Firestone
and the Warlord; The untold story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the tragedy
of Liberia.
by T. Christian Miller and Jonathan
Jones November
18, 2014
Key
Figures
Bridgestone
Americas Inc.,
often called Firestone, is a subsidiary of Bridgestone Corp., the Japanese tire
giant.
Donald
Ensminger;
A Firestone general manager, Ensminger was opposed to recognizing Charles
Taylor as president.
Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf;
Johnson Sirleaf is the current president of Liberia and a winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize.
John
“JT” Richardson;
Richardson was a top Taylor advisor who lived on the Firestone plantation
during Operation Octopus.
Gerald
Rose;
A top official at the U.S. Embassy, Rose personally disapproved of Firestone’s
deal with Taylor.
Charles Taylor; Educated in the U.S., Taylor
plunged Liberia into civil war. He was later convicted of war crimes.
Key
Events
1926
Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. begins
operations at the Firestone plantation in Liberia.
April 12, 1980
Forces led by Master Sargeant Samuel Doe
kill Liberian President William Tolbert.
October 26, 1990
Human Rights Watch issues a report
criticizing Taylor forces for putting one ethnic group "at risk of
genocide."
December 3, 1990
Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
releases its final report, citing Firestone for aiding Taylor.
1991
Firestone plantation general manager
Donald Ensminger says that he is let go from the company after protesting the
company’s decision to enter into negotiations with Charles Taylor.
January 12, 1991
The U.S. State Department annual human
rights report is released to Congress. The report blamed Charles Taylor’s
forces for killing civilians, raping women and forcing hundreds of thousands of
people to become refugees during 1990.
July 3, 1991
Firestone corporate executives John
Schremp and Richard Stupp meet with warlord Charles Taylor near Gbarnga,
Liberia.
January 17, 1992
Firestone and Charles Taylor’s rebel
government sign memorandum of understanding.
October 15, 1992
Taylor launches Operation Octopus from
Firestone’s Liberian plantation as an all-out attack to capture Monrovia,
capital of Liberia.
October 23, 1992
Three American nuns from the Adorers of
the Blood of Christ order are killed. Two others had been killed on October 20.
July 8, 1993
John Schremp, the Firestone Akron
executive who oversees the plantation, answers Sawyer’s accusations of
complicity with Taylor, defending the company.
July 19, 1997
Charles Taylor elected president of
Liberia with 75 percent of the vote.
March 7, 2003
Charles Taylor is indicted by the
Special Court for Sierra Leone for crimes against humanity.
November 23, 2005
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is declared the
winner of Liberia’s presidential elections. She becomes the first elected
female head of state in Africa.
April 28, 2012
Charles Taylor
is found guilty on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the
Special Court for Sierra Leone. He becomes the first head of state since Nazi
Germany to be found guilty. of such crimes. He is sentenced to 50 years in
prison
A joint reporting project by ProPublica
and PBS Frontline, “Firestone and the Warlord” reached hundreds of thousands of
viewers when it first aired Nov. 18. “Chilling,” Salon wrote. “Gripping,” said
Fortune. “An example of the reason we bother to scrutinize history,” said the
New York Times. The project provoked conversation and upset among American and
Liberian officials, as well as everyday citizens in the African nation whose
trail of tears has most recently included the deadly Ebola outbreak.
Accompanying its Feb. 3 rebroadcast, we are offering another chance to read the
story here.
HARBEL, Liberia — THE KILLERS LAUNCHED
from the plantation under a waning moon one night in October 1992. They surged
past tin-roofed villages and jungle hideouts, down macadam roads and red-clay
bush trails. More and more joined their ranks until thousands of men in long,
ragged columns moved toward the distant capital.
Men in camouflage mounted rusted
artillery cannon in battered pickup trucks. Thin teenagers lugged
rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Children carried AK-47s. Some held long
machetes.
The killers wore ripped jeans and
T-shirts, women’s wigs and cheap rubber sandals. Grotesque masks made them look
like demons. They were electric with drugs. They clutched talismans of feather
and bone to protect them from bullets. In the pre-dawn darkness, they
surrounded Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
They loosed their attack on the sleeping
city. Artillery slammed into stores and homes. Mortars arced through thick,
humid air that smelled of rot. Boy soldiers canoed across mangrove swamps. As
they pressed in, the killers forced men, women and children from their homes.
They murdered civilians and soldiers. Falling shells just missed the U.S.
Embassy, hunkered on a high spot overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
A new phase of Liberia’s civil war had
begun. It would whip savagely out of control over the next decade. More than
200,000 people would die or suffer terrible injuries, most of them civilians —
limbs hacked off, eyes gouged out. Half the country’s population would become
refugees. Five American nuns would be slaughtered, becoming international
symbols of the conflict’s depravity.
Orchestrating the anarchy was Charles
Taylor, a suave egomaniac obsessed with taking over Liberia, America’s most
faithful ally in Africa. For the attack that October morning, he had built his
army of butchers and believers in part with the resources of one of America’s
most iconic businesses: Firestone.
