak with Fayah Shello, a resident who spent decades tapping latex for Firestone.
Shello reported that the company had cut his pension, making it difficult to live. In his elder years, Shello said, he has needed to work as a security guard—and, even still, found himself “sleeping among mosquitoes,” given that his windows have no panes. While Shello credited Firestone for his career, he felt betrayed: retirement was supposed to spare him from poverty. (Per customary expectations, I compensated Shello for his time.)
An interview with the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) echoed Shello’s account. FAWUL faults Firestone for outsourcing its pensions to Liberia’s social security agency, which lacks the means to pay them. For its part, Firestone has defended the validity of its arrangement.
The dispute reflects how deeply US corporations, and their profit incentives, have shaped Liberia’s recent history. By 1980, the year that Samuel Doe’s coup ended Black settler rule, US interests in Liberia surpassed US$300 million. Over the next quarter century, Washington protected its investments at any cost to Liberian lives. Thanks to US backing, Doe’s autocratic regime ruled for a decade. After rebel forces killed Doe, the US threw its support behind Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL).
Anxious to keep latex flowing, Firestone paid Taylor millions in tax revenue. It safeguarded white managers but did nothing when the NPFL (and, later, peacekeeping troops) massacred Liberian civilians on the plantation. The TRC named Firestone as an “alleged perpetrator” and recommended the company be prosecuted for aiding and abetting economic crimes.
Smith, White, and Van Schaack have all invoked the US and Liberia’s “special relationship” to justify their stake in the tribunal. One of White’s associates even cited Firestone as evidence of the enduring bond. It is only right, he testified, for the US to make Liberia “the foundation for a renewed human rights regime.”
Recent events indicate what that “regime” entails. Shortly after the hearing in Washington, Boakai named Jonathan Massaquoi, a lawyer with clear conflicts of interest and the reported favorite of Smith and White’s, to lead the office established by Executive Order 131. Liberia’s human rights community denounced the move, spurring Boakai to back down. On Liberia’s Independence Day, Liberian scholar Robtel Neajai Pailey decried Washington’s record of exploitation, warning against its control of the tribunal. The US envoy walked out in protest.
The irony, of course, is that the US not only spurred mass violence but also failed time and again to act against it. Throughout Liberia’s war years, the TRC found, Washington had abandoned “the notion of ‘special and traditional’ relationship with Liberia which under current policies has no meaning to the USA.”
Twenty-one years after Liberia’s political elite acquiesced to “negative peace,” the US claims the fight against impunity as its own. Any honest appraisal of impunity would ask why corporations such as Firestone remain dominant—and Liberians such as Shello, dispossessed.
This piece builds upon a 2023 Graduate Research Fellowship that the author received from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
