09-12-2014, 09:42 AM
HARBEL, Liberia The killers launched from the plantation under a waning moon one night in October 1992. They surged past tin-roofed villages and jungle hideouts, down macadam roads and red-clay bush trails. More and more joined their ranks until thousands of men in long, ragged columns moved toward the distant capital.
Men in camouflage mounted rusted artillery cannon in battered pickup trucks. Thin teenagers lugged rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Children carried AK-47s. Some held long machetes.
The killers wore ripped jeans and T-shirts, women's wigs and cheap rubber sandals. Grotesque masks made them look like demons. They were electric with drugs. They clutched talismans of feather and bone to protect them from bullets. In the pre-dawn darkness, they surrounded Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
They loosed their attack on the sleeping city. Artillery slammed into stores and homes. Mortars arced through thick, humid air that smelled of rot. Boy soldiers canoed across mangrove swamps. As they pressed in, the killers forced men, women and children from their homes. They murdered civilians and soldiers. Falling shells just missed the U.S. Embassy, hunkered on a high spot overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
A new phase of Liberia's civil war had begun. It would whip savagely out of control over the next decade. More than 200,000 people would die or suffer terrible injuries, most of them civilians limbs hacked off, eyes gouged out. Half the country's population would become refugees. Five American nuns would be slaughtered, becoming international symbols of the conflict's depravity.
Orchestrating the anarchy was Charles Taylor, a suave egomaniac obsessed with taking over Liberia, America's most faithful ally in Africa. For the attack that October morning, he had built his army of butchers and believers in part with the resources of one of America's most iconic businesses: Firestone.
Firestone ran the plantation that Taylor used to direct the October 1992 assault on Monrovia. In operation since 1926, the rubber plantation was considered to be the largest of its kind in the world, a contiguous swath of trees, mud-brown rivers, low hills and verdant bush that at the time splayed across 220 square miles roughly the size of Chicago.
Firestone wanted Liberia for its rubber. Taylor wanted Firestone to help his rise to power. At a pivotal meeting in Liberia's jungles in July 1991, the company agreed to do business with the warlord.
In the first detailed examination of the relationship between Firestone and Taylor, an investigation by ProPublica and Frontline lays bare the role of a global corporation in a brutal African conflict.
Firestone served as a source of food, fuel, trucks and cash used by Taylor's ragtag rebel army, according to interviews, internal corporate documents and declassified diplomatic cables.
The company signed a deal in 1992 to pay taxes to Taylor's rebel government. Over the next year, the company doled out more than $2.3 million in cash, checks and food to Taylor, according to an accounting in court files. Between 1990 and 1993, the company invested $35.3 million in the plantation.
In return, Taylor's forces provided security to the plantation that allowed Firestone to produce rubber and safeguard its assets. Taylor's rebel government offered lower export taxes that gave the company a financial break on rubber shipments.
For Taylor, the relationship with Firestone was about more than money. It helped provide him with the political capital and recognition he needed as he sought to establish his credentials as Liberia's future leader.
"We needed Firestone to give us international legitimacy," said John Toussaint "J.T." Richardson, a U.S.-trained architect who became one of Taylor's top advisers. "We needed them for credibility."
While Firestone used the plantation for the business of rubber, Taylor used it for the business of war. Taylor turned storage centers and factories on Firestone's sprawling rubber farm into depots for weapons and ammunition. He housed himself and his top ministers in Firestone homes. He also used communications equipment on the plantation to broadcast messages to his supporters, propaganda to the masses and instructions to his troops.
Secret U.S. diplomatic cables from the time captured Taylor's gratitude to Firestone. Firestone's plantation "had been the lifeblood" of the territory in Liberia that he controlled, Taylor told one Firestone executive, according to a State Department cable. Taylor later said in sworn testimony that Firestone's resources had been the "most significant" source of foreign exchange in the early years of his revolt.
In written responses to questions, Firestone acknowledged the agreement with Taylor, but said it had never willingly assisted Taylor's insurrection.
The company said Taylor rebels had used Firestone's trucks, food, medical supplies, fuel and tools under the "obvious threat of violence to anyone who considered stopping them."
"Firestone had no role in the rise of Charles Taylor. It had no role in his ability to hold power in Liberia," the company said.
"At no time did Firestone have a collaborative relationship with Charles Taylor," the statement said. "The company's activities were focused on protecting its employees and property. The company had no ability to stop Taylor's forces from using the plantation for any purposes."
At the moment of the October 1992 attack that came to be known as Operation Octopus, Taylor controlled the vast majority of Liberia. He faced a weak interim government in Monrovia, backed by 7,000 largely untested soldiers from allied West African nations.
Operation Octopus effectively plunged the country into five more turbulent, terrible years of intermittent warfare. Taylor turned a civil war between his forces and the Liberian government into a bloodbath as more rebel factions joined in the fight for spoils: diamonds, timber, power. It spilled into neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone, where rebel forces allied with Taylor hacked the limbs off civilians in a terror campaign of unchecked brutality.
In July 1997, Taylor won his war, and not on the battlefield. He was elected president, dominating with 75 percent of the vote. For many Liberians, a vote for Taylor was a vote of resignation. Many believed it was the only way to stop the killing. After Taylor became president, more factions arose, more bloodletting, more revenge. Liberia and its people suffered yet again.
In 2003, Taylor was indicted by an international tribunal for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone. He resigned the presidency. He was eventually sentenced to 50 years in prison the first head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity since the Nazi era.
The path to cooperation was neither direct nor easy for Firestone and its executives, according to interviews and documents. Some company officials actively resisted working with Taylor and his fighters, even in the face of real and implied threats of physical violence.
Other senior officers felt the company had no choice but to give in to Taylor's demands. They believed that working with Taylor was the only way to protect the thousands of impoverished Liberians who lived and labored on the plantation.
Firestone also received conflicting direction from the United States government. One ambassador urged the company to work with Taylor. In Washington, diplomats warned Firestone executives about the dangers of doing business with him.
But in the end, Firestone as a corporation, and as a collection of men, made a deliberate decision to cooperate with a man whose forces were publicly denounced as violent, vicious and rapacious by the U.S. government and human rights groups.
The U.S. State Department had issued a report blaming Taylor's forces for killing civilians, raping women and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to become refugees. Human Rights Watch said that Taylor's forces had engaged in a killing campaign that put a targeted ethnic group at "risk of genocide."
Today, Firestone maintains that at the time it struck its deal with Taylor, the guerrilla leader had "no well-established record" of human right violations. It said that many other companies and world leaders had treated Taylor as a legitimate political figure. Other companies operating in Liberia at the time chose to leave. But some stayed on through the violence.
"Does Firestone believe it did the right thing? Yes," Firestone said of its decisions in Liberia. "Do we, along with former U.S. presidents, the U.S. State Department, the United Nations and many leaders around the world who worked with Charles Taylor regret the war criminal he became? Yes."
The decision that Firestone faced confronts American companies operating to this day in war-torn, volatile regions in an increasingly globalized economy. All aim to make money. All must weigh, to one degree or another, their hierarchy of obligations to their shareholders, to their foreign workers, to their host countries, and to their own sense of right and wrong.
Donald Ensminger served as the managing director of the Firestone plantation when Taylor invaded Liberia. He witnessed the violence first hand. Taylor rebels killed and imprisoned his workers. They threatened Ensminger with death at the point of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Ensminger was let go from the company in October 1991. For the next 23 years, he kept silent about Firestone's choice to do a deal with a warlord. Now, he told Frontline and ProPublica, he wanted to explain.
He said that he warned Firestone that Taylor was a killer. He told the company that working with him might be a crime. He urged them to avoid deals that might legitimize the guerilla leader as the ruler of Liberia.
For him, the decision was clear. And Firestone got it wrong.
"Certainly on behalf of our employees, the ones that were killed and suffered, it was immoral that we should now recognize the guy that caused all this," he said in an interview.
Gerald Rose, who served as the deputy chief of mission in Liberia at the time, holds an equally unsparing view of Firestone's choice.
"Do I think they have blood on their hands? Yes," Rose said. "I would not have made the decisions they made. I believe they facilitated a warlord in his insurrection and in the atrocities that he created."
Through the years, Liberia has been hesitant to examine its past. Taylor, for instance, was tried only for harm he caused in Sierra Leone, not Liberia. In 2009, the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended sanctions for scores of perpetrators. It cited Firestone for having aided Taylor in carrying out his rebellion and called for more investigation. The Liberian government never acted on those recommendations.
The stunning truth is that nobody has ever been punished in Liberia for the civil war that destroyed the nation. In fact, some of the people who helped to wreck the country are now the same people responsible for rebuilding it.
Top officials of formerly warring factions are now politicians passing laws in the legislature. They are pastors preaching from the country's pulpits. They are executives running some of the country's largest businesses.
The damage they inflicted on Liberia haunts the country even today. Liberia's shattered infrastructure and weakened health system have struggled to cope with the spread of the Ebola virus, which has killed thousands of Liberians.
In an interview with Frontline and ProPublica, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf acknowledged that Liberia had not yet succeeded in shaking the Taylor regime or the devils of its history.
"The effect of that regime and regimes of the past are still with us today," she said. "Today we have a traumatized nation."
Efforts over many months to reach Taylor through his lawyers and family were not successful.
Johnson Sirleaf looked thoughtful when asked to describe Liberia's relationship with Firestone. A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Johnson Sirleaf said the company had benefitted Liberia with jobs and revenue.
In fact, during its decades of operation, Firestone had built a nation within a nation. The company provided housing, schools, food and health care to workers and their families. Some 80,000 Liberians lived within its borders. Firestone introduced currency, built roads and opened up the rural interior.
At the same time, Johnson Sirleaf said, Firestone has sometimes failed to live up to its obligations to the country whose people have provided it with so much over so many years. Over the decades, the company has faced accusations that it exploited its laborers, received unfair concession deals, despoiled the environment and exacerbated corruption.
Said Johnson Sirleaf: "It is a mixed story."
I. Warlord on the Rise
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor
Charles McArthur Ghankay Taylor was a man of many faces: bureaucrat, jail breaker, revolutionary, orator, warlord, president, war criminal.
Born in Liberia in 1948, Taylor came to the United States in 1972 to attend college. He received an economics degree from Bentley College, a private school with a campus of brick buildings and leafy trees outside Boston.
In the United States, he was one of many young, educated Liberians in the 1970s agitating for change in their home country.
Taylor saw his chance in 1980, when a Liberian army master sergeant named Samuel Doe seized control of the government. Doe's men gutted the president, William Tolbert, in the presidential mansion that overlooked the turquoise ocean. They tied 13 government officials and political allies to wooden poles staked in the ground at a nearby beach and executed them.
Doe was 28 years old and barely literate. To Taylor and other Liberians, he represented the overthrow of the old patrician order that had long ruled the country. Taylor decided to join the revolution. Taylor was appointed head of the government's procurement arm, the General Services Agency.
The urbane, educated Taylor soon fell out of favor with Doe, who surrounded himself with thuggish fellow Krahn tribesmen. Taylor fled back to the United States amid charges that he bilked the Liberian government of nearly $1 million. An ardent Cold War ally, Doe asked President Ronald Reagan's administration for his extradition. Taylor was locked up in a Massachusetts jail to await deportation.
There, the myth of Taylor began. In September 1985, Taylor broke out of the Plymouth County jail. News reports said that he sawed through bars, descended on knotted blankets and escaped into surrounding woods.
How he accomplished the feat if that's indeed how he escaped has never been fully explained. At his war crimes trial, Taylor boasted that the CIA had aided the escape, a claim the agency has never confirmed or denied.
Taylor made it to Mexico and eventually Libya. There, he received instruction at a military camp established by Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi to train African revolutionaries. In the late 1980s, Taylor and his cohorts created the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, dedicated to overthrowing Doe.
Doe had become wildly unpopular. He had massacred thousands of other, rival tribe members, surrounded himself with cronies and driven the country into debt. In late 1989, the country was so broke that Doe convinced Firestone to provide an advance on future tax payments.
On Dec. 24, 1989, Taylor began his revolution to overthrow Doe and ostensibly return democracy to Liberia. It was, at first, quixotic. He launched his coup d'état not from the capital, but from a remote border crossing. He had a few dozen men, a paucity of weapons and little ammunition. He was taking on a longtime ally of the United States, with little popular support and no military experience.
