STORIES
The Gunslinger
Two men stood facing each other twenty paces apart in the main square of Springfield, Missouri on a hot summer’s day in 1865. Their revolvers were holstered, and hundreds of townspeople stood by, watching this public duel, the first ‘quick draw’ contest ever seen in America’s old Wild West. Two shots were fired. One man fell dead; the other one walked away – and into legend. He was ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. His real name was James Butler Hickok, born in Troy Grove, Illinois on 27 May 1837, and his skills as a gunfighter and scout, along with a reputation as a lawman, provided the basis for his fame. Hickok was a hard-drinking, gregarious character much into self-promotion, and along the way acquired the nickname ‘Wild Bill’. He became a legendary figure of America’s old Wild West, although some of his exploits are heavily fictionalised in the ‘dime novel’ tradition of those days. The moniker of ‘Wild Bill’ has inspired similar nicknames for men named William, who became known for their daring and ruthlessness in various fields, even though that was not Hickok’s real first name. Hickok came to the west as a stage coach driver, then became an elected marshal (lawman) in the frontier territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which were dangerous emerging areas as railways and settlers spread across the USA from the eastern states to the western shores of the Pacific. He fought in the UnionArmy during the American Civil War (1861-1865), and quickly gained fame after the conflict as a scout, marksman, marshal and professional gambler. Between his law enforcement duties and heavy gambling, which overlapped, Hickok was involved in several famous gun battles, and was ultimately killed whilst playing poker in a Dakota Territory saloon in the lawless mining enclave of Deadwood. He was just 39 years old when he died. Hickok grew up on his father’s farm, in what was then named Homer, Illinois, and learned his shooting skills helping his father protect the farm from antiabolitionists, becoming an expert marksman at an early age. Unknown to most, James Hickok was an early opponent of slavery, and assisted his father in smuggling runaway slaves along the 
Underground Railroad (an escape route for runaways). A secret room in his parents’ house was used to conceal slaves on several occasions. In 1855, Hickok, then aged 18, got into a brawl with a man named Charles Hudson. During the scrap, both men fell into a canal. As Hudson lay motionless, Hickok fled, mistakenly believing that he had killed him. He then joined General Jim Lane’s Free State Army (‘The Kansas Red Legs’), a militia of licensed marauders who rampaged through Kansas and Missouri before and during the Civil War. It was here that Hickok met 12-year-old William Cody, later to be known as ‘Buffalo Bill’, who was attached to Johnson’s Army as a scout. ‘Bill’ was now six feet, two inches (1.88 metres) tall in high-heeled shoes with auburn curls cascading to his shoulders. He was also articulate and cut such an impressive figure that dude reporters from the East lapped up every word he said. In 1857, Hickok claimed a 160-acre tract of land in Johnson County, Kansas where on 22 March 1858, he was elected as the first constable of Monticello Township. But he was unpopular there and by 1859 had joined the Russell, Waddell and Majors Freight Company as a driver. The following year he was injured by a bear and sent to the Rock Creek Station in Nebraska, (which the company had recently purchased from David McCanles) to work as a stable hand until he recovered. It was here that Hickok was involved in a deadly shoot-out with the McCanles ‘gang’. Reasons for the dispute vary, some saying that Hickok owed McCanles money following a poker game; others that David McCanles was insanely jealous when Hickok, a notorious womaniser, seduced Sarah Shull (aka Kate Shell), a local belle towhom McCanles was engaged. The latter rode out to the station to ‘clean up on the people there’. McCanles was clearly intending a Wild West crime of passion, joined by two neighbours and his 12-year-old son. According to Hickok, however, McCanles was accompanied by nine armed men, and he killed them all. The famous pistoleer boasted that he shot his main enemy and nine others with his two pearl-handled 1851 .44 calibre capand- ball Navy Colt revolvers. The West was well rid of the gang, said Hickok, for they were “desperadoes, horsethieves and murderers to a man”. One survivor at Rock Creek that day was David McCanles’ 12-year-old son, Monroe. Years after the event, historical investigators succeeded in tracing the boy, and he gave an account of the shooting which reflected no credit on the legendary lawman. Monroe stated that when his father entered the station manager’s house, Hickok shot him in the back with a .50 calibre buffalo rifle as he hid behind a curtain. The exit wound, said Monroe, was horrendous. With his next blast Hickok wounded one of McCanles’ neighbours and then the station manager Horace Wellman, his wife and a station employee named J W Brink beat the unfortunate man to death with clubs. The other neighbour fled out into the scrub where he was killed by someone toting a 12-gauge shotgun. Monroe could not say who was responsible for that death. Hickok and his accomplices (Wellman and his wife plus Mr Brink) duly went on trial for the affray only to be found