Liberia: Prince Johnson On TRC Stand Today

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The Analyst (Monrovia)

26 August 2008
Posted to the web 26 August 2008

Securing peace and reconciliation in postwar Liberia is a Herculean task for which the Accra brokered comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 18 August, 2003 sought the transitional justice mechanism of a truth and reconciliation commission for the country.

The basis for creation of this mechanism according to the fighting factions who mostly have trepidation of direct examination under a war crimes court, is that key leaders who dominated the recent past either in belligerent capacities or for substantial supports to the crisis, would be given their day to reveal their actions or knowledge about the ugly chapter in Liberian history.

Having promised over and again that he would appear before the commission to say what he knows and what he may have done during the crisis, the former leader of the splinter Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) Prince Yormie Johnson, who now serves as senior senator of Nimba County has laid aside titles of military valor and officialdom to appear before the men and women of the TRC for the provision of answers to questions that will enter the knowledge of commissioners concerning him.

The Analyst pieces together this analysis for our readership.

Nimba County Senior Senator Prince Y. Johnson is today slated to enter the historic Centennial Pavilion, not as a politician but as a leader of a defunct warring faction that executed former Liberian President Samuel Kanyon Doe, amongst other exploits during the war years.

Operating a splinter group from the parent National Patriotic Front of former warlord Charles Ghankay Taylor, senator Johnson whose prowess on the battlefront during the war saw the shutting down of Liberia's hydroelectric power plant in Mount Coffee, swiftly descended on Monrovia thereby reducing the prestige of the principal leader of the rebellion.

Once in Monrovia, and very astute in urban guerilla warfare, Johnson used high class psychology to befriend the former President Samuel Doe, in a move that was deciphered by the latter as a strategy to outflank Charles Taylor against his declared wish of taking the city by force of arm to ascend to state power.

But the Taylor-Johnson split had been occasioned by the avowed intent of Mr. Taylor to take the city, as the last battleground for state power. Johnson believed that the gun that liberates the people must not rule; hence he would not fight to advance that objective but create his own slice of the freedom fighters.

Subsequent events to this split were the creation of an entry corridor for the West African Peacekeepers known as the ECOMOG, the capture and assassination of Samuel K. Doe, ushering in of a transitional government headed by Amos Claudius Sawyer and the relinquishing or surrender of power to ECOMOG for exit to Nigeria, where Johnson underwent dramatic rebirth as a born again evangelist of Jesus' Gospel.

In a sense, today is the day of vivid recollection of those fleeting events before the TRC commissioners, some of whom are being sporadically accused as having tales to tell the Liberian people despite their current access to the gavel of this process.

It is also reported that following the testimony of Mr. Johnson, Sekou Damate Conneh, leader of the defunct Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer, Chairman of the Governance Commission will this week testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia (TRC).

The LURD's Chairman Conneh is slated to appear on Wednesday while Dr. Sawyer, former president of the Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU) from 1990 to 1994 will appear on Thursday.

The appearance of these personalities is part of the ongoing "Contemporary History of the Conflict (1979-2003)" Institutional and Thematic Hearings of the Commission at the historic Centennial Memorial Pavilion in Monrovia.

Under the theme: "Understanding the Conflict Through its Principal Events and Actors," the ongoing hearings are geared at determining the root causes of the conflict, including its military and political dimensions that must be documented to forestall the blights of the last fifteen years of bloody confrontations.

According to the commission, the hearings are focused on events between 1979 and 2003 with concerted emphasis on national and external actors who in one way or another helped to shape the events.

The TRC was agreed upon in the August 2003 peace agreement and created by the TRC Act of 2005. It was established to "promote national peace, security, unity and reconciliation," and at the same time makes it possible to hold perpetrators accountable for gross human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law that occurred in Liberia between January 1979 and October 2003.

Since the beginning of the thematic hearings at the Centennial Pavilion, many personalities have appeared to give their roles and activities during the war that may have directly or indirectly help to perpetuate the state of anarchy that has reigned in the country rather unremittingly.

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