Few people in either the U.S. or Liberian governments saw him as a serious threat.
"He wasn't on our radar," said Herman "Hank" Cohen, who back then was the assistant secretary of state for Africa.
That soon changed. Doe badly bungled his response to Taylor, sending out troops who ruthlessly murdered civilians. Angry men and women who had suffered the brunt of Doe's oppression began taking up arms to join Taylor's nascent band.
Taylor commanded a pauper's army that grew to thousands, led by a handful of trusted lieutenants, Libyan-trained mercenaries and professional military men.
Among the most notorious recruits were the Small Boys Unit young children, often orphans, who swore allegiance to "Papai," as Taylor was called. To prove their loyalty, the children sometimes had to gun down their mothers and fathers. They would become among some of the most vicious killers in a war of heartless, mindless, unfathomable killing.
As the months passed and his march toward Monrovia continued, Taylor's legend and ego only grew. He presented himself as a Baptist who neither smoked nor drank. A mesmeric speaker, he would appear before adoring crowds dressed in fine white linen, spouting promises of democracy, jobs and better days.
At other times, he wore camouflage and carried an AK-47. He would take to the radio to announce the impending capture of a nearby town, then magically do it. For many in Liberia, the spirit world remains close at hand. In such a place, Taylor became something more than a man mystical, powerful, otherworldly.
Taylor seized much of the country's rural, tribal interior, then his forces swept down an old railroad line built by a mining company to the Atlantic coast. There, he captured the country's second-largest port, a jumble of docks and cranes in the rundown town of Buchanan. Hundreds of people were slaughtered as his soldiers settled old ethnic scores.
Elementary and middle schools emptied of children as they flocked to join Taylor. Catholic nuns reported school attendance dropping from 3,000 to 1,000 students in one town. Children too young to carry rifles were given grenades instead.
Taylor's eyes now turned west, toward Monrovia, a capital of concrete and decay overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Between his army and his ambition lay an extraordinary treasure: the Firestone plantation. Some 40 miles from the capital, the plantation had the country's most modern communications and electrical systems. It had food, gas, vehicles. Right next to it sat the principal airport, Roberts International Airport.
In the early days of June 1990, Taylor hurled his men forward.
An Old Southern Plantation
images (1)For more than six decades, the Firestone plantation had spread across the coastal plains and rolling hills of central Liberia. It was a kingdom of men, machines and rubber trees, wedged between two tannin-stained rivers, on some of the country's most fertile soil.
At the center of this kingdom was House 53, reserved for the plantation boss. It stood on a hill overlooking the rest of the plantation, a two-story antebellum-style Georgian Colonial mansion of pink brick. It had a wide porch, six white Corinthian columns and jalousie windows. Other homes for expatriates, featuring verandas and manicured gardens, were scattered nearby in a section of the plantation known as Harbel Hills. There was a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts and a country club with a bar.
About 3 miles down the road was Harbel, Firestone's own company town, a portmanteau formed from the names of the business' founder Harvey S. Firestone Sr. and his wife Idabelle. It held Firestone's central office, industrial garages and a latex-processing plant redolent of ammonia and other chemicals. The town itself was a collection of tin-roofed homes and shops, a grocery store, a bank, schools and brick and cinder-block bungalows for mid-level Liberian managers and domestic staff.
A soccer field ran along the edge of town. On weekends, Firestone would show movies outdoors. The grounds were meticulous: close-cut grass and neat rows of rubber trees with the undergrowth cleared out. The order and precision immediately marked the plantation as different from the rest of the riotous, overgrown country.
Beyond the town were the trees, rows upon rows of trees: more than 8 million Hevea brasilienses planted in neat lines. Hidden in the groves and bush were dozens of work camps connected by roads that laced the farm.
These were the homes of the tappers, the Liberian workers who did the hard work of extracting the latex sap from the trees. The camps were long, low rows of residences almost like coops. Units generally consisted of a single room. The homes had wattle and daub walls and aluminum roofs. There were no windows and no kitchens. The work camps had communal pumps for water and outdoor kitchens for cooking. There was no electricity. Bathrooms were outhouses or the nearby bush.
Every day, the tappers got up to work before dawn. They cut thin slashes in the rubber trees with sharp knives, careful not to cut too deep or too often. The sap would run out into small cups raw latex, the source of natural rubber.
Thousands of workers labored to meet their daily quotas by tapping hundreds of trees. To meet the demands, or surpass them to make more money, the tappers sometimes put wives and children to work to complete their tasks.
The collected latex was poured into giant metal buckets, which each held up to 75 pounds of sap. They were carried two at a time by workers holding a wooden yoke across their shoulders. The latex would be weighed. The workers got a few dollars a day.
From there, the sap would be processed into hunks of block rubber or canisters of liquid latex. At the end of a good year, the daily, delicate tapping and gathering of thousands of tiny cups produced tens of thousands of tons of rubber. The raw material was shipped off to factories around the world to become car tires and rubber hoses, hospital gloves and condoms.
This was the world of the Firestone operation described in 1990 by one company executive as resembling "an old Southern plantation."
After years of decorum and routine, it was about to become a gruesome battlefield.
The War Machine
Taylor's war machine was sighted near the Firestone factory at 7 a.m. on June 5, 1990.
Ensminger, the plantation boss, woke to find Taylor's fighters on the other side of the slow-moving Farmington River the eastern border between the Firestone farm and the rest of Liberia. Wearing their trademark red bandanas, the rebels sang and danced on the bank some 400 feet away, waving U.S dollar bills and brandishing automatic rifles.
Tough, pragmatic and taciturn, Ensminger was not surprised by the arrival of the men. Grim stories raced ahead of Taylor's swarm.
On April 6, Ensminger had issued a "strictly confidential" memo to the 40 or so U.S. and foreign-national staff who oversaw the plantation's Liberian workers.
"Due to the current unstable political situation in Liberia, we believe it is prudent to plan for the worst case scenario," he wrote. The memo instructed expats to pack emergency supplies, gas up cars and meet at secret rally points in case of an evacuation. "The information contained in this memo even the very existence of this memo should not be discussed with persons not covered by it," he wrote. By May, the company had sent home expat wives and children.
To the persons not covered by the memo the Liberian workers and their families Ensminger projected confidence as the maelstrom drew closer.
On April 28, he met with 180 Liberian staffers who were "near panic" at Taylor's approach. Ensminger told them "they should be calm, as there was nothing to fear," a company memo said. He told Liberian managers and workers that the fighters would simply pass through the plantation on their way to attack the capital.
In an interview, Ensminger said he warned the employees that Firestone would not be able to protect them if Taylor's troops overran the plantation. He said he told them, "Our responsibility as an American company is to the expats. I told them, this is your country, you should take whatever action jointly or individually that you can take."
On the June morning when the rebels massed on the river-bank and mortars thumped in the distance, Ensminger directed his staff to carry out some last-minute errands. He sent Steve Raimo, the company's accounting manager, to drive a pickup truck through the plantation to ensure that workers got their weekly pay before the rebels crossed the river.
Upbeat and optimistic, Raimo joked with Ensminger that he would hang his arm out of the window to make sure the fighters would know he was white.
"I knew that at that time that the rebels weren't out to hurt us," Raimo said. "We weren't really involved in the fray."
As the fighters began crossing the river in roughhewn canoes, they called out soothing promises. They shouted out that they had "no interest to harm workers" and were "only interested in soldiers," Ensminger wrote in a journal that he kept during the invasion.
Whether or not Ensminger believed the rebels, many Liberian workers apparently did. When the fighters finally reached Firestone's side of the river just before noon, some workers celebrated. To them, Taylor's men were Freedom Fighters come to overthrow Doe, Liberia's reviled dictator.
Women ululated on the main market street. They waved their hands above their heads. "Freedom fighters, freedom fighters," some shouted.
Matthew Chipley, a skinny teenager who lived with his family on the plantation, watched as the fighters entered the town, guns held high. "People were jubilating. People were happy to receive Taylor," he said. "They were in poverty, things were hard for them, and nothing good was going on."
Mary Pollee, a young mother with three children whose husband worked in the Firestone electrical generator plant, remembered that the rebels seemed concerned about people's safety. "All of you, go in your house," they shouted to villagers. "When the rebels enter, they are not killing nobody," she said.
Arthur Welwean, a college student and the son of Ensminger's cook, raced down to the river's edge to watch young boys with wigs on their heads and AK-47s in their hands spread out through the plantation. "This is gonna be good," he remembered thinking. "These guys are in town. They wanna liberate people."
Michael Mulbah Sr., a Liberian manager who had gone to college in the United States and lived on the plantation, recalled the excitement over the prospect that this motley militia might overthrow Doe. "We talked that they were our saviors," he said.
Vendettas, Violence and Church-Robe Killers
It took only a day for the saviors to turn into devils.
The first person the rebels killed after crossing the river, according to several witnesses, was a mentally handicapped man. He was gunned down in the street. Next, the rebels began hunting down people who belonged to tribes closely associated with the ruling regime.
Kevin Estall, a British expatriate who was Firestone's agricultural operations manager, recalled seeing piles of dead bodies of Liberians laying outside the Harbel supermarket. He was told the rebels had executed the men in public because they were from a rival tribe. "They had been stitched, riddled with bullets from AK-47s straight up and down their bodies," he said. They were left in the street, their bodies swelling in the sun.
Mulbah was huddling in his bungalow when a group of Taylor's rebels demanded that he leave immediately. Several boy soldiers glared at him, their eyes red, guns dragging on the ground behind them. Mulbah fled with two pairs of pants and some shirts.
"Taylor was like an eagle," said Mulbah. "He'd come at you with his claws hidden, until he wanted to take them out."
Over the next couple of days, the rebels hunted down members of rival tribes, beating and killing them. They took Firestone trucks, fuel and rice. They imprisoned the chief of Firestone's police force in the plantation jail.
Welwean, the cook's son, was running to hide in a small camp when he heard screaming all around him. A squad of children jumped out of the bush holding automatic weapons. They wore maroon choir robes, which they had stolen from a church on the plantation. Too big for the boys, the robes trailed on the ground, their trim ragged and dusty.
The boys believed that Welwean was a government soldier. They had him raise his pants legs since they believed that the soldiers wore boots that left marks on the wearer's calf. When they found no marks, they let Welwean pass.
"It was terrifying. They had the AK-47s. The guns are pointed straight at you," recalled Welwean, who now works as a bank examiner in the United States. "They're like, If you lie, we're gonna kill you.' And you are trembling, shaking."
Four days after the rebel invasion, government soldiers counterattacked, pushing the rebels back into the bush. They scoured Harbel for rebel collaborators, rounding up scores of Firestone workers.
The soldiers, members of the Armed Forces of Liberia, went on their own rampage. They beat and tortured Firestone workers who were suspected of assisting Taylor's rebels. They raped women, forcing loved ones to watch. They dumped bodies in the plantation's drainage ditches.
The plantation turned menacing and surreal: Shadows darted through the rubber trees, corpses stuck out from weed-covered ditches, artillery fire pounded like bass drums into the early hours of the night.
Neighbors turned on each other. One boy pointed NPFL soldiers to two Firestone workers from a targeted tribe. Taylor rebels slit their throats. A few days later, the dead men's families handed over the boy to government soldiers. They executed him behind the Firestone bank.
Caught in the crossfire were Chipley and his family. The soldiers accused them of being spies. As the teenager watched, the soldiers flogged his mother and father. Chipley, who worked at Firestone's processing plant, was tied up by the soldiers. Young girls that he knew were raped, he said.
Chipley and scores of plantation workers decided to follow the example of thousands of other young Liberians brutalized by Doe's soldiers: They joined Taylor's forces. They fled to rebel outposts in the northern part of the plantation and began training.
"Upon God and man, I never one day thought of holding what they called gun," Chipley said. "Because of the ill-treatment, I was forced to join.
"They were plenty that joined," he said.
The Obligation
As the battle erupted, many of the remaining expats headed for House 53. Ensconced on the hill, Ensminger and his fellow expatriates were protected from the killings below them. The men passed the time playing cards and listening to BBC reports about the war. Ensminger smoked his pipe and practiced his golf game, using a pitching wedge to place short chip shots into nearby buckets.
Still, the executives could not escape the violence. Rifle fire crackled from all around. The power was out for days. Reports streamed in of nine bodies in one camp, high casualties in another. Conflicting rumors had the rebels in control of the plantation one day, government soldiers coming to the rescue the next.