Firestone has operated a rubber
plantation in Liberia since 1926.
Firestone ran the plantation that Taylor
used to direct the October 1992 assault on Monrovia. In operation since 1926,
the rubber plantation was considered to be the largest of its kind in the
world, a contiguous swath of trees, mud-brown rivers, low hills and verdant
bush that at the time splayed across 220 square miles – roughly the size of
Chicago.
Firestone wanted Liberia for its rubber.
Taylor wanted Firestone to help his rise to power. At a pivotal meeting in
Liberia’s jungles in July 1991, the company agreed to do business with the
warlord.
In the first detailed examination of the
relationship between Firestone and Taylor, an investigation by ProPublica and
Frontline lays bare the role of a global corporation in a brutal African
conflict.
Firestone served as a source of food,
fuel, trucks and cash used by Taylor’s ragtag rebel army, according to interviews,
internal corporate documents and declassified diplomatic cables.
The company signed a deal in 1992 to pay
taxes to Taylor’s rebel government. Over the next year, the company doled out
more than $2.3 million in cash, checks and food to Taylor, according to an
accounting in court files. Between 1990 and 1993, the company invested $35.3
million in the plantation.
In return, Taylor’s forces provided
security to the plantation that allowed Firestone to produce rubber and
safeguard its assets. Taylor’s rebel government offered lower export taxes that
gave the company a financial break on rubber shipments.
We needed Firestone to give us
international legitimacy. We needed them for credibility.
John Toussaint Richardson, one of
Taylor’s top advisers
For Taylor, the relationship with
Firestone was about more than money. It helped provide him with the political
capital and recognition he needed as he sought to establish his credentials as
Liberia’s future leader.
“We needed Firestone to give us
international legitimacy,” said John Toussaint “J.T.” Richardson, a
U.S.-trained architect who became one of Taylor’s top advisers. “We needed them
for credibility.”
While Firestone used the plantation for
the business of rubber, Taylor used it for the business of war. Taylor turned
storage centers and factories on Firestone’s sprawling rubber farm into depots
for weapons and ammunition. He housed himself and his top ministers in
Firestone homes. He also used communications equipment on the plantation to
broadcast messages to his supporters, propaganda to the masses and instructions
to his troops.
Secret U.S. diplomatic cables from the
time captured Taylor’s gratitude to Firestone. Firestone’s plantation “had been
the lifeblood” of the territory in Liberia that he controlled, Taylor told one
Firestone executive, according to a State Department cable. Taylor later said
in sworn testimony that Firestone’s resources had been the “most significant”
source of foreign exchange in the early years of his revolt.
In written responses to questions,
Firestone acknowledged the agreement with Taylor, but said it had never
willingly assisted Taylor’s insurrection.
Charles Taylor's rebels cobbled together
weapons for indiscriminate assaults on Monrovia. (Patrick Robert/Sygma/Corbis)
The company said Taylor rebels had used
Firestone’s trucks, food, medical supplies, fuel and tools under the “obvious
threat of violence to anyone who considered stopping them.”
“Firestone had no role in the rise of
Charles Taylor. It had no role in his ability to hold power in Liberia,” the
company said.
“At no time did Firestone have a
collaborative relationship with Charles Taylor,” the statement said. “The
company’s activities were focused on protecting its employees and property. The
company had no ability to stop Taylor’s forces from using the plantation for
any purposes.”
At the moment of the October 1992 attack
that came to be known as Operation Octopus, Taylor controlled the vast majority
of Liberia. He faced a weak interim government in Monrovia, backed by 7,000
largely untested soldiers from allied West African nations.
Operation Octopus effectively plunged
the country into five more turbulent, terrible years of intermittent warfare.
Taylor turned a civil war between his forces and the Liberian government into a
bloodbath as more rebel factions joined in the fight for spoils: diamonds,
timber, power. It spilled into neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone, where rebel
forces allied with Taylor hacked the limbs off civilians in a terror campaign
of unchecked brutality.
In July 1997, Taylor won his war, and
not on the battlefield. He was elected president, dominating with 75 percent of
the vote. For many Liberians, a vote for Taylor was a vote of resignation. Many
believed it was the only way to stop the killing. After Taylor became
president, more factions arose, more bloodletting, more revenge. Liberia and
its people suffered yet again.
In 2003, Taylor was indicted by an
international tribunal for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone. He resigned
the presidency. He was eventually sentenced to 50 years in prison — the first
head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity since the Nazi era.
The path to cooperation was neither
direct nor easy for Firestone and its executives, according to interviews and
documents. Some company officials actively resisted working with Taylor and his
fighters, even in the face of real and implied threats of physical violence.
Do I think they have blood on their
hands? Yes. I believe they facilitated a warlord in his insurrection and in the
atrocities that he created.
Gerald Rose, former deputy chief of
mission for the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia
Other senior officers felt the company
had no choice but to give in to Taylor’s demands. They believed that working
with Taylor was the only way to protect the thousands of impoverished Liberians
who lived and labored on the plantation.
