Rebel MODEL’s Game of Numbers

21 April 04

The ethnic-Krahn dominated rebel group, Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), says it still has 15,000 fighters all over the southeast, its home and stronghold along the border with Cote d’Ívoire. This is a little bizarre, because MODEL has been described as the smallest of the three rebel groups—Charles Taylor’s militias, and the Liberians United for Democracy and Reconciliation (LURD), described as the largest apart from Taylor’s. Responding, a UN official said they are prepared to construct cantonment sites in the southeast to accommodate the imaginary 15,000.

In Gbarnga, about 1300 LURD fighters were disarmed. There are talks of LURD fighters in Voinjama, the destroyed town on the border with Guinea that used to be its headquarters. It will soon emerge that if there are fighters there, they are independents, a few of them unable to get to Monrovia or Gbarnga. If LURD is the largest, then it remains to be seen how many MODEL fighters there really are.

One rationale for the delay of disarmament has been UNMIL (UN Mission in Liberia) demand for comprehensive lists from the rebel groups for months, and it is likely they never got one because there are no comprehensive lists. This makes MODEL’s claims of having 15,000 fighters an empty threat designed to prove it still commands an army and therefore must command political development with the one all-important objective—for some of its leaders in government to steal and run back to America to pay mortgages. This is a ploy of fear—we have 15,000 men in the forest so don’t mess with us or our benefits deserved. But the fact of the matter is that as the few ragtag child soldiers slowly get deprogrammed, these men who have over the years programmed themselves to make a living out of violent politics  will realise how vulnerable it is to be a chief without Indians. Their worries over the coming months should not be how much money to steal for US banks, but how to avoid the child soldiers they deluded into believing that economic glories were theirs once their war of personal fortune was over. If MODEL has any strength left, it is the ethnic bonds—the belief that all its members from a particular clan in Grand Gedeh share a common fate and must therefore hold together against their enemies, again not to champion political reforms that should redeem their name (Movement for Democracy….) but to siphon money from the state, something slowly being institutionalised since 1980 when political power was equated to wealth and ethnicity, not competence, a passport for top jobs as was the case under the Americo-Liberians, another ethnic group. The sweetness of political power based on ethnicity has since gravitated towards the destruction of all, regardless which tribal garment one wears. LURD, the so-called larger group, significantly lacks the fortune of ethnic homogeneity. (It doesn’t even familial homogeneity since husband and wife—Seki and Asha Conneh—have been at war over who controls the group.) Thus it has been split, with its Krahn faction and the dominant Mandingo faction at loggerhead.

As disarmament proceedes, there will be some surprises on the political playing field, since the instrument of violent politics—the child soldiers with the AK-47—will no longer be a factor. Numbers have been the magic in Liberia’s march towards anarchy since 1989 when Libya, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and others decided Liberia needed democracy brought in by Charles Taylor, a celebrated thief. In every interview Charles Taylor gave on the ever-willing BBC in the 1990s, he emphasised his numbers—over 50,000—sending his opponents running and offering any compromise he demanded. .No one had the time and mind to check, but the facts came in 1992 when, with his 50,000, he launched his Operation Octopus. ECOMOG, with barely 7,000 soldiers in the country, pushed his imaginary 50,000 from the gates of Monrovia, evicting them from key cities like Buchanan and others. The reason the West African force did not capture Gbarnga, (Taylor was already reported in Cote d’Ivoire or Ouagadougou hiding, according to very reliable sources) was the intervention of Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer’s interim government with the slogan, “Our people are dying.“ Convince he was militarily finished, Charles Taylor, as cunning as ever, opened the peace umbrella by suggesting he was now prepared to talk. But what he wanted was time to regroup his ragtag child soldiers and embark on terror tactics like the Carter Camp massacre and others, since he could not stand and fight with his 50,000 man against a mere 7,000.

This game worked against weaklings, but this time around, the actual strength of each rebel group will soon be known, because they will be counted in their camps. The cantonment sites will be there for all to see and visit, something far from the 95% completed disarmament the Nigerian military commander Victor Malu announced in 1997, while the 5% was preparing for war.

Nevertheless, a successful trick is attractive. In 2004, Taylor fell on the same paradigm of numbers. If the world insisted that he faces justice for his enormous crimes in Sierra Leone, he declared, his Generals would revolt, and with over 50,000 men, the sub region would be ablaze. Those who fear fear believed him, and therefore let him go. The facts, as they emerged, was that he could not produce 2000 men called soldiers against a few hundreds rebels.

MODEL has fallen on the same trick, but it is doubtful if they have any leader amongst them as suave, smart and cunning as Charles Taylor. Fighting over the spoils of war, their days are numbered, whatever dreamy numbers they give to accentuate their following. Many of their Ivorian comrades who freelanced with them when Laurent Gbagbo was paying Taylor back have since returned, according to reports. The party will therefore end, because Liberia will never be the same—subjected to exploitation by the biggest and most brutal guns.

--Tom Kamara

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