For those long used to control, confusion reigned.
"Very awkward and potentially dangerous for us, our people and our assets," Ensminger scribbled as the battle for Firestone raged. "Will there be confrontations? Who will control? How to deal with changing hands/demands?"
The last question was a daily challenge. John Vispo, Ensminger's Number 2 and the plantation controller, had withdrawn the equivalent of $10,000 in cash from the Firestone safe before he sought shelter in House 53. It was, he figured, the best way to appease the fighters, who were often drunk, angry and armed.
As rebel commanders streamed to the mansion with demands, Ensminger took careful notes in his journal. One commander got $500 to "insure safety [in the Harbel Hills] area." Another fighter received 100 gallons of gas, five bags of rice and $40. Ensminger handed yet another group Firestone Truck 63A the oldest available.
On other occasions he resisted: Tough talk prevented the theft of vehicles and a personal computer. There seemed to be no one in charge, no overall commander to contact.
"We are totally helpless!!" Ensminger scrawled after days of demands at gunpoint.
By the third day, a huge crowd of some 1,500 to 2,000 panicked Liberians headed for House 53. For decades, Firestone had provided them with food, shelter and safety. Now, they begged for protection from the savagery.
Vispo halted the crowd as it walked up the long, broad lawn leading to House 53. There was nothing that Firestone could do, he told them. Firestone chefs cooked up a big pot of rice, which was distributed among the crowd.
"We're all in this together. We have no way to protect you or ourselves. We're as scared as you," Vispo recalled telling the people. "There's nothing we can do to protect you. It's better off if you go to your villages."
The next day, several dozen senior Liberian staffers people who worked directly with the expats, who considered them friends and colleagues approached a second time in hopes of rescue.
"Some of the Firestone staff said, Well, if the expatriates are going out to Ensminger's house and it's safe, the rebels are not going there to bother anyone,'" said Welwean, who joined the stream of refuge seekers. "There should be a sanctuary for everyone."
This time, Ensminger stood on the porch and delivered the response: There was nothing the company could do for them.
"We recognized a responsibility to our employees. But what could we do? Our position got so untenable. There was nothing I could do about 1,000 or 1,500 or 40 or 50 Liberians," Ensminger said in the interview.
The decision did not sit well with some expats. Estall refused to take shelter in Ensminger's house. He holed up in his own home nearby, taking in several Liberians who pleaded for refuge.
"They felt they had been betrayed," Estall said of Firestone's Liberian staffers. "They felt let down by Mr. Ensminger for not offering them any shelter."
The rejection stung the Liberians. Firestone employees had difficulty believing that such a powerful corporation, one with so much sway in the Liberian capital and so much money in its bank accounts, could not help in any way.
Actually it could help but that aid would only be for the expats.
On June 13 at 5:30 in the evening, six Taylor guerillas confronted Ensminger on the front porch of House 53. The expats recognized several of the fighters as men who had worked as caddies at Firestone's golf course.
The commander pointed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at Ensminger and threatened to blow up the house. He demanded $1,000. Ensminger convinced the men to leave with a truck and $200.
During the takeover, Ensminger had maintained radio contact with the embassy and Firestone headquarters in Akron, Ohio. Now, he called them again. It was time to leave.
The U.S. Embassy sent military escorts to accompany the Firestone expats to safety. Just after dawn, 19 expats in 17 vehicles headed through Gate 15, the northwestern entrance to the plantation. U.S. special forces made sure they arrived safely in Monrovia.
The Liberian workers woke to find themselves abandoned.
Justin Knuckles, a senior Liberian manager, had taken refuge in the Firestone community center with other Liberian staff. He remembers finding a note on the door from one of the expats, apologizing for their departure. The note said they would return when the situation calmed down.
"You know when Jesus were taken and the disciples were left alone? That how we felt," Knuckles said. "Because we had a belief, as long as the Americans are on the plantation, we had a little hope. But now the Americans are gone, what gonna happen to us?"
Raimo said leaving behind the employees was "disheartening." Looking back, however, he could think of no way that Firestone could have evacuated all the employees on the plantation.
"Our hands were tied," he said. "We had no U.S. Army or Marines or whatever to come in and help us evacuate these hundreds of thousands of people who had been affiliated with Firestone, one way or another."
"It's hard to process sometimes the inhumanity of man towards man," said Raimo, who is now a business consultant and a Christian minister. "Certainly, evil was taking reign in Liberia."
The expats headed home.
The final scrawl in Ensminger's journal: "WHAT AN ORDEAL!!"
Ensminger arrived in Akron some 26 hours after the evacuation. At a press conference, he recounted the story of the rebel invasion and the RPG pointed at his chest.
His biggest concern, he said, was for the workers.
"I personally … have an obligation to the many thousands of employees in Harbel," Ensminger told reporters.
Everybody Run Away
As Ensminger spoke to the press, Mary Pollee was trudging through thick bush to keep her shattered family alive.
A group of government soldiers had burst into Pollee's mud-walled home on the Firestone plantation just before the ex-pats evacuated. They dragged her and her husband Joseph outdoors. They stripped him to his underwear. In front of their three children, they began beating and kicking the couple, accusing them of working with Taylor's rebels.
"When you want cry, they beat you. They say, You want die? You want die? You will die right now,'" Pollee said. "They hard, that day. They were not easy."
The soldiers hauled away her bleeding husband. They marched back later demanding a ransom for his return. Pollee handed over what little she had. The soldiers returned a day later. They asked for $500 more. When she told them that she did not have it, the soldiers gang-raped her. They told her they would kill her and her children.
The next day, the soldiers killed her husband behind the white-washed, cinder-block bank in Harbel. Pollee decided to flee into the surrounding jungle with her children. Just before leaving, she remembers hearing that the Firestone expats had evacuated.
It made little difference to Pollee and her children. They plodded through the bush, eating sugar cane to survive, weary, afraid, hungry. A few days into her trek, Pollee noticed that the 3-year-old boy who she had strapped to her back had stopped moving. Monko, her youngest, had died.
Pollee was crazed with grief. She held the child in front of her, stumbling through the bush. She ran into a stranger, who helped her to bury the boy in the wild.
After days in the jungle, Pollee and her remaining children reached Kakata, a rebel-held town just outside the plantation. Her ordeal was not over.
In a recent interview, Pollee sat, dignified and graceful, on her couch in her tiny, tidy home beneath a mango tree in a suburb of Monrovia.
She remains angry at Firestone. Why hadn't the company stood firm against the rebels? Why hadn't the Firestone police tried to stop the assault? Why hadn't the company asked the government soldiers to stay back?
"Nobody were there to protect the worker, nobody," she said. "They went with their children, their wives, everybody, nobody left here, and when they left that's the time the people started raising hell with us."
Still, she said she understood.
"When it come to a war," she said, "everybody run away."
II. A Century of Blood, Sweat and Profits
To understand the ferocity of the fighting that erupted in 1990 and why Firestone and its plantation inevitably became central in it one needs to know something of Liberia's unusual history.
The country was settled in the 1800s by freeborn American blacks and freed American slaves, the result of a back-to-Africa movement by the American Colonization Society, a philanthropic organization. It was supported by President James Monroe and the U.S. Congress.
Even after the colony declared itself independent in 1847, naming itself Liberia, or "Land of Freedom," the country duplicated many of the economic and social structures of the American South. The settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, had a complex relationship with the indigenous Africans who lived in the region. Some of the settlers built Southern-style mansions and exploited the locals' labor and land.
Firestone arrived in Liberia in the 1920s. By that time, Harvey S. Firestone Sr., the farm boy from Ohio who founded the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., had become one of the top industrialists of the gilded age.
He dreamed of finding a rubber source beyond the grasp of the British Empire, which controlled much of the world market. In Liberia, he found a spot in the narrow band around the equator where rubber trees thrived and a nation that was in debt and desperate for business.
After two years of negotiations, Firestone and Liberia announced one of history's great sweetheart deals. Liberia gave Firestone the right to lease up to 1 million acres roughly 10 percent of the country's arable land. The cost? Six cents an acre. The term? Ninety-nine years.
The deal survived an early controversy in 1930, when investigators from the League of Nations found officials in the Liberian government had engaged in forcing indigenous villagers to work on private farms, including Firestone's plantation.
The investigators found no evidence that Firestone "consciously employs labor which has been forcibly impressed." Soon after the scandal, Harvey Firestone Jr., the founder's son, launched a public relations campaign, delivering a series of radio addresses that described the company's work in Liberia.
The five-minute spots depicted a company that respected local customs, provided workers with health care and built roads for a benighted nation all the while benefitting American car owners.
"To the little Republic of Liberia, Firestone has brought a new day of hope and advancement," Firestone said in one broadcast. "It has been a gratifying thought to us that by means of commercial progress we have been of service to mankind."
The 1950s were golden years for Firestone and Liberia's elite. Firestone was Liberia's largest private employer and the largest exporter in the country. Firestone's profits after taxes amounted to three times the government's total revenue for 1951, according to one study.
The company tightened its relationships with the country's ruling class in part by helping them become rubber farmers, providing free saplings and agricultural advice. When the rubber began to flow, Firestone purchased it.
Former presidents Charles King, Edwin Barclay, William V.S. Tubman and Tolbert all owned large rubber plantations.
To preserve its plantation, Firestone worked closely with whoever ran Liberia, no matter how they came to power or what they did to hold onto it.
In office for nearly 30 years, Tubman turned into a virtual dictator, quashing dissent, imprisoning political opponents and creating a spy network to track ordinary citizens. Firestone maintained such close ties with him that when the daughter of one plantation executive got married, she and her husband honeymooned at Tubman's summer retreat outside Monrovia.
Tolbert, Tubman's longtime vice president and successor, had the most fractious relationship with the rubber giant. As president in the mid-1970s, he renegotiated the government's contract with Firestone, insisting on raising taxes and hiring more Liberians in senior management. Firestone executives complained that the plantation's profitability began to decline.
About four weeks after Doe's bloody coup in 1980, Firestone sent Don L. Weihe, the affable executive in charge of the company's overseas rubber operations, to meet the new dictator.
"When you're the big frog in the pond, you're sort of wondering who is in charge of the pond," Weihe explained.
Doe suspended the 1976 rubber deal struck by Tolbert that had so pained Firestone executives. Until world rubber prices rebounded, he decided, the company would enjoy generous tax exemptions. "Firestone and Liberia have enjoyed a long and unique historical relationship," Doe said in a speech to Firestone's executives. "We therefore consider this relationship as a contract of survival."
Taylor ensured that Doe's role in the relationship would be limited.
III: Tough Talk in the Jungle
After chasing the Firestone managers out in June 1990, Taylor took over the colonnaded grandeur of House 53. The message was unmistakable: The company that had dominated the country for so long, that held power over its leaders and its laborers, had been vanquished.
The stately mansion was often chaotic and frenzied. Cronies and bodyguards lounged in the hallways. Sycophants waited for an audience. Battle commanders rushed in and out.
Taylor's goal was to seize Monrovia, which held half the country's population, most of its major financial and political institutions and most important, the executive mansion Doe's presidential residence, a menacing, fortified structure overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Taylor staged his attack from the Firestone plantation. He was confident enough of his success that he announced he would occupy the mansion by early July.
His men battled to within 500 yards of the executive mansion where Doe had holed up with his men. That was as far as he would get. As the two sides traded mortar- and small-arms fire, Taylor suddenly called a halt to the operation. The United States had reached out to him to plead for peace.
Cohen, the State Department's top Africa hand, talked with Taylor several times by satellite phone to negotiate a ceasefire. He even visited Taylor at a rearguard base in Ivory Coast, where he found Taylor seated on a throne, surrounded by child soldiers. Behind him was a portrait of President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline.
"He had visions of being a great statesman," Cohen said. "He saw himself like that. I'm gonna take over Liberia and make it into a new country.' "
The bid for peace failed, and Liberia faded further as a concern for the United States. Cohen said his superiors made that clear to him.
"The feeling was that we didn't want to have Liberia as our adopted child," Cohen said. "We were not going to take charge of Liberia."
Into the void stepped an alliance of West African nations led by Nigeria, the regional heavyweight. In August 1990, the alliance deployed some 7,000 peacekeepers, known as ECOMOG.
