Never in the history of Liberia has a power feud between two ethnic groups degenerated into a war so senseless that arbitrators have no clear rule on how to pin down a culprit.

	• Pres. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

But the power feud that began in 1983 or thereabout between the Gios and Manos in Nimba County and the Krahns in Grand Gedeh County did just that with outlandish superb.

The feud had remained latent after the late President Samuel Doe tried to resolve it in 1988, got a stage-managed truce that collapsed at his heels, and the war began – and until recently, when former warlord Prince Y. Johnson testified before the TRC.

Now, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has embarked on the same mission as Doe, though from a disinterested standpoint. But “Will she succeed or bump into anthills of deceptions as Doe did?” is the question that observers say comes to mind.

The Analyst Staff Writer has been finding out.

Shot at Resolution

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has moved to still the affray that has erupted after Senator Prince Y. Johnson revealed in his TRC testimony that the remains of slain President Samuel Doe were cremated and spread over a river.

Observers say by citing the two major families to intervene in a certain symptom of the pigheaded, ethnic-anchored feud, the President has taken a shot at the resolution of the conflict, placing herself contentedly into the pinching shoes once worn by slain President Samuel K. Doe.

The President made the move, recently, when she convened, at the Foreign Ministry, a meeting between the relatives of the slain president led by Mr. Jackson E. Doe and those of former warlord Prince Y. Johnson (now senator of Nimba County), led by the Senator himself.

An Executive Mansion press release announcing the Foreign Ministry meeting suggests that the meeting was intended to put a lid on the hot exchanges of words and eliminate the rising tension engendered by the exchanges on both sides.

During the meeting, the Liberian leader thanked Senator Johnson and Minister Doe for accepting an invitation to discuss the recent misunderstanding between the two sides.

She then urged both men to exercise leadership and take the lead in promoting peace and reconciliation as the country recovers from its bitter past.

The Liberian leader noted that their individual roles in the peace process were crucial to once and for all put to rest the conflict that has come between the otherwise friendly and closely-related peoples of Nimba and Grand Gedeh counties.

“We all have a responsibility to ensure that the events of the past are never repeated in this country,” the Liberian leader reminded Minister Doe and Senator Johnson, adding, ‘we have a responsibility to spare our children of what we have gone through so that they don’t carry with them the resentment.”

In remarks, the two men welcomed the decision by the Liberian leader to convene the meeting, which they described as timely.

They agreed that all Liberians have a responsibility to promote peace because without peace there can be no progress, and promised to work toward the achievement total peace in post-war Liberia.

“We are all in the country because of your exemplary leadership,” they said and assured the President that the sides they represent in the conflict will work towards promoting peace and unity among not only the peoples of Nimba and Grand Gedeh but Liberians in general.

Senator Johnson (unrelated to the President), in response to the President’s comment, noted that while the conflict seems primarily to be between the peoples of Nimba and Grand Gedeh and narrowed to the Doe and Johnson families, it has affected all Liberians.

He described the President’s intervention as “welcome and timely” and noted that more than for anything else, the magnitude and the spread of the conflict have put a demand upon the leadership of the country to help Liberians put behind them what he called the bitter past and move forward in the spirit of national reconciliation.

Meanwhile, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has welcomed suggestions for a meeting between the people of Nimba and Grand Gedeh to celebrate the peace which Liberia now enjoys.

The President said such a meeting would provide an opportunity to thank the people of both counties for their decision to allow peace to prevail in the country. The venue for the meeting proposed to be held at the end of the year is a yet-to-be named border town between the two counties.

In another development, the Liberian chief executive has reiterated her government’s plans to accord appropriate burial to former leaders who died while in office.

The exercise, the President said, was necessary as part of the healing process as the nation puts to rest the pains of the past.

The meeting was attended by Representative Zoe Pennue of Tchien District in Grand Gedeh County; Mr. George Tarley, Chairman of the Konobo District Citizens [Association], and Elder Daniel Nah also of Tchien District among others.

Senator Johnson was accompanied to the meeting by Nimba County District #7 Representative Edwin P. Gaye.

