Monrovia – In the years immediately following the 1989 outbreak of the civil war in Liberia, not many Presidents in the West African region, leaders of ECOWAS, dared to visit the country.
Liberians have historically been West African ‘citizens’ before the formation of ECOWAS and the fact that ECOWAS came to offer protection to them in the hour of need in the unfortunate civil war makes them a people with abiding faith in West African integration moving towards the creation of an ECOWAS of people write veteran journalists Ben Asante and Lindsay Barrett
The only exception was Jerry Rawlings, Ghana’s former President who piloted himself into the Spriggs Payne airport in the heart of the capital Monrovia unannounced at a time when the country was still divided and the war raged unabated.
It was also a time when he was serving as ECOWAS chairman and his government was hosting negotiations among the warring factions in Accra.
These negotiations were going nowhere when, unknown to the warlords and warring factions’ leaders, Rawlings landed in the war-ravaged capital to find out things for himself.
At the time that he took this trip it was being suggested that unless the warlords agreed on ending the war and forming a peace-making government they should not be allowed to come back into the country.
President Rawlings, dressed in his air force fatigues, drove from the outskirts of the city, through parts of the downtown area, such as Crown Hill and Broad Street to the headquarters of ECOMOG at Bushrod Island.
There he held a closed door meeting with the high command led by the deputy Field Commander in the absence of the Field Commander who had remained in Accra for the negotiations among the warring factions.
President Rawlings’ visit as the ECOWAS chairman at the time he went into the Liberian capital Monrovia was the closest any leader in the ECOWAS Authority came to personally witnessing the ravages of the civil war with major infrastructures and buildings in ruins as a result of the fighting.
Apart from Rawlings’ trip hardly any West African President visited Liberia while the war lasted, nor even in the years since relative peace has returned under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s government.
This will change dramatically in June when Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf hosts the 51st Ordinary Summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the capital city Monrovia with most of its leaders expected to attend.
President Johnson Sirleaf has been the chairman of ECOWAS since her unanimous election June last year in Dakar, Senegal.
In the eleven years that she served as leader of Liberia, being ECOWAS chairman is one additional responsibility that she has most cherished taking on, because she regards it as an opportunity to express gratitude to the organisation and the people of the region for their sacrifices to help end the civil war and restore peace to her nation.
Ordinary Liberians, and their leaders, will cheer the arriving ECOWAS leaders as they meet in Liberia, in appreciation for their having saved the country by sending troops to end the civil war.
The fact that it is possible for ECOWAS Heads of State and Government to meet in Liberia contributes to the proof that the country has recovered significantly from its years of violence and moved away from instability.
Today Liberia, a country that was once viewed as a failed state with its people entrapped in a senseless factional war after rebels invaded to overthrow the Doe government and ended up causing anarchy, has indeed recovered through the unprecedented military intervention by ECOWAS.
The sub-regional body took what was an unprecedented step at the time to dispatch troops to separate the warring factions, save lives and enforce conditions for restoring normalcy.
In the last two decades, Liberia might have been seen as ECOWAS problem child but this has not always been the case.
For a long period, Liberia was a torch-bearer for self-determination in West Africa, in particular and for the entire continent.
Like Ethiopia, Liberia occupies a special place in African history in that it was never colonized by any of the major colonizing European powers.
Liberia’s role in support of the self-determination of the black race has always been part of the consciousness of many West Africans when neighboring countries in the region struggled to free themselves from colonial rule.
Some notable nationalists including Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe passed through Liberia as they journeyed to the outside world in search of knowledge.
Records show that West Africa is inhabited by a highly mobile population of some 300 million people with a penchant for informal trading and settling in new areas.
Significant trade and regular interaction within the region date back to well before efforts were made to bring the nations and their people together in recent times.
Liberia in particular, long proved to be a home away from home welcoming people from many of its neighbors.
Nigerians, Ghanaians and many others, settled in Liberia and bonded with Liberian families through marriage. Many of them served as high officials in various governments.
Several ordinary people from neighboring countries worked in Liberian governments over the years while others felt welcome enough to come and offer their skills and invest in commercial activities.
These included owners of major industries, automobile agencies, transport companies and breweries. Liberia also served as a convenient stepping stone in the quest for visas to enter the US.
Around 1965 the late President William Tubman called for an economic union comprising of Ivory Coast, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and others.
Although the idea did not take off then, when Nigeria’s Gen. Yakubu Gowon and Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema promoted the establishment of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) the idea became a reality.
When the treaty of May 1975 was signed by the original 16 nations of the region Liberia was a founding member and initially headed the ECOWAS Fund which was based in Lome , Togo.
In recent years when ECOWAS converted to a Commission headed by a President and various Commissioners in-charge of major departments a Liberian Dr. Toga Gayewea MacIntosh served as the first Vice President of the Commission.