The peacekeepers succeeded in halting Taylor. But they did not save Liberia's president. Doe was captured and killed by the head of a rival rebel faction led by Prince Johnson, one of Taylor's former generals.
A notorious, vicious drunk, Johnson had himself filmed as he ordered his men to torture Doe. While he sat behind a desk with two open cans of Budweiser beer, a young woman fanning him from behind, Johnson ordered his men to strip Doe. The portly president kneeled before Johnson in his underwear, quivering, sobbing, begging. Johnson's men hacked off his ears. Blood poured down his torso. Doe's body was later found dumped outside a medical clinic.
Amos Sawyer, a Liberian intellectual, would emerge as the president of an interim government named at a meeting of leading Liberian politicians, activists and religious leaders.
By November, an uneasy ceasefire had settled across the country. Liberians called it "no peace, no war."
Taylor, unimpressed by the peacekeepers and the new interim president, went about the business of governing.
He now controlled almost all of Liberia. In typically grandiose fashion, Taylor named his territory Greater Liberia though it was better known by its eponymous nickname, Taylorland. He declared himself president.
As his capital, he chose the village of Gbarnga in the flatlands of northern Liberia, a scruffy regional trading center.
Taylor turned a long, low single-story house on an airy hill overlooking the village into his executive mansion. From the outside, it was modest and unpretentious. Inside was rococo furniture and walls of varnished wood.
He formed a legislative body for Taylorland, the National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government, or NPRAG. He appointed a Cabinet of ministers (frequently fired, sometimes beaten) and created a judicial system (hardly independent). He even hired a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.
He also built his army eventually amassing perhaps 10,000 fighters and child soldiers armed with machine guns, mortars and artillery cannon.
His dreams stretched wide as Liberia's sky.
"I'm not a soldier. I'm an economist. I came here believing in the very democratic principles that the United States is built on today," he told television cameras. "All I want to do is to bring back some sanity, some fair play in the country."
For a while, a group of Firestone's Liberian managers worked with Taylor to run the plantation. But they couldn't maintain the millions of rubber trees. They had no ships to transport the rubber, no sales network to sell it. The farm's hydroelectric plant supplied electricity only haphazardly.
By February 1991, the plantation was in danger of falling apart. A group of former Firestone workers met Taylor on the veranda of House 53. Their message: They wanted Firestone back.
"The employees were not benefiting," said Victor Bestman, the Liberian estates manager. Taylor's associates "sold the rubber, enriched themselves and how they divided it nobody knows."
Taylor grew to realize that he needed Firestone. Symbolically, the company's return would amount to a bright neon sign indicating that Taylorland was open for business. Politically, its jobs and supplies of food would ensure that residents did not rise up in dissent.
"We needed Firestone to keep people busy," Richardson said.
When Firestone abandoned Liberia, it made Taylor seethe.
"There's a little war, and then you run off, and there's no food, no medicine, complete breakdown," Taylor would later tell one Firestone executive at a meeting. "That's inexcusable."
For its own part, Firestone was in no mood to kowtow to a guerrilla leader who had threatened its managers and killed its workers.
In October 1990, Ensminger sent a brusque letter addressing Taylor as "Commander-in-Chief" not President. He requested a meeting, and a guarantee that the Firestone personnel who attended the meeting would be safe. A week later, Ensminger sent a follow-up aide memoire a term typically used in diplomatic circles to outline discussion points.
In it, Ensminger laid out Firestone's conditions for returning to Liberia. At the top of the list: Firestone "cannot resume operations unless its employees, both Liberian and expatriate, have sufficient assurances that peace, law and order will be restored in Liberia to ensure their own safety and that of the members of their families from physical harm."
Ensminger demanded better financial terms to lower the company's tax liabilities. And he noted that Firestone would not recognize the "legitimacy" of any political or military authority so as to avoid "interfering in the internal affairs of Liberia."
"The existing situation raises questions as to whether, when and how operations could be resumed in Liberia," Ensminger wrote.
Today, Ensminger said he thought the company should not have attempted to negotiate with Taylor.
"Taylor was not a recognized government of Liberia. There was no reason or legality for negotiation with Taylor," Ensminger said in the interview. "It was only that we were trying to figure out a way to get to the plantation and resume operations."
The missive did little to improve Taylor's disposition.
Ensminger's attitude was, " We want our plantation back. You have no business there. We want everything. Our trucks back. We want this, that and everything else,' " said Richardson, Taylor's adviser.
Taylor was prepared to wait. If Firestone wanted its rubber plantation back, it would have to bend and pay.
The Investment
Back in Akron, Ensminger and other managers began strategizing about how to get the plantation running again.
In 1988, the Japanese tire conglomerate Bridgestone had acquired Firestone for $2.65 billion the largest purchase of a U.S. company by a Japanese one at the time.
Business analysts judged the deal a disaster. Bridgestone moved too slowly to make necessary cuts. The company hemorrhaged money. Between 1990 and 1992, the new U.S. subsidiary, called Bridgestone/Firestone, lost $1 billion, according to one history of the company.
On Bridgestone's balance sheet, Firestone's Liberian plantation wasn't a large item, generating about $104 million in revenue and $15.6 million in profits in 1989, the year before the civil war. But the 15 percent profit margin the plantation achieved that year was a bright spot on a corporate ledger drowning in red ink.
Top managers "were under a lot of pressure from Akron to get the plantation going," said Ken Gerhart, the Firestone manager who ran the company's soda bottling plant in Monrovia. The plantation "was very, very profitable. It was very efficient."
The company found alternative sources of rubber in Asia after the plantation's abandonment, but the latex produced in Liberia was considered to be among the finest in the world, in part because of the company's tight quality control. The plantation supplied about 40 percent of the U.S. market for latex, and 10 percent of the world market.
The value of the plantation itself the land, the trees, the factories, buildings, vehicles and equipment was estimated at nearly $200 million. If Firestone pulled out for good, those assets would be unsalvageable. Even a temporary interruption posed risks: There was no assurance that Liberia would allow the company back, especially under the favorable conditions of the original deal cut in 1926.
To figure out how to deal with Taylor and return to Liberia, Firestone hired a young Liberian-born lawyer with impressive credentials. Gerald Padmore had graduated from Yale and then Harvard Law School. He had returned to Liberia to serve in President Tolbert's government. As the acting minister of finance, he sat across the table from Firestone in rubber contract negotiations.
Later, he switched to Firestone's side and began advising company leaders on whether to return to Liberia. Firestone agreed to have Padmore answer questions for the company about events in the early 1990s.
"It was a real dilemma for the company," Padmore said. There was "a lot of, I would say, soul-searching, and really tough, tough decision-making that had to be done."
As Padmore saw it, there were two competing governments in Liberia, neither of which had been formally recognized by the United States. Firestone's operations straddled the lines of control. The plantation sat in Taylorland. But the company shipped its rubber and latex from Monrovia. To move from the plantation to the port, company employees had to pass through numerous roadblocks and withstand entreaties for bribes at each stop. Who made the rules? Who got the company's taxes?
Padmore said much of Firestone's determination to return to Liberia was driven by concern for its Liberian workforce. Firestone had stopped making rice shipments to the plantation in June 1990, and so men, women and children were surviving on sugar cane and rotting bananas. During one period that fall, the company's medical director was recording 10 to 15 deaths a day, according to a sworn deposition.
The plantation and its trees were also a worry. Rubber trees must be very carefully tended and harvested to prevent them from dying. Firestone had received word that Liberians had descended on the plantation to illegally harvest latex from the company's trees. They were "slaughter tapping" an industry term for extracting so much sap that the tree dies.
"We're hearing stories from our employees that they're distressed," Padmore recalled. "We're hearing stories that our assets are being looted or destroyed. It's a question of do we abandon Liberia, as many other major businesses had done, or will there be a future, and how do we get back on?"
Padmore said the "easy answer" for Firestone would have been to abandon the plantation. Several companies fled Liberia at the start of the war. Others had chosen to stay, according to a State department cable.
Padmore said it was tempting for Firestone to say, " We're out of here. It's risky. It's scary. Economically, it doesn't make any sense.' "
"In a sense, that would have been morally satisfying, that you could safely be back in the United States. But if you felt a sense of responsibility to Liberia, and, most importantly, to the workers, your teammates, really, the people you've worked with for years, who were distressedsome of them were killedyou'd say, Well, let's go back and see if we can help them,'" Padmore continued.
"I think those were all good decisions, because, for me, Liberia outlasts the temporary rulers it may have. It's a country. It's ordinary people whose lives are terribly important. They don't have the ability or the means, as I fortunately did, to fly off to the United States and be safe. They've got to worry about their kids. For me, it's the right choice. Stay as long as you can," Padmore said.
Padmore acknowledged that Firestone's employees had experienced Taylor's violence. His soldiers had threatened Ensminger. Gerhart was put on a hit list, and his personal driver had the soles of his feet cut off with machetes by Taylor's men. Firestone expats witnessed Taylor's fighters savaging people in Harbel.
"We knew there had been fighting, there had been killing, and there had been some ethnic reprisal killings," Padmore said. "But at that time, from the information available to me, and, I think, to Firestone, Taylor did not appear to be conducting genocidal activities."
In the interview, Ensminger said that was "laughable."
"Firestone knew full well and was getting reports from the State Department and from the ambassador and from Liberians," he said. "They knew full well that atrocities and human rights violations were committed."
In October 1990, Human Rights Watch reported that Taylor soldiers had committed widespread killing and torture. Two-thirds of Doe's tribe, the Krahn, had fled the country. Those who remained, the report said, were "at risk of genocide."
In early 1991, the U.S. State Department released its report on human rights violations in 1990, a congressionally-mandated assessment for every country in the world. For Liberia, it read like a gore novel.
All the warring factions, including government soldiers, had committed atrocities. Each time Taylor took over a new province, his forces hunted and killed hundreds of men, women and children from the Mandingo and Krahn ethnic groups, which were seen as sympathetic to Doe. Emergency food centers set up to feed starving Liberians became grotesque snares. Those in line were forced to produce identity cards. The Krahn were killed. In one particularly nasty practice, Taylor's men set up a highway checkpoint called "No Return." More than 2,000 people were killed there.
"The overall human rights situation in Liberia in 1990 was appalling," the report read. "All combatants routinely engaged in indiscriminate killing and abuse of civilians, looting, and ethnically based executions."
"Leaders of all the armed groups did little or nothing to stop the killings
and, in some cases, may have encouraged them or been directly responsible for the abuses."
Official data, painstakingly compiled years later by Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission from the testimony of thousands of Liberians, attempted to quantify the human damage. By December 1990, Taylor's forces alone had committed nearly 40,000 human rights violations. The toll included more than 6,400 killings, 800 kidnappings and 600 rapes, according to a ProPublica analysis of the data.
Mary Pollee said she was one victim of Taylor's fighters. From the Firestone plantation, she fled to a city held by Taylor's rebels. The fighters stole her food. They took her clothes. They threatened her with guns. And then one day, they grabbed her 13-year-old daughter and raped and killed her.
Pollee her husband, a son, and a daughter now buried went mad.
"I was like somebody going crazy," said Pollee. She began weeping at the memory in her living room, the cicadas outside whirring, the sun beating. "I was not to myself, oh."
In Ohio, Firestone executives continued to discuss what to do. Initially, they decided to wait to see if the conflict would resolve itself. But as those hopes faded, Firestone made its final decision.
The company would go back to Liberia.
"Completely justifiable," Padmore called the decision.
"Had I had a crystal ball and an ability to say that's going to happen, I would have told Firestone in January of 1992, Don't go back,' but we didn't know that would happen. We were hopeful that good things were going to happen."
He added: "Had [Firestone executives] not taken those decisions, I think Liberia would be much the worse for it today."
America Works for Firestone
XC1999.51.000 Firestone and the Warlord: The Untold Story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the Tragedy of LiberiaIn February 1991, Ensminger flew to Liberia to reach out to Taylor. Over the coming months, the company resumed feeding its workers. It sent shipments of rice to Taylor and to the interim government. It even hired Taylor forces to guard House 53.
Taylor ignored the entreaties.
Said Richardson: "They just wanted what's for Firestone to be for Firestone."
In April 1991, U.S. Ambassador Peter Jon de Vos secured a meeting with Taylor in Gbarnga. He invited Ensminger along for the journey.
De Vos was a proponent of Firestone and Taylor reaching an accommodation. After the meeting, a cable noted that "De Vos pressed Taylor" to talk with Firestone officials.