Doe’s Shoe

Observers say while President Sirleaf’s position as an outsider to the conflict places her in a position to affect the Nimba-Grand Gedeh conflict that is clearly visible in the tension that grew in recent days between Rep. Zoe Pennoh Doe and Senator Prince Y. Johnson, she is unlikely to have a runaway success unless she probed the genesis, scope, and the thrust factor of the conflict.

	• The late Samuel Doe

Instead of holding a follow-up meeting solely to celebrate the existing restive peace, they say, the President must brace herself for a marathon intervention that goes back to the core of the Liberian peace process, if she intends to rise above previous interventions.

“She also needs to understand that there is no single moral, political, or ethnic-based authority to the conflict since it is not based in morality or politics, but on individual interpretation of the effect of the war on their lives and on the need to build and sustain an ethnic hegemony that changes in intensity according to the needs of the one who takes the gavel on behalf of a given ethnic group at a given time,” said one observer.

Analysts agree, noting that while this view may be an avant-garde, it points to a number of reasons that would be risky to overlook.

The Executive Mansion release may be unsuspecting, putting things as simply as conducive for the peace season in Liberia. But analysts say the resumption of tension between the Doe and Johnson families, which seems likely to draw in rash supporters on both sides, holds the key to peace and security in Liberia after the war – all other issues being stable.

In their view, by calling attention to the conflict and planning a year-end, up-country meeting to resolve it, the President she has not only placed herself in Doe’s shoes, but she has also bet the stability of Liberia and the peace and reconciliation agendas on the outcome of that meeting.

“The President’s move should be one of two extreme opposites – be the beginning of a parallel process of a deeper attempt at reconciliation between the peoples of Nimba and Grand Gedeh County and be successful.

Or be just a one-shot intervention into a nervy feud that lies buried under layers of grievances, that lies at the heart of ethnic feud for raw power and dominance and that goes as far back as 1963 to the days of the house arrest of army commander Thomas G. Quiwonkpa and the infamous ‘Nimba Raid’, and fail,” said Moses U. Saye of Congo Town, Monrovia.

Moses, a former fighter of the NPFL now a student of the University of Liberia, said what it would take in his view to end the feud was a process of negotiation and inter-tribal outreaches that span years of peaceful contacts.

“We will only forget this thing when no front-runner of each group seeks to resurrect the creation of a tribal dominance at the expense of the other. No one person, whether in the Senate, civil society, or government, can order the conflict ended today and get the support of all others who were affected in various ways during the war.

The healing will be permanent if it is allowed to go away naturally and without the interruptions seen in recent days between the Johnson and Doe families. Because when these interruptions happen, ethnic solidarity is kicked up spontaneously. We can’t control this because it whips up life-death scenarios of the bitter days, however consciously we try to,” he said.

According to him, Doe did the best thing in 1988 by convening a meeting in Saniquellie, Nimba County, of the elders and militiamen of both counties but failed to capture the spirit of reconciliation when he relied exclusively on the pledged support of so-called tribal leaders some of whom were in government and miserably neglected to understand the dynamics of the conflict.

“He did not realize the fact that some people on both sides, who suffered more than the others, would need rehabilitative support, and he proceeded to legislate an end to the conflict,” said Ziah Davies who claimed to be a Krahn resident of Slipway, Monrovia.

It may be recalled that Doe adopted a tribal moot approach to the conflict in Sanniquellie, Nimba County, sometime in 1988, involving observers and the elders and militants of Nimba and Grand Gedeh counties.

Even though at the center of the conflict and very much seen as the builder of the Krahn hegemony, Doe left the Sanniquellie meeting bloated by the assumption that he had ended the feud that was haunting the stability of his administration, only to have the Charles Taylor-led NPFL and the Prince Johnson-led INPFL-led guerrillas crawling all over his power base by the third quarters of 1990.

The two rebel groups drew a significant number of their numerical strength from the Gio and Mano ethnic groups that were said to have been largely affected by the feud that erupted in 1983 between PRC strongman, AFL Commanding General Thomas G. Quiwonkpa of the Gio ethnic group and PRC leader, Samuel Doe of the Krahn ethnic group. Naturally then, the Gios and Manos were fundamentally opposed to the creation of a Krahn political hegemony, of which they say Doe was an embodiment.

