- Express
Your Revulsion; Demonstrate Concrete Solidarity!
The
assault on CEDE officials in Monrovia
In
broad daylight on Tuesday 28 November, 12 security thugs descended on the
offices of the Centre for Democratic Empowerment (CEDE) in downtown
Monrovia armed with hammers, knives and cudgels.
In a sadistic show of brutality, the men attacked and inflicted
life-threatening wounds on Prof. Amos Sawyer, former Interim President of
Liberia and Chair of CEDE and Conmany Wesseh, CEDE Director.
While their victims lay barely conscious on the floor, the thugs
set about systematically dismantling the premises: they looted laptop
computers and other gadgets, smashed windows, bigger PCs and other
unmovable property, and drove away in get-away vehicles.
Prof. Sawyer and Mr. Wesseh cannot, at the moment, seek
professional medical attention abroad because, their travel documents were
among the stolen items during the raid.
This latest attack marks an alarming escalation in brutality and impunity
in Liberia and follows a well-known pattern of intimidation and harassment
against pro-democracy defenders and activists in the country.
It will be recalled that on 30 July last year, thugs attacked,
looted and vandalised Conmany Wesseh’s house and roughed up his pregnant
wife and UN employee, Medina Wesseh.
Medina now lives in exile in Côte d’Ivoire.
Kofi Woods, former Director of the human rights body Justice and
Peace Commission, was hounded out of the country two years ago.
Ms Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a presidential candidate in the elections
that rubber-stamped Charles Taylor’s armed seizure of power, is
currently living under the weight of treason charges.
Her crime? She he had issued a statement on the state of affairs in
Liberia in August this year. Other
activists within Liberia, such as Dr. Boimah Fambulleh, an opposition
leader and Dr. Togba Nah Tippoteh, Director of Sisuku,
live and work under the threat of death.
The Centre for Democracy & Development unreservedly condemns this
latest act of barbarity, urges all civil society groups and individuals in
West Africa and elsewhere, African States and the rest of the
International Community to demonstrate their revulsion at the culture of
impunity and disregard for human dignity that epitomises Charles
Taylor’s Liberia today.
Sequence of Events
President Charles Taylor, who has been barred from travelling to several
countries because of his regime’s destabilising activities in West
Africa, returned from a visit to France on Thursday 23 November to be met
by student protests. The
university students had issued a statement calling on Charles Taylor to
take radical measures to ease the crippling sanctions and isolation that
the international community has imposed on the country.
Among the students’ demands, they called for an end to Taylor’s
support to Sierra Leonean rebels and the expulsion of Sierra Leone’s
Revolutionary United Front combatants, including their commander, Sam
‘Maskito’ Bockarie; they demanded an end to Liberia’s role in arms
proliferation and diamond expropriation and; called on the regime to stop
Malaysian firms depleting the University’s forest reserves.
Charles Taylor summoned the student leadership to the Presidential Mansion
the next day, and according to a student present, warned that he was going
to ‘look beyond the students and deal instead with the people behind the
agitation outside the campus’. The
attack on Prof. Sawyer and Conmany Wesseh took place four days later.
President Taylor called the victims the next day expressing his
‘horror’ and promising ‘to go to the bottom of the matter’.
CDD welcomes the concern of the President as well as his promise to bring
the perpetrators of this act of cowardly brutality to justice.
However, circumstances surrounding the attack and subsequent
developments cast doubts on the feasibility of a state-led investigation.
Firstly, since the attack, individual members of the hit-squad have
admitted to Radio Veritas and in other call-ins on local radio stations
that the operation was planned and had a level of official approval within
the state security apparatus. Secondly,
the NPP Government of Charles Taylor is yet to uncover the perpetrators of
past atrocities against human rights campaigners.
Finally, the NPP is responsible, under the Liberian Constitution,
for the security of its citizens; While Charles Taylor maintains a firm
grip on the national security apparatus, the continuing spate of
unpunished violence in Liberia is an indictment of the Courts’ ability
to assure impartial justice.
What
should be done?
The only way President Taylor can convince the world of his sincerity in
this matter, is to allow a free, independent and impartial investigation
into the brutality. We
therefore call on the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights,
with the assistance of ECOWAS, to establish such a body, with full
co-operation from the Government and unfettered powers to subpoena anybody
to appear before it. We therefore call on sister organisations, the media
and governments around the world to press for such an independent body of
inquiry.
It is the belief of CDD that the violent attack on Amos Sawyer and Conmany
Wesseh is a deliberate attempt to institutionalise violence and fear with
the aim of:
1) Intimidating and silencing the voices of conscience in society as a
warning to those who dare speak up against the excesses and impunity of
the state security forces as well as the appalling conditions under which
Liberians still live three and a half years after the end of the war in
that country.
2) Destroying the basis of independent civil society organisations in
Liberia in order to cripple their activities and force critical actors
into a culture of silence or to flee the country.
Subsequently, we call on fraternal organisations and other
democracy-supporting institutions to go beyond the expression of revulsion
at what has happened, to the show of concrete solidarity.
As Prof. Sawyer said in an interview with BBC Focus On Africa not
long after his ordeal, ‘CEDE intends to remain and work in Liberia for
the good of the Liberian people’. One
concrete way this determination can materialise is for organisations that
can afford it, and international funding community to provide CEDE with
generous financial and material assistance to enable it to continue with
its excellent work.
CDD,
London, 1 December 2000
Dr. J ‘Kayode Fayemi
Director
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