"We are encouraging (Taylor Labor Minister Nyundeh) Monkonmlah and Firestone to reach accommodation si
Men in camouflage mounted rusted artillery cannon in battered pickup trucks. Thin teenagers lugged rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Children carried AK-47s. Some held long machetes.
The killers wore ripped jeans and T-shirts, women's wigs and cheap rubber sandals. Grotesque masks made them look like demons. They were electric with drugs. They clutched talismans of feather and bone to protect them from bullets. In the pre-dawn darkness, they surrounded Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
They loosed their attack on the sleeping city. Artillery slammed into stores and homes. Mortars arced through thick, humid air that smelled of rot. Boy soldiers canoed across mangrove swamps. As they pressed in, the killers forced men, women and children from their homes. They murdered civilians and soldiers. Falling shells just missed the U.S. Embassy, hunkered on a high spot overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
A new phase of Liberia's civil war had begun. It would whip savagely out of control over the next decade. More than 200,000 people would die or suffer terrible injuries, most of them civilians limbs hacked off, eyes gouged out. Half the country's population would become refugees. Five American nuns would be slaughtered, becoming international symbols of the conflict's depravity.
Orchestrating the anarchy was Charles Taylor, a suave egomaniac obsessed with taking over Liberia, America's most faithful ally in Africa. For the attack that October morning, he had built his army of butchers and believers in part with the resources of one of America's most iconic businesses: Firestone.
Firestone ran the plantation that Taylor used to direct the October 1992 assault on Monrovia. In operation since 1926, the rubber plantation was considered to be the largest of its kind in the world, a contiguous swath of trees, mud-brown rivers, low hills and verdant bush that at the time splayed across 220 square miles roughly the size of Chicago.
Firestone wanted Liberia for its rubber. Taylor wanted Firestone to help his rise to power. At a pivotal meeting in Liberia's jungles in July 1991, the company agreed to do business with the warlord.
In the first detailed examination of the relationship between Firestone and Taylor, an investigation by ProPublica and Frontline lays bare the role of a global corporation in a brutal African conflict.
Firestone served as a source of food, fuel, trucks and cash used by Taylor's ragtag rebel army, according to interviews, internal corporate documents and declassified diplomatic cables.
The company signed a deal in 1992 to pay taxes to Taylor's rebel government. Over the next year, the company doled out more than $2.3 million in cash, checks and food to Taylor, according to an accounting in court files. Between 1990 and 1993, the company invested $35.3 million in the plantation.
In return, Taylor's forces provided security to the plantation that allowed Firestone to produce rubber and safeguard its assets. Taylor's rebel government offered lower export taxes that gave the company a financial break on rubber shipments.
For Taylor, the relationship with Firestone was about more than money. It helped provide him with the political capital and recognition he needed as he sought to establish his credentials as Liberia's future leader.
"We needed Firestone to give us international legitimacy," said John Toussaint "J.T." Richardson, a U.S.-trained architect who became one of Taylor's top advisers. "We needed them for credibility."
While Firestone used the plantation for the business of rubber, Taylor used it for the business of war. Taylor turned storage centers and factories on Firestone's sprawling rubber farm into depots for weapons and ammunition. He housed himself and his top ministers in Firestone homes. He also used communications equipment on the plantation to broadcast messages to his supporters, propaganda to the masses and instructions to his troops.
Secret U.S. diplomatic cables from the time captured Taylor's gratitude to Firestone. Firestone's plantation "had been the lifeblood" of the territory in Liberia that he controlled, Taylor told one Firestone executive, according to a State Department cable. Taylor later said in sworn testimony that Firestone's resources had been the "most significant" source of foreign exchange in the early years of his revolt.
In written responses to questions, Firestone acknowledged the agreement with Taylor, but said it had never willingly assisted Taylor's insurrection.
The company said Taylor rebels had used Firestone's trucks, food, medical supplies, fuel and tools under the "obvious threat of violence to anyone who considered stopping them."
"Firestone had no role in the rise of Charles Taylor. It had no role in his ability to hold power in Liberia," the company said.
"At no time did Firestone have a collaborative relationship with Charles Taylor," the statement said. "The company's activities were focused on protecting its employees and property. The company had no ability to stop Taylor's forces from using the plantation for any purposes."
At the moment of the October 1992 attack that came to be known as Operation Octopus, Taylor controlled the vast majority of Liberia. He faced a weak interim government in Monrovia, backed by 7,000 largely untested soldiers from allied West African nations.
Operation Octopus effectively plunged the country into five more turbulent, terrible years of intermittent warfare. Taylor turned a civil war between his forces and the Liberian government into a bloodbath as more rebel factions joined in the fight for spoils: diamonds, timber, power. It spilled into neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone, where rebel forces allied with Taylor hacked the limbs off civilians in a terror campaign of unchecked brutality.
In July 1997, Taylor won his war, and not on the battlefield. He was elected president, dominating with 75 percent of the vote. For many Liberians, a vote for Taylor was a vote of resignation. Many believed it was the only way to stop the killing. After Taylor became president, more factions arose, more bloodletting, more revenge. Liberia and its people suffered yet again.
In 2003, Taylor was indicted by an international tribunal for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone. He resigned the presidency. He was eventually sentenced to 50 years in prison the first head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity since the Nazi era.
The path to cooperation was neither direct nor easy for Firestone and its executives, according to interviews and documents. Some company officials actively resisted working with Taylor and his fighters, even in the face of real and implied threats of physical violence.
Other senior officers felt the company had no choice but to give in to Taylor's demands. They believed that working with Taylor was the only way to protect the thousands of impoverished Liberians who lived and labored on the plantation.
Firestone also received conflicting direction from the United States government. One ambassador urged the company to work with Taylor. In Washington, diplomats warned Firestone executives about the dangers of doing business with him.
But in the end, Firestone as a corporation, and as a collection of men, made a deliberate decision to cooperate with a man whose forces were publicly denounced as violent, vicious and rapacious by the U.S. government and human rights groups.
The U.S. State Department had issued a report blaming Taylor's forces for killing civilians, raping women and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to become refugees. Human Rights Watch said that Taylor's forces had engaged in a killing campaign that put a targeted ethnic group at "risk of genocide."
Today, Firestone maintains that at the time it struck its deal with Taylor, the guerrilla leader had "no well-established record" of human right violations. It said that many other companies and world leaders had treated Taylor as a legitimate political figure. Other companies operating in Liberia at the time chose to leave. But some stayed on through the violence.
"Does Firestone believe it did the right thing? Yes," Firestone said of its decisions in Liberia. "Do we, along with former U.S. presidents, the U.S. State Department, the United Nations and many leaders around the world who worked with Charles Taylor regret the war criminal he became? Yes."
The decision that Firestone faced confronts American companies operating to this day in war-torn, volatile regions in an increasingly globalized economy. All aim to make money. All must weigh, to one degree or another, their hierarchy of obligations to their shareholders, to their foreign workers, to their host countries, and to their own sense of right and wrong.
Donald Ensminger served as the managing director of the Firestone plantation when Taylor invaded Liberia. He witnessed the violence first hand. Taylor rebels killed and imprisoned his workers. They threatened Ensminger with death at the point of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Ensminger was let go from the company in October 1991. For the next 23 years, he kept silent about Firestone's choice to do a deal with a warlord. Now, he told Frontline and ProPublica, he wanted to explain.
He said that he warned Firestone that Taylor was a killer. He told the company that working with him might be a crime. He urged them to avoid deals that might legitimize the guerilla leader as the ruler of Liberia.
For him, the decision was clear. And Firestone got it wrong.
"Certainly on behalf of our employees, the ones that were killed and suffered, it was immoral that we should now recognize the guy that caused all this," he said in an interview.
Gerald Rose, who served as the deputy chief of mission in Liberia at the time, holds an equally unsparing view of Firestone's choice.
"Do I think they have blood on their hands? Yes," Rose said. "I would not have made the decisions they made. I believe they facilitated a warlord in his insurrection and in the atrocities that he created."
Through the years, Liberia has been hesitant to examine its past. Taylor, for instance, was tried only for harm he caused in Sierra Leone, not Liberia. In 2009, the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended sanctions for scores of perpetrators. It cited Firestone for having aided Taylor in carrying out his rebellion and called for more investigation. The Liberian government never acted on those recommendations.
The stunning truth is that nobody has ever been punished in Liberia for the civil war that destroyed the nation. In fact, some of the people who helped to wreck the country are now the same people responsible for rebuilding it.
Top officials of formerly warring factions are now politicians passing laws in the legislature. They are pastors preaching from the country's pulpits. They are executives running some of the country's largest businesses.
The damage they inflicted on Liberia haunts the country even today. Liberia's shattered infrastructure and weakened health system have struggled to cope with the spread of the Ebola virus, which has killed thousands of Liberians.
In an interview with Frontline and ProPublica, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf acknowledged that Liberia had not yet succeeded in shaking the Taylor regime or the devils of its history.
"The effect of that regime and regimes of the past are still with us today," she said. "Today we have a traumatized nation."
Efforts over many months to reach Taylor through his lawyers and family were not successful.
Johnson Sirleaf looked thoughtful when asked to describe Liberia's relationship with Firestone. A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Johnson Sirleaf said the company had benefitted Liberia with jobs and revenue.
In fact, during its decades of operation, Firestone had built a nation within a nation. The company provided housing, schools, food and health care to workers and their families. Some 80,000 Liberians lived within its borders. Firestone introduced currency, built roads and opened up the rural interior.
At the same time, Johnson Sirleaf said, Firestone has sometimes failed to live up to its obligations to the country whose people have provided it with so much over so many years. Over the decades, the company has faced accusations that it exploited its laborers, received unfair concession deals, despoiled the environment and exacerbated corruption.
Said Johnson Sirleaf: "It is a mixed story."
I. Warlord on the Rise
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor
Charles McArthur Ghankay Taylor was a man of many faces: bureaucrat, jail breaker, revolutionary, orator, warlord, president, war criminal.
Born in Liberia in 1948, Taylor came to the United States in 1972 to attend college. He received an economics degree from Bentley College, a private school with a campus of brick buildings and leafy trees outside Boston.
In the United States, he was one of many young, educated Liberians in the 1970s agitating for change in their home country.
Taylor saw his chance in 1980, when a Liberian army master sergeant named Samuel Doe seized control of the government. Doe's men gutted the president, William Tolbert, in the presidential mansion that overlooked the turquoise ocean. They tied 13 government officials and political allies to wooden poles staked in the ground at a nearby beach and executed them.
Doe was 28 years old and barely literate. To Taylor and other Liberians, he represented the overthrow of the old patrician order that had long ruled the country. Taylor decided to join the revolution. Taylor was appointed head of the government's procurement arm, the General Services Agency.
The urbane, educated Taylor soon fell out of favor with Doe, who surrounded himself with thuggish fellow Krahn tribesmen. Taylor fled back to the United States amid charges that he bilked the Liberian government of nearly $1 million. An ardent Cold War ally, Doe asked President Ronald Reagan's administration for his extradition. Taylor was locked up in a Massachusetts jail to await deportation.
There, the myth of Taylor began. In September 1985, Taylor broke out of the Plymouth County jail. News reports said that he sawed through bars, descended on knotted blankets and escaped into surrounding woods.
How he accomplished the feat if that's indeed how he escaped has never been fully explained. At his war crimes trial, Taylor boasted that the CIA had aided the escape, a claim the agency has never confirmed or denied.
Taylor made it to Mexico and eventually Libya. There, he received instruction at a military camp established by Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi to train African revolutionaries. In the late 1980s, Taylor and his cohorts created the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, dedicated to overthrowing Doe.
Doe had become wildly unpopular. He had massacred thousands of other, rival tribe members, surrounded himself with cronies and driven the country into debt. In late 1989, the country was so broke that Doe convinced Firestone to provide an advance on future tax payments.
On Dec. 24, 1989, Taylor began his revolution to overthrow Doe and ostensibly return democracy to Liberia. It was, at first, quixotic. He launched his coup d'état not from the capital, but from a remote border crossing. He had a few dozen men, a paucity of weapons and little ammunition. He was taking on a longtime ally of the United States, with little popular support and no military experience.
Few people in either the U.S. or Liberian governments saw him as a serious threat.
"He wasn't on our radar," said Herman "Hank" Cohen, who back then was the assistant secretary of state for Africa.
