Liberia

Liberia The oldest independent republic in Africa (1847) owes its origin to the American Colonization Society, which resettled African slaves from the USA. The resettled slaves and their descendants formed only a small minority of the total population, but controlled the country's politics and economy. Its currency was linked to the US dollar, while its economy remained heavily reliant on US support. In the 1920s the Firestone Rubber Company planted huge areas of rubber trees and provided a permanent and stable market. President Tubman (1944–71) introduced a number of liberal, ‘open door’ policies designed to encourage foreign investment. These were successful in producing economic growth, though they did little to alleviate the poverty of the population, as profits went either abroad or to the Afro-American Liberian elite. In the 1970s, therefore, more than 60 per cent of national income was earned by an elite amounting to around 5 per cent of the population. During that decade, discontent about political and economic repression began to mount, which Tubman's successor, W. R. Tolbert, found increasingly difficult to overcome. Protest was organized around the trade unions, and became articulated through two political parties, the Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) and the Movement for Justice in Africa (MoJA).

After the Easter rebellion of 1980, the traditional elite was overthrown and many of its members executed, as a group of junior military officers led by Samual K. Doe came to power. However, the new regime did little to change the country's economic direction, as it benefited from rising US aid as much as the old regime had done, and it too was soon faced with opposition, which it brutally suppressed. In consequence, the Libyan-supported National Patriotic Front of Liberia led by Charles Taylor began a guerrilla campaign on 24 December 1989. While Reagan had wholeheartedly supported Doe's regime, Bush was more sceptical and withdrew US aid in early 1990. Doe was murdered in autumn 1990, whereupon the country sank into anarchy. The country's various ethnic groups no longer fought the Afro-American elite, but each other instead. More than two-thirds of the entire population had been displaced by the war by 1996, as refugees either within the country or in Guinea and the Ivory Coast. A peace deal was brokered in 1996, and in 1997 Charles Taylor, who during the civil war had been the most powerful warlord in the countryside, became President. He struggled to establish his power, however, because he became entangled in the civil war in neighbouring Guinea, and because Liberia in return faced incursion by rebels from the neighbouring country. Taylor also remained controversial because of his involvement in the illegal diamond trade, and his disregard for human and political rights.