Firestone also received conflicting
direction from the United States government. One ambassador urged the company
to work with Taylor. In Washington, diplomats warned Firestone executives about
the dangers of doing business with him.
But in the end, Firestone as a
corporation, and as a collection of men, made a deliberate decision to
cooperate with a man whose forces were publicly denounced as violent, vicious
and rapacious by the U.S. government and human rights groups.
The U.S. State Department had issued a
report blaming Taylor’s forces for killing civilians, raping women and forcing
hundreds of thousands of people to become refugees. Human Rights Watch said
that Taylor’s forces had engaged in a killing campaign that put a targeted
ethnic group at “risk of genocide.”
Today, Firestone maintains that at the
time it struck its deal with Taylor, the guerrilla leader had “no
well-established record” of human right violations. It said that many other
companies and world leaders had treated Taylor as a legitimate political
figure. Other companies operating in Liberia at the time chose to leave. But
some stayed on through the violence.
“Does Firestone believe it did the right
thing? Yes,” Firestone said of its decisions in Liberia. “Do we, along with
former U.S. presidents, the U.S. State Department, the United Nations and many
leaders around the world who worked with Charles Taylor regret the war criminal
he became? Yes.”
The decision that Firestone faced
confronts American companies operating to this day in war-torn, volatile
regions in an increasingly globalized economy. All aim to make money. All must
weigh, to one degree or another, their hierarchy of obligations – to their
shareholders, to their foreign workers, to their host countries, and to their
own sense of right and wrong.
Charles Taylor was sentenced to 50 years
in prison for "aiding and abetting ... some of the most heinous and brutal
crimes recorded in human history." (Jerry Lampen/AFP/Getty Images)
Donald Ensminger served as the managing
director of the Firestone plantation when Taylor invaded Liberia. He witnessed
the violence first hand. Taylor rebels killed and imprisoned his workers. They
threatened Ensminger with death at the point of a rocket-propelled grenade
launcher.
Ensminger was let go from the company in
October 1991. For the next 23 years, he kept silent about Firestone’s choice to
do a deal with a warlord. Now, he told Frontline and ProPublica, he wanted to
explain.
He said that he warned Firestone that
Taylor was a killer. He told the company that working with him might be a
crime. He urged them to avoid deals that might legitimize the guerilla leader
as the ruler of Liberia.
For him, the decision was clear. And
Firestone got it wrong.
“Certainly on behalf of our employees,
the ones that were killed and suffered, it was immoral that we should now
recognize the guy that caused all this,” he said in an interview.
Gerald Rose, who served as the deputy
chief of mission in Liberia at the time, holds an equally unsparing view of
Firestone’s choice.
“Do I think they have blood on their
hands? Yes,” Rose said. “I would not have made the decisions they made. I
believe they facilitated a warlord in his insurrection and in the atrocities
that he created.”
Through the years, Liberia has been
hesitant to examine its past. Taylor, for instance, was tried only for harm he
caused in Sierra Leone, not Liberia. In 2009, the country’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission recommended sanctions for scores of perpetrators. It
cited Firestone for having aided Taylor in carrying out his rebellion and
called for more investigation. The Liberian government never acted on those
recommendations.
The stunning truth is that nobody has
ever been punished in Liberia for the civil war that destroyed the nation. In
fact, some of the people who helped to wreck the country are now the same
people responsible for rebuilding it.
Charles Taylor's civil war included the
use of child soldiers and scenes of gruesome violence. (Patrick
Robert/Sygma/Corbis)
Top officials of formerly warring
factions are now politicians passing laws in the legislature. They are pastors
preaching from the country’s pulpits. They are executives running some of the
country’s largest businesses.
The damage they inflicted on Liberia
haunts the country even today. Liberia’s shattered infrastructure and weakened
health system have struggled to cope with the spread of the Ebola virus, which
has killed thousands of Liberians.
In an interview with Frontline and
ProPublica, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf acknowledged that Liberia
had not yet succeeded in shaking the Taylor regime or the devils of its
history.
“The effect of that regime and regimes
of the past are still with us today,” she said. “Today we have a traumatized
nation.”
Efforts over many months to reach Taylor
through his lawyers and family were not successful.
Johnson Sirleaf looked thoughtful when
asked to describe Liberia’s relationship with Firestone. A Nobel Peace Prize
winner, Johnson Sirleaf said the company had benefitted Liberia with jobs and
revenue.
In fact, during its decades of
operation, Firestone had built a nation within a nation. The company provided
housing, schools, food and health care to workers and their families. Some
80,000 Liberians lived within its borders. Firestone introduced currency, built
roads and opened up the rural interior.
At the same time, Johnson Sirleaf said,
Firestone has sometimes failed to live up to its obligations to the country
whose people have provided it with so much over so many years. Over the
decades, the company has faced accusations that it exploited its laborers,
received unfair concession deals, despoiled the environment and exacerbated
corruption.
Said Johnson Sirleaf: “It is a mixed
story.”
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