That soon changed. Doe badly bungled his response to Taylor, sending out troops who ruthlessly murdered civilians. Angry men and women who had suffered the brunt of Doe's oppression began taking up arms to join Taylor's nascent band.
Taylor commanded a pauper's army that grew to thousands, led by a handful of trusted lieutenants, Libyan-trained mercenaries and professional military men.
Among the most notorious recruits were the Small Boys Unit young children, often orphans, who swore allegiance to "Papai," as Taylor was called. To prove their loyalty, the children sometimes had to gun down their mothers and fathers. They would become among some of the most vicious killers in a war of heartless, mindless, unfathomable killing.
As the months passed and his march toward Monrovia continued, Taylor's legend and ego only grew. He presented himself as a Baptist who neither smoked nor drank. A mesmeric speaker, he would appear before adoring crowds dressed in fine white linen, spouting promises of democracy, jobs and better days.
At other times, he wore camouflage and carried an AK-47. He would take to the radio to announce the impending capture of a nearby town, then magically do it. For many in Liberia, the spirit world remains close at hand. In such a place, Taylor became something more than a man mystical, powerful, otherworldly.
Taylor seized much of the country's rural, tribal interior, then his forces swept down an old railroad line built by a mining company to the Atlantic coast. There, he captured the country's second-largest port, a jumble of docks and cranes in the rundown town of Buchanan. Hundreds of people were slaughtered as his soldiers settled old ethnic scores.
Elementary and middle schools emptied of children as they flocked to join Taylor. Catholic nuns reported school attendance dropping from 3,000 to 1,000 students in one town. Children too young to carry rifles were given grenades instead.
Taylor's eyes now turned west, toward Monrovia, a capital of concrete and decay overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Between his army and his ambition lay an extraordinary treasure: the Firestone plantation. Some 40 miles from the capital, the plantation had the country's most modern communications and electrical systems. It had food, gas, vehicles. Right next to it sat the principal airport, Roberts International Airport.
In the early days of June 1990, Taylor hurled his men forward.
An Old Southern Plantation
images (1)For more than six decades, the Firestone plantation had spread across the coastal plains and rolling hills of central Liberia. It was a kingdom of men, machines and rubber trees, wedged between two tannin-stained rivers, on some of the country's most fertile soil.
At the center of this kingdom was House 53, reserved for the plantation boss. It stood on a hill overlooking the rest of the plantation, a two-story antebellum-style Georgian Colonial mansion of pink brick. It had a wide porch, six white Corinthian columns and jalousie windows. Other homes for expatriates, featuring verandas and manicured gardens, were scattered nearby in a section of the plantation known as Harbel Hills. There was a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts and a country club with a bar.
About 3 miles down the road was Harbel, Firestone's own company town, a portmanteau formed from the names of the business' founder Harvey S. Firestone Sr. and his wife Idabelle. It held Firestone's central office, industrial garages and a latex-processing plant redolent of ammonia and other chemicals. The town itself was a collection of tin-roofed homes and shops, a grocery store, a bank, schools and brick and cinder-block bungalows for mid-level Liberian managers and domestic staff.
A soccer field ran along the edge of town. On weekends, Firestone would show movies outdoors. The grounds were meticulous: close-cut grass and neat rows of rubber trees with the undergrowth cleared out. The order and precision immediately marked the plantation as different from the rest of the riotous, overgrown country.
Beyond the town were the trees, rows upon rows of trees: more than 8 million Hevea brasilienses planted in neat lines. Hidden in the groves and bush were dozens of work camps connected by roads that laced the farm.
These were the homes of the tappers, the Liberian workers who did the hard work of extracting the latex sap from the trees. The camps were long, low rows of residences almost like coops. Units generally consisted of a single room. The homes had wattle and daub walls and aluminum roofs. There were no windows and no kitchens. The work camps had communal pumps for water and outdoor kitchens for cooking. There was no electricity. Bathrooms were outhouses or the nearby bush.
Every day, the tappers got up to work before dawn. They cut thin slashes in the rubber trees with sharp knives, careful not to cut too deep or too often. The sap would run out into small cups raw latex, the source of natural rubber.
Thousands of workers labored to meet their daily quotas by tapping hundreds of trees. To meet the demands, or surpass them to make more money, the tappers sometimes put wives and children to work to complete their tasks.
The collected latex was poured into giant metal buckets, which each held up to 75 pounds of sap. They were carried two at a time by workers holding a wooden yoke across their shoulders. The latex would be weighed. The workers got a few dollars a day.
From there, the sap would be processed into hunks of block rubber or canisters of liquid latex. At the end of a good year, the daily, delicate tapping and gathering of thousands of tiny cups produced tens of thousands of tons of rubber. The raw material was shipped off to factories around the world to become car tires and rubber hoses, hospital gloves and condoms.
This was the world of the Firestone operation described in 1990 by one company executive as resembling "an old Southern plantation."
After years of decorum and routine, it was about to become a gruesome battlefield.
The War Machine
Taylor's war machine was sighted near the Firestone factory at 7 a.m. on June 5, 1990.
Ensminger, the plantation boss, woke to find Taylor's fighters on the other side of the slow-moving Farmington River the eastern border between the Firestone farm and the rest of Liberia. Wearing their trademark red bandanas, the rebels sang and danced on the bank some 400 feet away, waving U.S dollar bills and brandishing automatic rifles.
Tough, pragmatic and taciturn, Ensminger was not surprised by the arrival of the men. Grim stories raced ahead of Taylor's swarm.
On April 6, Ensminger had issued a "strictly confidential" memo to the 40 or so U.S. and foreign-national staff who oversaw the plantation's Liberian workers.
"Due to the current unstable political situation in Liberia, we believe it is prudent to plan for the worst case scenario," he wrote. The memo instructed expats to pack emergency supplies, gas up cars and meet at secret rally points in case of an evacuation. "The information contained in this memo even the very existence of this memo should not be discussed with persons not covered by it," he wrote. By May, the company had sent home expat wives and children.
To the persons not covered by the memo the Liberian workers and their families Ensminger projected confidence as the maelstrom drew closer.
On April 28, he met with 180 Liberian staffers who were "near panic" at Taylor's approach. Ensminger told them "they should be calm, as there was nothing to fear," a company memo said. He told Liberian managers and workers that the fighters would simply pass through the plantation on their way to attack the capital.
In an interview, Ensminger said he warned the employees that Firestone would not be able to protect them if Taylor's troops overran the plantation. He said he told them, "Our responsibility as an American company is to the expats. I told them, this is your country, you should take whatever action jointly or individually that you can take."
On the June morning when the rebels massed on the river-bank and mortars thumped in the distance, Ensminger directed his staff to carry out some last-minute errands. He sent Steve Raimo, the company's accounting manager, to drive a pickup truck through the plantation to ensure that workers got their weekly pay before the rebels crossed the river.
Upbeat and optimistic, Raimo joked with Ensminger that he would hang his arm out of the window to make sure the fighters would know he was white.
"I knew that at that time that the rebels weren't out to hurt us," Raimo said. "We weren't really involved in the fray."
As the fighters began crossing the river in roughhewn canoes, they called out soothing promises. They shouted out that they had "no interest to harm workers" and were "only interested in soldiers," Ensminger wrote in a journal that he kept during the invasion.
Whether or not Ensminger believed the rebels, many Liberian workers apparently did. When the fighters finally reached Firestone's side of the river just before noon, some workers celebrated. To them, Taylor's men were Freedom Fighters come to overthrow Doe, Liberia's reviled dictator.
Women ululated on the main market street. They waved their hands above their heads. "Freedom fighters, freedom fighters," some shouted.
Matthew Chipley, a skinny teenager who lived with his family on the plantation, watched as the fighters entered the town, guns held high. "People were jubilating. People were happy to receive Taylor," he said. "They were in poverty, things were hard for them, and nothing good was going on."
Mary Pollee, a young mother with three children whose husband worked in the Firestone electrical generator plant, remembered that the rebels seemed concerned about people's safety. "All of you, go in your house," they shouted to villagers. "When the rebels enter, they are not killing nobody," she said.
Arthur Welwean, a college student and the son of Ensminger's cook, raced down to the river's edge to watch young boys with wigs on their heads and AK-47s in their hands spread out through the plantation. "This is gonna be good," he remembered thinking. "These guys are in town. They wanna liberate people."
Michael Mulbah Sr., a Liberian manager who had gone to college in the United States and lived on the plantation, recalled the excitement over the prospect that this motley militia might overthrow Doe. "We talked that they were our saviors," he said.
Vendettas, Violence and Church-Robe Killers
It took only a day for the saviors to turn into devils.
The first person the rebels killed after crossing the river, according to several witnesses, was a mentally handicapped man. He was gunned down in the street. Next, the rebels began hunting down people who belonged to tribes closely associated with the ruling regime.
Kevin Estall, a British expatriate who was Firestone's agricultural operations manager, recalled seeing piles of dead bodies of Liberians laying outside the Harbel supermarket. He was told the rebels had executed the men in public because they were from a rival tribe. "They had been stitched, riddled with bullets from AK-47s straight up and down their bodies," he said. They were left in the street, their bodies swelling in the sun.
Mulbah was huddling in his bungalow when a group of Taylor's rebels demanded that he leave immediately. Several boy soldiers glared at him, their eyes red, guns dragging on the ground behind them. Mulbah fled with two pairs of pants and some shirts.
"Taylor was like an eagle," said Mulbah. "He'd come at you with his claws hidden, until he wanted to take them out."
Over the next couple of days, the rebels hunted down members of rival tribes, beating and killing them. They took Firestone trucks, fuel and rice. They imprisoned the chief of Firestone's police force in the plantation jail.
Welwean, the cook's son, was running to hide in a small camp when he heard screaming all around him. A squad of children jumped out of the bush holding automatic weapons. They wore maroon choir robes, which they had stolen from a church on the plantation. Too big for the boys, the robes trailed on the ground, their trim ragged and dusty.
The boys believed that Welwean was a government soldier. They had him raise his pants legs since they believed that the soldiers wore boots that left marks on the wearer's calf. When they found no marks, they let Welwean pass.
"It was terrifying. They had the AK-47s. The guns are pointed straight at you," recalled Welwean, who now works as a bank examiner in the United States. "They're like, If you lie, we're gonna kill you.' And you are trembling, shaking."
Four days after the rebel invasion, government soldiers counterattacked, pushing the rebels back into the bush. They scoured Harbel for rebel collaborators, rounding up scores of Firestone workers.
The soldiers, members of the Armed Forces of Liberia, went on their own rampage. They beat and tortured Firestone workers who were suspected of assisting Taylor's rebels. They raped women, forcing loved ones to watch. They dumped bodies in the plantation's drainage ditches.
The plantation turned menacing and surreal: Shadows darted through the rubber trees, corpses stuck out from weed-covered ditches, artillery fire pounded like bass drums into the early hours of the night.
Neighbors turned on each other. One boy pointed NPFL soldiers to two Firestone workers from a targeted tribe. Taylor rebels slit their throats. A few days later, the dead men's families handed over the boy to government soldiers. They executed him behind the Firestone bank.
Caught in the crossfire were Chipley and his family. The soldiers accused them of being spies. As the teenager watched, the soldiers flogged his mother and father. Chipley, who worked at Firestone's processing plant, was tied up by the soldiers. Young girls that he knew were raped, he said.
Chipley and scores of plantation workers decided to follow the example of thousands of other young Liberians brutalized by Doe's soldiers: They joined Taylor's forces. They fled to rebel outposts in the northern part of the plantation and began training.
"Upon God and man, I never one day thought of holding what they called gun," Chipley said. "Because of the ill-treatment, I was forced to join.
"They were plenty that joined," he said.
The Obligation
As the battle erupted, many of the remaining expats headed for House 53. Ensconced on the hill, Ensminger and his fellow expatriates were protected from the killings below them. The men passed the time playing cards and listening to BBC reports about the war. Ensminger smoked his pipe and practiced his golf game, using a pitching wedge to place short chip shots into nearby buckets.
Still, the executives could not escape the violence. Rifle fire crackled from all around. The power was out for days. Reports streamed in of nine bodies in one camp, high casualties in another. Conflicting rumors had the rebels in control of the plantation one day, government soldiers coming to the rescue the next.
For those long used to control, confusion reigned.
