Prince of war

Why shouldn’t one of Liberia’s most infamous psychopaths become its president?

Human rights are universal and indivisible, existing as they do in an unexplored metaphysical sphere in which the European Court of Human Rights plays the role of Christopher Columbus. So it is a wonderful thing to see the court’s discoveries accepted, applied and even extended in a country in which its writ does not yet run, namely Liberia, in West Africa.

There, a man called Prince Y Johnson is running for president in the forthcoming elections. When I met him, a little more than 20 years ago, he was Field Marshal Brigadier-General Prince Y Johnson, but just as he awarded himself these ranks, so he has now divested himself of them.

In those days it was advisable, or so I was told, to visit the Field Marshal in the morning, before he had drunk too much beer and smoked too much dope: for in the event of intoxication he was inclined to take up his AK47 and go round shooting people more or less at random. When I met him, he was affable enough, but I can’t say that I trusted him entirely.

Johnson was principally famous for having led one of the armed factions in the Liberian civil war, the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, that had so destroyed the country that traders of Lebanese extraction fled Liberia for the relative safety of Beirut. Johnson’s greatest military exploit was the capture of the then-president, Samuel Doe, whom he subsequently had tortured to death in front of him, an event so historic that Johnson thought it worthy of capture on video: a video of which he is sufficiently proud that he offered to show it to visiting foreigners.