For U.S.-based Liberians, pre-vote passions

Petra Cahill Reporter • E-mail

STATEN ISLAND, NY - “Help us! We are suffering too much in our country!” shouted the Rev. Mary D. Robinson as she sold fish from the sidewalk in the Park Hill neighborhood of Staten Island, a borough of New York City.

Colorfully dressed in the traditional West African style of a matching print top, skirt and head scarf, the 55-year-old Liberian was pleading for greater American involvement in the first elections since 1997 in her war-torn home country.

Robinson, the founder and senior pastor of the Christ Memorial Christian Church, a Pentacostal congregation in Staten Island, moved to the U.S. in 1990. She was in Liberia from February to July this year and described the desperation of her extended family, many of whom she supports with money she sends back from her fish sales. “No light, no water, no phone! We are suffering!”

While Robinson and the others in Liberia’s largest community in America don’t have the right to vote in the upcoming election, that hasn’t stopped them from voicing their opinions on the role they believe the U.S. should have in the small West African nation.

In particular, the election has caught attention because of the candidacy of former soccer star George Weah, who rose from the slums of Liberia to become a multimillionaire based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Ties to U.S.
Weah’s U.S. residency is just a tiny part of the long and sometimes tortured relationship between America and Liberia, a country founded by former slaves in 1847. With a constitution modeled on the U.S. constitution, its capital, Monrovia, was named after President James Monroe and its flag shares the colors and bars of the American flag.

In an ironic twist of history, the former slaves who helped found the nation proceeded to subject the “native” Africans who made up the vast majority of the Liberian population to much of the same persecution they had suffered on American shores. The generally lighter-skinned former slaves, who made up about five percent of the population, were the ruling class in Liberia for more than a century until a master sergeant in the army, Samuel Doe, staged a coup in 1980 and publicly executed President William Tolbert and 13 of his top government ministers.

Doe dominated the country until economic collapse led to civil war in 1989, and in 1990 dissidents belonging to Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) overran the capital, plunging the country into further turmoil and years of violent instability.

During the civil war more than 250,000 people were killed by Taylor’s ragtag army — many of them boys strung out on drugs — and thousands fled the fighting.

The conflict finally reached a breaking point in 2003 when Taylor — under intense international pressure and in the battle of his life with rebels for control of Monrovia — fled the country and went into exile in Nigeria.

U.S. Marines helped stabilize the country and propped up an interim government before handing over to United Nations peacekeepers in 2003. Two years of relative calm have laid the groundwork for Tuesday’s elections.

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