"Very awkward and potentially dangerous for us, our people and our assets," Ensminger scribbled as the battle for Firestone raged. "Will there be confrontations? Who will control? How to deal with changing hands/demands?"
The last question was a daily challenge. John Vispo, Ensminger's Number 2 and the plantation controller, had withdrawn the equivalent of $10,000 in cash from the Firestone safe before he sought shelter in House 53. It was, he figured, the best way to appease the fighters, who were often drunk, angry and armed.
As rebel commanders streamed to the mansion with demands, Ensminger took careful notes in his journal. One commander got $500 to "insure safety [in the Harbel Hills] area." Another fighter received 100 gallons of gas, five bags of rice and $40. Ensminger handed yet another group Firestone Truck 63A the oldest available.
On other occasions he resisted: Tough talk prevented the theft of vehicles and a personal computer. There seemed to be no one in charge, no overall commander to contact.
"We are totally helpless!!" Ensminger scrawled after days of demands at gunpoint.
By the third day, a huge crowd of some 1,500 to 2,000 panicked Liberians headed for House 53. For decades, Firestone had provided them with food, shelter and safety. Now, they begged for protection from the savagery.
Vispo halted the crowd as it walked up the long, broad lawn leading to House 53. There was nothing that Firestone could do, he told them. Firestone chefs cooked up a big pot of rice, which was distributed among the crowd.
"We're all in this together. We have no way to protect you or ourselves. We're as scared as you," Vispo recalled telling the people. "There's nothing we can do to protect you. It's better off if you go to your villages."
The next day, several dozen senior Liberian staffers people who worked directly with the expats, who considered them friends and colleagues approached a second time in hopes of rescue.
"Some of the Firestone staff said, Well, if the expatriates are going out to Ensminger's house and it's safe, the rebels are not going there to bother anyone,'" said Welwean, who joined the stream of refuge seekers. "There should be a sanctuary for everyone."
This time, Ensminger stood on the porch and delivered the response: There was nothing the company could do for them.
"We recognized a responsibility to our employees. But what could we do? Our position got so untenable. There was nothing I could do about 1,000 or 1,500 or 40 or 50 Liberians," Ensminger said in the interview.
The decision did not sit well with some expats. Estall refused to take shelter in Ensminger's house. He holed up in his own home nearby, taking in several Liberians who pleaded for refuge.
"They felt they had been betrayed," Estall said of Firestone's Liberian staffers. "They felt let down by Mr. Ensminger for not offering them any shelter."
The rejection stung the Liberians. Firestone employees had difficulty believing that such a powerful corporation, one with so much sway in the Liberian capital and so much money in its bank accounts, could not help in any way.
Actually it could help but that aid would only be for the expats.
On June 13 at 5:30 in the evening, six Taylor guerillas confronted Ensminger on the front porch of House 53. The expats recognized several of the fighters as men who had worked as caddies at Firestone's golf course.
The commander pointed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at Ensminger and threatened to blow up the house. He demanded $1,000. Ensminger convinced the men to leave with a truck and $200.
During the takeover, Ensminger had maintained radio contact with the embassy and Firestone headquarters in Akron, Ohio. Now, he called them again. It was time to leave.
The U.S. Embassy sent military escorts to accompany the Firestone expats to safety. Just after dawn, 19 expats in 17 vehicles headed through Gate 15, the northwestern entrance to the plantation. U.S. special forces made sure they arrived safely in Monrovia.
The Liberian workers woke to find themselves abandoned.
Justin Knuckles, a senior Liberian manager, had taken refuge in the Firestone community center with other Liberian staff. He remembers finding a note on the door from one of the expats, apologizing for their departure. The note said they would return when the situation calmed down.
"You know when Jesus were taken and the disciples were left alone? That how we felt," Knuckles said. "Because we had a belief, as long as the Americans are on the plantation, we had a little hope. But now the Americans are gone, what gonna happen to us?"
Raimo said leaving behind the employees was "disheartening." Looking back, however, he could think of no way that Firestone could have evacuated all the employees on the plantation.
"Our hands were tied," he said. "We had no U.S. Army or Marines or whatever to come in and help us evacuate these hundreds of thousands of people who had been affiliated with Firestone, one way or another."
"It's hard to process sometimes the inhumanity of man towards man," said Raimo, who is now a business consultant and a Christian minister. "Certainly, evil was taking reign in Liberia."
The expats headed home.
The final scrawl in Ensminger's journal: "WHAT AN ORDEAL!!"
Ensminger arrived in Akron some 26 hours after the evacuation. At a press conference, he recounted the story of the rebel invasion and the RPG pointed at his chest.
His biggest concern, he said, was for the workers.
"I personally … have an obligation to the many thousands of employees in Harbel," Ensminger told reporters.
Everybody Run Away
As Ensminger spoke to the press, Mary Pollee was trudging through thick bush to keep her shattered family alive.
A group of government soldiers had burst into Pollee's mud-walled home on the Firestone plantation just before the ex-pats evacuated. They dragged her and her husband Joseph outdoors. They stripped him to his underwear. In front of their three children, they began beating and kicking the couple, accusing them of working with Taylor's rebels.
"When you want cry, they beat you. They say, You want die? You want die? You will die right now,'" Pollee said. "They hard, that day. They were not easy."
The soldiers hauled away her bleeding husband. They marched back later demanding a ransom for his return. Pollee handed over what little she had. The soldiers returned a day later. They asked for $500 more. When she told them that she did not have it, the soldiers gang-raped her. They told her they would kill her and her children.
The next day, the soldiers killed her husband behind the white-washed, cinder-block bank in Harbel. Pollee decided to flee into the surrounding jungle with her children. Just before leaving, she remembers hearing that the Firestone expats had evacuated.
It made little difference to Pollee and her children. They plodded through the bush, eating sugar cane to survive, weary, afraid, hungry. A few days into her trek, Pollee noticed that the 3-year-old boy who she had strapped to her back had stopped moving. Monko, her youngest, had died.
Pollee was crazed with grief. She held the child in front of her, stumbling through the bush. She ran into a stranger, who helped her to bury the boy in the wild.
After days in the jungle, Pollee and her remaining children reached Kakata, a rebel-held town just outside the plantation. Her ordeal was not over.
In a recent interview, Pollee sat, dignified and graceful, on her couch in her tiny, tidy home beneath a mango tree in a suburb of Monrovia.
She remains angry at Firestone. Why hadn't the company stood firm against the rebels? Why hadn't the Firestone police tried to stop the assault? Why hadn't the company asked the government soldiers to stay back?
"Nobody were there to protect the worker, nobody," she said. "They went with their children, their wives, everybody, nobody left here, and when they left that's the time the people started raising hell with us."
Still, she said she understood.
"When it come to a war," she said, "everybody run away."
II. A Century of Blood, Sweat and Profits
To understand the ferocity of the fighting that erupted in 1990 and why Firestone and its plantation inevitably became central in it one needs to know something of Liberia's unusual history.
The country was settled in the 1800s by freeborn American blacks and freed American slaves, the result of a back-to-Africa movement by the American Colonization Society, a philanthropic organization. It was supported by President James Monroe and the U.S. Congress.
Even after the colony declared itself independent in 1847, naming itself Liberia, or "Land of Freedom," the country duplicated many of the economic and social structures of the American South. The settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, had a complex relationship with the indigenous Africans who lived in the region. Some of the settlers built Southern-style mansions and exploited the locals' labor and land.
Firestone arrived in Liberia in the 1920s. By that time, Harvey S. Firestone Sr., the farm boy from Ohio who founded the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., had become one of the top industrialists of the gilded age.
He dreamed of finding a rubber source beyond the grasp of the British Empire, which controlled much of the world market. In Liberia, he found a spot in the narrow band around the equator where rubber trees thrived and a nation that was in debt and desperate for business.
After two years of negotiations, Firestone and Liberia announced one of history's great sweetheart deals. Liberia gave Firestone the right to lease up to 1 million acres roughly 10 percent of the country's arable land. The cost? Six cents an acre. The term? Ninety-nine years.
The deal survived an early controversy in 1930, when investigators from the League of Nations found officials in the Liberian government had engaged in forcing indigenous villagers to work on private farms, including Firestone's plantation.
The investigators found no evidence that Firestone "consciously employs labor which has been forcibly impressed." Soon after the scandal, Harvey Firestone Jr., the founder's son, launched a public relations campaign, delivering a series of radio addresses that described the company's work in Liberia.
The five-minute spots depicted a company that respected local customs, provided workers with health care and built roads for a benighted nation all the while benefitting American car owners.
"To the little Republic of Liberia, Firestone has brought a new day of hope and advancement," Firestone said in one broadcast. "It has been a gratifying thought to us that by means of commercial progress we have been of service to mankind."
The 1950s were golden years for Firestone and Liberia's elite. Firestone was Liberia's largest private employer and the largest exporter in the country. Firestone's profits after taxes amounted to three times the government's total revenue for 1951, according to one study.
The company tightened its relationships with the country's ruling class in part by helping them become rubber farmers, providing free saplings and agricultural advice. When the rubber began to flow, Firestone purchased it.
Former presidents Charles King, Edwin Barclay, William V.S. Tubman and Tolbert all owned large rubber plantations.
To preserve its plantation, Firestone worked closely with whoever ran Liberia, no matter how they came to power or what they did to hold onto it.
In office for nearly 30 years, Tubman turned into a virtual dictator, quashing dissent, imprisoning political opponents and creating a spy network to track ordinary citizens. Firestone maintained such close ties with him that when the daughter of one plantation executive got married, she and her husband honeymooned at Tubman's summer retreat outside Monrovia.
Tolbert, Tubman's longtime vice president and successor, had the most fractious relationship with the rubber giant. As president in the mid-1970s, he renegotiated the government's contract with Firestone, insisting on raising taxes and hiring more Liberians in senior management. Firestone executives complained that the plantation's profitability began to decline.
About four weeks after Doe's bloody coup in 1980, Firestone sent Don L. Weihe, the affable executive in charge of the company's overseas rubber operations, to meet the new dictator.
"When you're the big frog in the pond, you're sort of wondering who is in charge of the pond," Weihe explained.
Doe suspended the 1976 rubber deal struck by Tolbert that had so pained Firestone executives. Until world rubber prices rebounded, he decided, the company would enjoy generous tax exemptions. "Firestone and Liberia have enjoyed a long and unique historical relationship," Doe said in a speech to Firestone's executives. "We therefore consider this relationship as a contract of survival."
Taylor ensured that Doe's role in the relationship would be limited.
III: Tough Talk in the Jungle
After chasing the Firestone managers out in June 1990, Taylor took over the colonnaded grandeur of House 53. The message was unmistakable: The company that had dominated the country for so long, that held power over its leaders and its laborers, had been vanquished.
The stately mansion was often chaotic and frenzied. Cronies and bodyguards lounged in the hallways. Sycophants waited for an audience. Battle commanders rushed in and out.
Taylor's goal was to seize Monrovia, which held half the country's population, most of its major financial and political institutions and most important, the executive mansion Doe's presidential residence, a menacing, fortified structure overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Taylor staged his attack from the Firestone plantation. He was confident enough of his success that he announced he would occupy the mansion by early July.
His men battled to within 500 yards of the executive mansion where Doe had holed up with his men. That was as far as he would get. As the two sides traded mortar- and small-arms fire, Taylor suddenly called a halt to the operation. The United States had reached out to him to plead for peace.
Cohen, the State Department's top Africa hand, talked with Taylor several times by satellite phone to negotiate a ceasefire. He even visited Taylor at a rearguard base in Ivory Coast, where he found Taylor seated on a throne, surrounded by child soldiers. Behind him was a portrait of President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline.
"He had visions of being a great statesman," Cohen said. "He saw himself like that. I'm gonna take over Liberia and make it into a new country.' "
The bid for peace failed, and Liberia faded further as a concern for the United States. Cohen said his superiors made that clear to him.
"The feeling was that we didn't want to have Liberia as our adopted child," Cohen said. "We were not going to take charge of Liberia."
Into the void stepped an alliance of West African nations led by Nigeria, the regional heavyweight. In August 1990, the alliance deployed some 7,000 peacekeepers, known as ECOMOG.
The peacekeepers succeeded in halting Taylor. But they did not save Liberia's president. Doe was captured and killed by the head of a rival rebel faction led by Prince Johnson, one of Taylor's former generals.