“He trusted the tribal peace ceremonies such as the pouring of libation to the dead, the slaughtering of cows, goats, and spotless sheep to prepare peace meals, and thought peace between Nimba and Grand Gedeh was a sealed deal. But he came upon an anthill of deception.

The people of Nimba were not unanimous; they were not ready because they had not exacted the revenge they badly wanted and generally believe would kill Krahn dominance of national leadership and politics.

They saw the presence of Doe in the Executive Mansion as Krahn victory and Gio failure,” said Jimmy Gyconjee of Bassa Community.

He said this explains why when some moderate figures in the Nimba tribal leadership, such as Paramount Jerry Gonyon, exposed the training that was in progress in the back country of Nimba at the time to topple Doe, they got a backlash from both the Nimba tribal leaders and President Doe. Doe had an unqualified confidence in the tribal rituals conducted in Nimba months earlier and the compliance they guaranteed.

Jimmy said this is why in President Sirleaf’s search for suggestions about the meeting she is proposing, she must search within her administration’s reconstruction agenda for clues about what to do with the welfare of the victims of the conflict she is out to resolve.

He said she risks stumbling upon mountains of deception if she does not get down to the people and ensure that the acts that brought about the conflicts are not repeated.

“You can’t seek to end the conflict without seeking to pacify the victims, even if it is just to ensure their security. Both are interlink in a strange way. Security is crucial to the conflict as is restoration and guarantee.

And more than that, you have to put as little a trust as possible in the so-called tribal leaders who are at the forefront of the building of tribal hegemony because these individuals will always fall back on the tribal grievances to advance their political agendas,” said AMEU Business student Beatrice V. Weh.

She said because victims see the political success of these so-called tribal leaders as the hope of their ethnic group, these so-called self-seeking tribal leaders will always maintain the feud in the hope of drawing from it base support in case they face obstacle in pursuit of political salvation.

“Without support from these natural bases, where else does anyone expect these people to look for support? The stronger the tribal feud and the longer it lasts, the better it is for the political life of these people. Ending the conflict is closing their political base and they will not allow that.

Even though Liberians of all tribes suffered death and destruction during the war, these politico-tribal leaders will continue to highlight the plight of their people and make it the core of the nation’s peace agenda,” said political observer Alphonso Toe of Clara Town.

He said if the President wanted to make a difference, she needed to understand these dynamics and the bigotry that underlie the so-called Nimba-Grand Gedeh conflict and work out approaches to the resolution of the conflict that will guarantee lasting peace.

She must make sure she is not deceived by the promises of peace that often come so easily during public peace meetings – that is intended to have the President “save face” but that is insincere.

“This is especially so when the cause of conflict abides more in hegemony building and political self-aggrandizement, but less in the cause of the oppressed and the need to build national links for democracy, reconstruction, and social-economic emancipation,” Alphonso said.

Analysts say while the suggestion to walk around the “tribal leaders” in the search for peace in Nimba and Grand Gedeh is attractive, how to generate trust in ordinary Krahns, Manos, and Gios – bypassing the people they come to know as symbols of their security – is a difficult nut to crack.

“How they achieve this will be the point of departure of this administration from business as usual,” they said.

They recall that sometime in 1999 or so, the media peace-building group, The Talking Drum Studio, worked in vain to solve the Nimba-Grand Gedeh crisis.

The group organized a month-long peace confab in which all stakeholders were invited to speak their minds, state the core of their contentions, and eventually pledge to put the past behind them and move ahead in the path of peace.

But like the outcome of Doe’s 1988 meeting, the Talking Drum confab ended with deceptive promises even though it involved carousal celebration of peace, tribal ritual like Doe’s, involved the elders and advocacy groups on either sides, and went further to involve the young people more than 90% of whom were ex-fighters.

The deceptive promises, analysts maintained, were indicated by the active involvement of the Mano-Gio and Krahn rivals in the war that toppled the Taylor Administration.

“So, the question, is it possible? Will those now drawing support from the feud to promote their political agenda be magnanimous enough to watch, lying down, their power base erode?”

These, analysts say, are the watch questions that line up next to the question of whether President Sirleaf will succeed or bump into anthills of deceptions as Doe did.