Why shouldn’t one of Liberia’s most infamous psychopaths become its president?
Human rights are universal and indivisible, existing as they do in an unexplored metaphysical sphere in which the European Court of Human Rights plays the role of Christopher Columbus. So it is a wonderful thing to see the court’s discoveries accepted, applied and even extended in a country in which its writ does not yet run, namely Liberia, in West Africa.
There, a man called Prince Y Johnson is running for president in the forthcoming elections. When I met him, a little more than 20 years ago, he was Field Marshal Brigadier-General Prince Y Johnson, but just as he awarded himself these ranks, so he has now divested himself of them.
In those days it was advisable, or so I was told, to visit the Field Marshal in the morning, before he had drunk too much beer and smoked too much dope: for in the event of intoxication he was inclined to take up his AK47 and go round shooting people more or less at random. When I met him, he was affable enough, but I can’t say that I trusted him entirely.
Johnson was principally famous for having led one of the armed factions in the Liberian civil war, the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, that had so destroyed the country that traders of Lebanese extraction fled Liberia for the relative safety of Beirut. Johnson’s greatest military exploit was the capture of the then-president, Samuel Doe, whom he subsequently had tortured to death in front of him, an event so historic that Johnson thought it worthy of capture on video: a video of which he is sufficiently proud that he offered to show it to visiting foreigners.
In the video Johnson sits at a table drinking Budweiser while in front of him, naked and trussed like a chicken, sits the former president. Johnson orders Doe’s ears to be cut off, and they are. It becomes clear that one motives for the torture, apart from to procure Doe’s death, is to make him divulge, before he expires, the numbers of his bank accounts in London, where it is assumed that he has salted away his ill-gotten gains.
Doe was not an admirable man, and no mean killer himself. It is widely believed that he participated personally in the massacre at St Peter’s Church, Monrovia, where about 600 people who had taken refuge there were mowed down with machine-guns by his men, maddened by their impending defeat at the hands of the rebels. The outlines of the bodies in the dried blood were still visible when I visited the church. I found a New Testament there, in which a young girl,
Martha D. Z. Sonyah, recorded her decision to receive Christ as her Saviour seven days before she was shot and then buried in a mass grave.
Dr Ameche, a Nigerian long resident in Liberia, and practically the only doctor left in Monrovia still in practice at the time, told me how Johnson had had him up against the wall ready to shoot him because he had told Johnson that it was his duty as a doctor to treat the wounded of all sides, and not just those of Doe’s faction, the INPFL. Fortunately, Johnson thought better of it, because Dr Ameche was a popular man, known to the American embassy; but killing was nothing to him.
Another man, a BBC correspondent, told me that he had personally witnessed Johnson killing a young man. The young man had been trying to break into the wreck of a car; Johnson, who was passing, asked him what he was doing. The boy confessed, but then tried to run away. Johnson said, ‘Where my AK?’ and mowed the boy down, afterwards passing on as if he had not extinguished a human life.
I saw Johnson’s capacity for instantaneous change from affability to murderous rage when, to persuade me that behind the murderer was the philanthropist, he took me to an orphanage that his organisation ran. He patted a little boy on the head there who had a protuberant stomach (malnutrition and worms), and said, in Liberian English, ‘What the matter, you pregnant-o?’
When a psychopathic killer-at-large laughs, you laugh with him. But then a man came out of the orphanage to tell Johnson that there was no ‘soup’ for the children: none of the savoury accompaniment to the starch that was the staple food. Johnson turned on him with fury for having humiliated him in front of a foreigner. I wouldn’t have recommended the man as a risk for a life insurance company.
So it is definitely a sign of moral progress that such a man as Johnson should be a candidate for the presidency of his country. First, of course, it helps to overcome the stigma that attaches to people who have done the most terrible things. Surely we must allow them the possibility of redemption? As everyone knows, one of the reasons people keep on doing bad things is that no one will give them a chance to reform. There is no reason why a man who tortured someone to death should not be a head of state 20 years later. Besides, philosophers have difficulty with the concept of personal identity: how do we really know that the Johnson of 20 years ago is the same man as the Johnson of today?
And second, of course, we must return to the European Court of Human Rights. Has it not ruled that prisoners have an inalienable right to the vote? And if they have the right to vote for the rulers of their country, does it not follow that they have the right actually to be the rulers of their country? For to grant them the one thing and not the other would be discriminatory, and there is no crime worse than that of making discriminations. Besides, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind forces us to accept that all politicians, at least of the present day, are criminals, in the moral if not in the legal sense.
Strike a blow, then, for human rights: vote psychopath!
Anthony Daniels is the author of Monrovia Mon Amour, John Murray.