President Samuel K. Doe
1980-1990
Published: 16 September, 2005
Samuel Kanyon Doe was born on May 6, probably in 1951. He was born in Tuzon, a small town in Grand Gedeh County, in the Southeastern part of Liberia. His parents were poor and uneducated as were most rural Liberians, and they belonged to the Krahn tribe. Samuel Doe had only accomplished primary education when he became a career soldier, presumably because of lack of other job opportunities.
In October 1979 he was promoted master sergeant in the Liberian Army. He was in his 4th year in high school and attending night classes when he and a group of soldiers seized power, assassinated President William R. Tolbert, Jr., and established, for the first time in Liberia’s history, military rule over the country. It was April 12, 1980. Since Samuel Doe was the highest ranking non-commissioned officer of the 18 plotters, all but him ordinary soldiers, he became Chairman of the People’s Redemption Council (PRC) that was created.
The military coup is still surrounded by mysteries. Apparently, the preparations for it went unnoticed -- which is astonishing, given the fact that there was considerable political tension, and also in light of the well-staffed U.S. Embassy in Morovia (over 500 people). In an interview which the present author (FVDK) had with the then U.S. Ambassador to Liberia, Julius Walker, he confirmed that the events had taken them all by surprise. Samuel Doe was not a publicly known figure in Liberia before April 12, 1980. That soon changed after that date.
The military take-over was a bloody one, labelled ‘a revolution’ by the 18 enlisted men of the Armed Forces of Liberia who toppled the Government of William R. Tolbert. The 66-year old President was savagely murdered by private soldier Harrison Pennoh, who later proved mentally unstable. Before the end of the month the entire Cabinet had been put on trial and sentenced to death - with no right to be defended by a lawyer and no right to appeal to the verdict. In a horrific scene they were all but one publicly executed on a beach near Monrovia. The only cabinet member who escaped from being shot was the only minister of tribal origin, raised in an Americo-Liberian family that was part of the Tolbert clan.
Chairman (later Head of State) Samuel Doe on numerous occasions reiterated the army’s pledge to return to the barracks. On April 12, 1981, on the first anniversary of the coup, he announced the creation of a 25-member Constitutional Commission under the leadership of a renowned Liberian, Dr Amos Sawyer. A new constitution ‘should pave the road to a genuine democracy’.
However, within the four years that followed, everything changed. Chairman Doe started to like the taste of power. He increasingly surrounded himself with members of the (small) Krahn-tribe, in number hardly exceeding the Americo-Liberians who were now excluded from power. The US Government was greatly relieved when Doe maintained the country’s pro-Western stance, and Doe was even invited to the White House. It was here that President Ronald Reagan made his historic blunder when he cordially greeted ‘Chairman Moe’ when he warmly shook his hand. Nevertheless, Liberia received more political and military assistance from the USA in the decade of Doe’s rule than it had ever received, despite an increasingly deteriorating political climate and human rights record.
When in July 1985 the ban on politics and political parties was lifted, President Doe created his own party, the National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL). He was the NDPL’s candidate for the presidential elections slated for October of the same year. The elections were neither free nor fair, but Doe was declared winner with nearly 51 percent of the poll. There were numerous accusations of fraud and indications that the opposition Liberia Action Party (LAP), led by Jackson Doe (not related), was the real winner. The international community did not react, the US State Department ‘was pleased’. Dr Samuel K. Doe – he had received an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Political Science from the University of Seoul during one of his numerous visits abroad – was sworn in as Liberia’s 20th President, and First President of the Second Republic, on January 6, 1986.
Related to the October 1985 presidential elections three incidents are worth mentioning.
First, when Samuel Doe started to prepare for the race to the Executive Mansion, he consulted Dr. Amos Sawyer, a highly popular politician, intellectual and academian. He wanted Amos Sawyer to become his Vice President; but Sawyer declined. Subsequently, he fell into disgrace, was threatened, and his house burnt. His political party, the Liberia People’s Party (LPP), was accused of endangering the democratic process and subsequently banned from the presidential elections.
Second, since one of the clauses of the new constitution stipulated that the new president of the country was to be at least 35 years of age, Samuel Doe had his year of birth changed. Whereas ever since the military coup it was mentioned that it had been led by a 28-year old master sergeant, from now on Samuel Doe’s official date of birth was May 6, 1950.
This has led to hilarious situations. In his book ‘The road to democracy under the leadership of Samuel Kanyon Doe’, Willie Givens writes in ‘A brief biography of Dr Samuel K. Doe’ that he was born on May 6, 1950. He also shows a picture taken May 6, 1981 with the sub-title ‘the man who changed the course of Liberia’s history three weeks before the age of 29, celebrates his 30th birthday’ (Givens, 1986: 98).
The third incident perhaps is the most important and severe. One month after the elections, Doe’s former right hand, Commanding Gen. Thomas Quiwonkpa led an armed invasion from Nimba County, in the north of the country. Soon the rebels were in Monrovia where they attacked the Executive Mansion. Two years earlier, Quiwonkpa, who hailed from Nimba County, had been accused of an attempt to overthrow the Government but was granted clemency. This time, during the November 1985 revolt, he was killed, his mutilated body publicly displayed. The excessive and brutal reprisals of the Krahn-led Liberian Army against the Mano and Gio, in Nimba County, proved to become important stepping stones to the civil war that officially began in December 1989 – also starting in Nimba.
On Christmas Eve 1989 an alliance composed of Americo-Liberians and Mano and Gio people, united in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), invaded from Cote d’Ivoire. The NPLF was led by Charles Taylor, a corrupt former civil servant under Doe, who was born from an Americo-Liberian father and a Gola mother. An internal rift between the Americo-Liberian and tribal fighters in the NPFL resulted in a split led by the mentally defective ‘General’ Prince Johnson of Nimba County, who created the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia. The Liberian army was soon losing control over a large part of the territory, and Doe asked Nigeria’s president Babangida, with whom he presumably had common business interests, for support. In August 1990 the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sent a 4,000 men peacekeeping force to Liberia, known as ECOMOG.
On September 9, 1990 President Samuel Doe, on a visit to ECOMOG's headquarters in Monrovia, was captured by Prince Y. Johnson. How this could have happen is still unclear. Doe was tortured, mutilated and finally brutally killed by Johnson and his men, among whom was John Yormie, while all gruesome details were videotaped. The tape later found its way all over West Africa. Images of the videotape shocked civilized people all over the world. In the confusing period following Doe’s assassination, the psychopathic Prince Johnson claims to have been acting President for three months, before the arrival of the Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU) headed by Professor Amos Sawyer (see Pah K. Suku, Jr's comments in my guestbook).
Ironically, Samuel Doe died at the hands of a mentally defective Liberian, like his predecessor who had also succumbed in the hands of a mentally unstable person. Doe’s repressive military dictatorship and his transformation from a shy, thin, softspoken Master Sergeant into a corpulent, well-fed and well-clad Commander-In-Chief earned him a place next to other notorious heads of state like Idi Amin (Uganda), Jean-Bedel Bokasso (Central Africa), and ‘Baby’ Doc (Haiti). The greed for power, the corruption, nepotism and the abuse of human rights for which Doe had reproached Tolbert had become a trademark of his regime.
Not surprisingly, Liberians, with a remarkable sense of humour, had re-baptized his Revolutionary Council, known under the acronym PRC, as ‘People Repeating Corruption’. Who said ‘when history repeats itself, it first is as a tragedy, then as a farce’?
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