A notorious, vicious drunk, Johnson had himself filmed as he ordered his men to torture Doe. While he sat behind a desk with two open cans of Budweiser beer, a young woman fanning him from behind, Johnson ordered his men to strip Doe. The portly president kneeled before Johnson in his underwear, quivering, sobbing, begging. Johnson's men hacked off his ears. Blood poured down his torso. Doe's body was later found dumped outside a medical clinic.
Amos Sawyer, a Liberian intellectual, would emerge as the president of an interim government named at a meeting of leading Liberian politicians, activists and religious leaders.
By November, an uneasy ceasefire had settled across the country. Liberians called it "no peace, no war."
Taylor, unimpressed by the peacekeepers and the new interim president, went about the business of governing.
He now controlled almost all of Liberia. In typically grandiose fashion, Taylor named his territory Greater Liberia though it was better known by its eponymous nickname, Taylorland. He declared himself president.
As his capital, he chose the village of Gbarnga in the flatlands of northern Liberia, a scruffy regional trading center.
Taylor turned a long, low single-story house on an airy hill overlooking the village into his executive mansion. From the outside, it was modest and unpretentious. Inside was rococo furniture and walls of varnished wood.
He formed a legislative body for Taylorland, the National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government, or NPRAG. He appointed a Cabinet of ministers (frequently fired, sometimes beaten) and created a judicial system (hardly independent). He even hired a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.
He also built his army eventually amassing perhaps 10,000 fighters and child soldiers armed with machine guns, mortars and artillery cannon.
His dreams stretched wide as Liberia's sky.
"I'm not a soldier. I'm an economist. I came here believing in the very democratic principles that the United States is built on today," he told television cameras. "All I want to do is to bring back some sanity, some fair play in the country."
For a while, a group of Firestone's Liberian managers worked with Taylor to run the plantation. But they couldn't maintain the millions of rubber trees. They had no ships to transport the rubber, no sales network to sell it. The farm's hydroelectric plant supplied electricity only haphazardly.
By February 1991, the plantation was in danger of falling apart. A group of former Firestone workers met Taylor on the veranda of House 53. Their message: They wanted Firestone back.
"The employees were not benefiting," said Victor Bestman, the Liberian estates manager. Taylor's associates "sold the rubber, enriched themselves and how they divided it nobody knows."
Taylor grew to realize that he needed Firestone. Symbolically, the company's return would amount to a bright neon sign indicating that Taylorland was open for business. Politically, its jobs and supplies of food would ensure that residents did not rise up in dissent.
"We needed Firestone to keep people busy," Richardson said.
When Firestone abandoned Liberia, it made Taylor seethe.
"There's a little war, and then you run off, and there's no food, no medicine, complete breakdown," Taylor would later tell one Firestone executive at a meeting. "That's inexcusable."
For its own part, Firestone was in no mood to kowtow to a guerrilla leader who had threatened its managers and killed its workers.
In October 1990, Ensminger sent a brusque letter addressing Taylor as "Commander-in-Chief" not President. He requested a meeting, and a guarantee that the Firestone personnel who attended the meeting would be safe. A week later, Ensminger sent a follow-up aide memoire a term typically used in diplomatic circles to outline discussion points.
In it, Ensminger laid out Firestone's conditions for returning to Liberia. At the top of the list: Firestone "cannot resume operations unless its employees, both Liberian and expatriate, have sufficient assurances that peace, law and order will be restored in Liberia to ensure their own safety and that of the members of their families from physical harm."
Ensminger demanded better financial terms to lower the company's tax liabilities. And he noted that Firestone would not recognize the "legitimacy" of any political or military authority so as to avoid "interfering in the internal affairs of Liberia."
"The existing situation raises questions as to whether, when and how operations could be resumed in Liberia," Ensminger wrote.
Today, Ensminger said he thought the company should not have attempted to negotiate with Taylor.
"Taylor was not a recognized government of Liberia. There was no reason or legality for negotiation with Taylor," Ensminger said in the interview. "It was only that we were trying to figure out a way to get to the plantation and resume operations."
The missive did little to improve Taylor's disposition.
Ensminger's attitude was, " We want our plantation back. You have no business there. We want everything. Our trucks back. We want this, that and everything else,' " said Richardson, Taylor's adviser.
Taylor was prepared to wait. If Firestone wanted its rubber plantation back, it would have to bend and pay.
The Investment
Back in Akron, Ensminger and other managers began strategizing about how to get the plantation running again.
In 1988, the Japanese tire conglomerate Bridgestone had acquired Firestone for $2.65 billion the largest purchase of a U.S. company by a Japanese one at the time.
Business analysts judged the deal a disaster. Bridgestone moved too slowly to make necessary cuts. The company hemorrhaged money. Between 1990 and 1992, the new U.S. subsidiary, called Bridgestone/Firestone, lost $1 billion, according to one history of the company.
On Bridgestone's balance sheet, Firestone's Liberian plantation wasn't a large item, generating about $104 million in revenue and $15.6 million in profits in 1989, the year before the civil war. But the 15 percent profit margin the plantation achieved that year was a bright spot on a corporate ledger drowning in red ink.
Top managers "were under a lot of pressure from Akron to get the plantation going," said Ken Gerhart, the Firestone manager who ran the company's soda bottling plant in Monrovia. The plantation "was very, very profitable. It was very efficient."
The company found alternative sources of rubber in Asia after the plantation's abandonment, but the latex produced in Liberia was considered to be among the finest in the world, in part because of the company's tight quality control. The plantation supplied about 40 percent of the U.S. market for latex, and 10 percent of the world market.
The value of the plantation itself the land, the trees, the factories, buildings, vehicles and equipment was estimated at nearly $200 million. If Firestone pulled out for good, those assets would be unsalvageable. Even a temporary interruption posed risks: There was no assurance that Liberia would allow the company back, especially under the favorable conditions of the original deal cut in 1926.
To figure out how to deal with Taylor and return to Liberia, Firestone hired a young Liberian-born lawyer with impressive credentials. Gerald Padmore had graduated from Yale and then Harvard Law School. He had returned to Liberia to serve in President Tolbert's government. As the acting minister of finance, he sat across the table from Firestone in rubber contract negotiations.
Later, he switched to Firestone's side and began advising company leaders on whether to return to Liberia. Firestone agreed to have Padmore answer questions for the company about events in the early 1990s.
"It was a real dilemma for the company," Padmore said. There was "a lot of, I would say, soul-searching, and really tough, tough decision-making that had to be done."
As Padmore saw it, there were two competing governments in Liberia, neither of which had been formally recognized by the United States. Firestone's operations straddled the lines of control. The plantation sat in Taylorland. But the company shipped its rubber and latex from Monrovia. To move from the plantation to the port, company employees had to pass through numerous roadblocks and withstand entreaties for bribes at each stop. Who made the rules? Who got the company's taxes?
Padmore said much of Firestone's determination to return to Liberia was driven by concern for its Liberian workforce. Firestone had stopped making rice shipments to the plantation in June 1990, and so men, women and children were surviving on sugar cane and rotting bananas. During one period that fall, the company's medical director was recording 10 to 15 deaths a day, according to a sworn deposition.
The plantation and its trees were also a worry. Rubber trees must be very carefully tended and harvested to prevent them from dying. Firestone had received word that Liberians had descended on the plantation to illegally harvest latex from the company's trees. They were "slaughter tapping" an industry term for extracting so much sap that the tree dies.
"We're hearing stories from our employees that they're distressed," Padmore recalled. "We're hearing stories that our assets are being looted or destroyed. It's a question of do we abandon Liberia, as many other major businesses had done, or will there be a future, and how do we get back on?"
Padmore said the "easy answer" for Firestone would have been to abandon the plantation. Several companies fled Liberia at the start of the war. Others had chosen to stay, according to a State department cable.
Padmore said it was tempting for Firestone to say, " We're out of here. It's risky. It's scary. Economically, it doesn't make any sense.' "
"In a sense, that would have been morally satisfying, that you could safely be back in the United States. But if you felt a sense of responsibility to Liberia, and, most importantly, to the workers, your teammates, really, the people you've worked with for years, who were distressedsome of them were killedyou'd say, Well, let's go back and see if we can help them,'" Padmore continued.
"I think those were all good decisions, because, for me, Liberia outlasts the temporary rulers it may have. It's a country. It's ordinary people whose lives are terribly important. They don't have the ability or the means, as I fortunately did, to fly off to the United States and be safe. They've got to worry about their kids. For me, it's the right choice. Stay as long as you can," Padmore said.
Padmore acknowledged that Firestone's employees had experienced Taylor's violence. His soldiers had threatened Ensminger. Gerhart was put on a hit list, and his personal driver had the soles of his feet cut off with machetes by Taylor's men. Firestone expats witnessed Taylor's fighters savaging people in Harbel.
"We knew there had been fighting, there had been killing, and there had been some ethnic reprisal killings," Padmore said. "But at that time, from the information available to me, and, I think, to Firestone, Taylor did not appear to be conducting genocidal activities."
In the interview, Ensminger said that was "laughable."
"Firestone knew full well and was getting reports from the State Department and from the ambassador and from Liberians," he said. "They knew full well that atrocities and human rights violations were committed."
In October 1990, Human Rights Watch reported that Taylor soldiers had committed widespread killing and torture. Two-thirds of Doe's tribe, the Krahn, had fled the country. Those who remained, the report said, were "at risk of genocide."
In early 1991, the U.S. State Department released its report on human rights violations in 1990, a congressionally-mandated assessment for every country in the world. For Liberia, it read like a gore novel.
All the warring factions, including government soldiers, had committed atrocities. Each time Taylor took over a new province, his forces hunted and killed hundreds of men, women and children from the Mandingo and Krahn ethnic groups, which were seen as sympathetic to Doe. Emergency food centers set up to feed starving Liberians became grotesque snares. Those in line were forced to produce identity cards. The Krahn were killed. In one particularly nasty practice, Taylor's men set up a highway checkpoint called "No Return." More than 2,000 people were killed there.
"The overall human rights situation in Liberia in 1990 was appalling," the report read. "All combatants routinely engaged in indiscriminate killing and abuse of civilians, looting, and ethnically based executions."
"Leaders of all the armed groups did little or nothing to stop the killings
and, in some cases, may have encouraged them or been directly responsible for the abuses."
Official data, painstakingly compiled years later by Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission from the testimony of thousands of Liberians, attempted to quantify the human damage. By December 1990, Taylor's forces alone had committed nearly 40,000 human rights violations. The toll included more than 6,400 killings, 800 kidnappings and 600 rapes, according to a ProPublica analysis of the data.
Mary Pollee said she was one victim of Taylor's fighters. From the Firestone plantation, she fled to a city held by Taylor's rebels. The fighters stole her food. They took her clothes. They threatened her with guns. And then one day, they grabbed her 13-year-old daughter and raped and killed her.
Pollee her husband, a son, and a daughter now buried went mad.
"I was like somebody going crazy," said Pollee. She began weeping at the memory in her living room, the cicadas outside whirring, the sun beating. "I was not to myself, oh."
In Ohio, Firestone executives continued to discuss what to do. Initially, they decided to wait to see if the conflict would resolve itself. But as those hopes faded, Firestone made its final decision.
The company would go back to Liberia.
"Completely justifiable," Padmore called the decision.
"Had I had a crystal ball and an ability to say that's going to happen, I would have told Firestone in January of 1992, Don't go back,' but we didn't know that would happen. We were hopeful that good things were going to happen."
He added: "Had [Firestone executives] not taken those decisions, I think Liberia would be much the worse for it today."
America Works for Firestone
XC1999.51.000 Firestone and the Warlord: The Untold Story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the Tragedy of LiberiaIn February 1991, Ensminger flew to Liberia to reach out to Taylor. Over the coming months, the company resumed feeding its workers. It sent shipments of rice to Taylor and to the interim government. It even hired Taylor forces to guard House 53.
Taylor ignored the entreaties.
Said Richardson: "They just wanted what's for Firestone to be for Firestone."
In April 1991, U.S. Ambassador Peter Jon de Vos secured a meeting with Taylor in Gbarnga. He invited Ensminger along for the journey.
De Vos was a proponent of Firestone and Taylor reaching an accommodation. After the meeting, a cable noted that "De Vos pressed Taylor" to talk with Firestone officials.
"We are encouraging (Taylor Labor Minister Nyundeh) Monkonmlah and Firestone to reach accommodation si
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass