Africa’s War Lord Queen; The Bloodstained Career of Liberia’s Eleanor Sirleaf Johnson

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf attends an Arab and African leaders summit meeting in Kuwait city on November 19, 2013. The summit aims at reviewing steps to promote economic ties between wealthy Gulf states and investment-thirsty Africa. AFP PHOTO/YASSER AL-ZAYYAT        (Photo credit should read YASSER AL-ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images)
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf attends an Arab and African leaders summit meeting in Kuwait city on November 19, 2013. The summit aims at reviewing steps to promote economic ties between wealthy Gulf states and investment-thirsty Africa. AFP PHOTO/YASSER AL-ZAYYAT (Photo credit should read YASSER AL-ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images)

Eleanor Sirleaf Johnson is the Harvard educated, Nobel Prize winning President of Liberia with a long bloodstained history of support for warlords both past and present. She used to be the de facto foreign minister for that most bloodthirsty of warlords former Liberian “President” Charles Taylor, and she addressed the US Congress in his support.

President Johnson is the queen of the warlords, for she has granted fiefdoms to many of Charles Taylor’s top Capos in todays Liberia. This is the Charles Taylor that is an incarcerated war criminal having been found guilty of crimes against humanity by that pack of western lickspittles enthroned at the International Criminal Court.

Thats right, the ruling President in Liberia was the right hand woman for a serious killer and today is surrounded by many of his most notorious warlords.

Interestingly enough, Charles Taylor was convicted by the ICC of crimes against humanity for crimes he committed in…Sierra Leone? But wasn’t Charles Taylor President of Liberia? Yes, and he committed all sorts of terrible acts in Liberia for much longer than he did during his invasion of Sierra Leone during its bitter civil war, but the ICC couldn’t touch anything Liberian for it would leave Eleanor Sirleaf Johnson with blood on her hands for the world to see.

You see President Johnson was hand picked by the USA and it lackeys at the UN to rule Liberia when the Charles Taylor regime finally collapsed, doing so under the rubric of “democracy”, never mind Ms. Johnson tends to run unopposed?

To give you an idea just how rotten things are, the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in front of which Ms. Johnson testified, issued an opinion calling for Ms. Johnson to be barred for life from Liberian politics.

When one speaks of warlords it is meant literally, for the lords of war under Charles Taylor now rule much of the Liberian economy and critical government departments. John T. Richardson was appointed head of the Housing Authority and was a top commander for Charles Taylor and is infamous for being the commander of the operation where 5 American nuns were murdered. Eugene Nagbe was a senior commander under Taylor and was appointed Minister of Information. Roland Dou was a senior frontlline commander and is now head of special operations at the National Security Agency along side President
Johnson’s step son Fomba Sirleaf. Charles Taylors wife, Jewel Howard-Taylor has been a Senator and is being touted as the next Vice President. And the list goes on and on, exposing how some of the worst criminals in neo colonial Africa are ensconced as warlords high up in the national crime syndicate that rules Liberia.

In the mining industry, a mainstay of the economy, many undercover documentaries have exposed how Liberia’s “government” is little more than an extortion racket run by gangsters. Pay to Play? Cash and Carry? Anything goes, never mind the environment and disaster for the locals.

As the Ebola epidemic exposed, there is little in the way of government services for ordinary Liberians, How could there be when corruption and graft are so entrenched?

For years now, while the capital city Monrovia lacked such basic services as electricity and running water, the western banksters, their minions in government and the media kept up a cacophony of praise for the Queen of African Warlords, going so far as to anoint Eleanor Sirleaf Johnson with the Nobel Peace Prize. And this for someone who stood front and center in the ranks of those who supported Charles Taylor?

Charles Taylor was a warlord who did whatever it took to preserve his power, and always worried that his mentors, if convenient, would hand him over to the ICC without qualms, which is what they did. His “trial” was fully sanitized and the automatic guilty verdict pronounced with the necessary pomp and circumstance. And the African Queen of the Warlords, Eleanor Sirleaf Johnson, would escape scott free, and remain on her throne, overseeing so much misery and suffering that Liberia should rightfully be considered a failed state, as exposed by the Ebola epidemic.

Yet Ms. Johnson is regularly welcomed in black American churches across the USA, held up as an example of “a good African” to those with the same skin color but no affinity for any real connection to the African motherland.

The Liberian diaspora in the USA has been active in educating the public about what really happened during the terrible Charles Taylor times and the present regimes links to him. Maybe the real story will see the light of day and Ms. Johnson will no longer be honored with such adulation, instead see the inside of a prison where she belongs.

Thomas C. Mountain is and independent journalist in Eritrea, living and reporting from here since 2006. See thomascmountain on Facebook or best contact him at thomascmountain at g mail dot com

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