Not only was Liberia a founding member of ECOWAS but it fundamentally changed the entire nature of the organisation, through the misfortune of its civil war, when ECOWAS was forced to send in peacekeepers and undertake diplomatic negotiations for a peaceful settlement.
Initially ECOWAS’ was mainly concerned with economic matters with the various finance and economy ministers handling integration and trade within the community.
With the civil war escalating and thousands of Liberian refugees seeking safety in neighboring countries foreign ministers from member states met to examine the problem.
Dr. Abbas Bundu, the Executive Secretary at the time pushed for the establishment of a Council of foreign ministers with a parallel committee of ambassadors from member states accredited to Nigeria to serve as permanent representatives to ECOWAS able to relate much faster to the community headquarters in Lagos, which was later to be transferred to Abuja.
Long before the civil war in Liberia, ECOWAS had in fact adopted additional protocols on non-aggression among member states and security concerns in the build-up to the 1975 agreement establishing it.
However, the Authority’s concerns never envisaged armed invasions by non-state actors as demonstrated by the NPFL rebel challenge that destabilised Liberia.
Until ECOWAS went into Liberia, with peacekeeping troops in August 1990, no one single regional power has ever succeeded in intervening forcefully in an African civil war in a member country by putting boots on the ground without prior agreement between the warring groups.
ECOWAS succeeded in doing this in Liberia with a strong commitment to act as its brothers’ keepers in a situation where the rest of the world, especially the USA (considered as having a special relationship with Liberia) looked the other way.
The civil war in Somalia and Liberia started about the same time. The Somali crisis is still raging.
The difference between Somalia and Liberia was the presence and courage of ECOWAS and the ECOMOG intervention force but some analysts say that it was Nigeria that made the greatest difference because it was willing to use its resources to back the ECOMOG intervention with its air force and war ships as well as supporting the diplomatic negotiations along with other member states.
The Liberian civil war threatened the ECOWAS objectives because economic integration and free movement could only take place in a peaceful environment.
The fact that ECOWAS leaders were confronting a threat to the entire region was best illustrated by former Nigeria military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, when he said, “We could not simply go into the country and pick out our own citizens. What do we do about Liberians fearful for their lives and coming across as refugees?”
Babangida’s fears were soon justified when Liberian refugees in their thousands started arriving in ship-loads in Nigeria, with Ghana and many more going on foot into neighboring Sierra Leone, Cote dÍvoire, and Guinea.
The regional threat that the Liberian war posed was exacerbated when Charles Taylor’s NPFL rebel movement, which was the most intransigent in the many negotiations for peace, joined the RUF in Liberia’s neighbor Sierra Leone and thus initiated an even more brutal civil war in that country.
Before the crisis few countries in the region could rank with Liberia as a hospitable, friendly, and exciting place to visit and to live in.
The warmth of its friendly welcoming people in spite of their wide ethnic variety and the ease with which they existed in a cultural milieu of tolerance and politeness, made it difficult to explain the violence and bitterness that surfaced during the war.
That the civil war ended the way it did with neither victor nor vanished but rather with a democratic compromise could only be possible in a unique country like Liberia.
Indeed, it will be hard to find a country to compare with Liberia in Africa in terms of its willingness to collaborate with its neighbours.
Before the war people accused the Liberian elite of seeking to identify with communities outside of Africa, especially the United States of America Today, especially since the Presidency of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, this perception has changed, and most people in the region identify with this unique country where the ease of doing business and interacting with the people is extraordinary.
Because the civil war drove the ordinary people in their thousands to find places of refuge in neighboring countries today no single group can claim to be more West African than Liberians.
Out of the painful experience of the civil war Liberians may be said to have become the primary citizens of ECOWAS.
To a great extent, the civil war contributed to many Liberians discovering more about West Africa and they were able to generally mix and form lifelong relationships with other nationals of ECOWAS member state.
Today there are Liberian communities in Ghana, in Buduburam, outside of the capital Accra and in the Central Region, and in Oru in Nigeria’s South-West where Liberians are settled in a community.
Many more individuals have settled, married and naturalized in Guinea, Ghana and Nigeria.
That Liberians and their government led by President Johnson Sirleaf would go to any length to show their gratitude to the region was demonstrated by its willingness to send troops to join the ECOWAS stand-by force which went into Mali during its ongoing crisis. Liberia in fact, is home to the ECOWAS Youth Volunteers Corp which was first launched there.
ECOWAS’ involvement in Liberia, including the security operations, has altogether cemented greater bonds with its neighbors for concrete growth in economic, social and interpersonal relations.
These facts and realities will be acutely on the mind of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as she hosts leaders of the region in whose hands lay the future of all citizens of West Africa even as the country goes into elections this October.