not guilty by reason of acting in self-defence despite reliable reports that none of the ‘McCanles gang’ was armed. From 1862 onwards Hickok served with the Union forces in Kansas and Missouri, earning a reputation as a skilled tracker and scout. When the war ended in April 1865, he joined ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, David L Payne and Robert Denbow in a successful buffalo hunting partnership. In 1867, Hickok’s fame was boosted when he was interviewed at length by the famed writer Henry Morton Stanley. When Payne and Denbow moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1870, Hickok was elected for a spell as Sheriff of Hays, Kansas, and in 1873 he appeared in a stage play put on by Bill Cody’stravelling entourage entitled ‘Scouts of the Plains’. Perhaps Hickok’s most famous moment occurred on 21 July 1865 in the town square of Springfield, Missouri in that ‘quick draw’ duel with David Tutt Junior. Fiction and countless western movies have typified this style of gunfight as being commonplace, but this is the only such duel on official record. Tutt apparently incurred a gambling
debt with Hickok but the real dispute between the two men was over a young ady named Susannah Moore, withwhom Hickok had been enjoying an affair until Tutt came along and stole her away from him. An enraged Hickok then challenged Tutt to a duel at Springfield. The duel is an age-old means of settling a love-triangle that leads to bitter dispute; a kind of ritualised crime of passion. This one differed from earlier encounters in that this time the weapons were holstered. The two men quietly
squared off, watched by hundreds of excited townsfolk. Tutt drew first but he was in too much of a hurry, and his hasty shot missed. Meantime Hickok drew and cocked a Navy Colt from his waistband, took careful aim with his weapon at full
arm’s length, and put a .44 calibre round through Tutt’s heart. “Just being fast is not going to win you the game”, Hickok later related. “It’s keeping your cool whilst being shot at and then being right on target when you shoot back.” Several weeks later Hickok was interviewed by Colonel George Ward Nichols for Harpers New Monthly Magazine.The article recounted hundreds of men that Hickok personally killed and
other exaggerated exploits, and was so controversial wherever Hickok was known, that it lead to several frontier newspaper rebuttals. As a result, Hickok was not elected marshal of Springfield. After a brief period as Deputy US Marshall at Fort Riley, Kansas, Hickok served as a scout for the famous George A Custer’s 7th Cavalry during the Indian wars of the western plains. Luckily for him, he was not among Custer’s forces when the unfortunate LieutenantColonel and his men were massacred by Sioux warriors at the Battle of Little Big Horn (in what is now Montana) on 25
June 1876. In 1867 Hickok took a break from the west and moved to Niagara Falls where he tried his hand at acting in a stage play called ‘The Daring Buffalo Chases of the Plains.’ But Hickok was a truly terrible actor and soon returned to the west where he was elected Sheriff and City Marshal of Ellis County, Kansas on 23 August 1869. In his first month at Hays, Hickok shot and killed two men (Bill Mulvey and Sam Strawhim) in gun duels that were highly sensationalised by dime novelists later.
At Hays on 17 July 1870 Hickok was involved in another gunfight with drunk and disorderly soldiers of the 7th US Cavalry, wounding two men, one of them mortally. Failing to win re-election to his post, Hickok moved on to Abilene, Kansas where he was elected marshal on15 April 1871. It was here that Hickok became friends with the famed outlaw John Wesley Hardin. The two men often gambled and went out drinkin and whoring together. But Hardin was forced to leave town when he shot a snoring hotel guest for disturbing his sleep. Hickok quickly disarmed his friend and persuaded him to saddle up and ride away. Whilst working at Abilene, Hickok and a saloon owner named Sam Coe had an ongoing gambling dispute that later resulted in another gunfight. When Coe told Hickok that he could “kill a crow on the wing”, the marshal allegedly retorted, “Did the crow have a pistol? Was he shooting back at you? You can be sure that I will be, Mister Sam Coe.” On 5 October 1871 Hickok was
attempting to quell a street brawl when Coe fired two shots with his handgun.
Hickok ordered his deputies to arrest Coe for firing a weapon within the city limits. Coe protested that he had merely been shooting at a stray dog. As deputies moved in to arrest him, Coe suddenly turned his gun on Hickok. But the wily lawman was too quick for him: he fired first, and Coe fell dead in the dust. Hickok then caught a glimpse of movement of someone running towards him from his left and quickly fired two more rounds in that direction. Another man fell to the street: Special Deputy Marshal Mike Williams, who had merely been coming to Hickok’s aid. That accidental death was to haunt Hickok for the remainder of his life, and as a direct
result of this fatal ‘friendly fire’ incident, Hickok was relieved of his duties as marshal less than two months later. ‘Wild Bill’ gave up serving the law and turned to gambling for a living and by 1876 was diagnosed as suffering from both glaucoma and gonorrhea. Despite earning a good income from gambling and displays of showmanship for a few years, Hickok’s health and marksmanship were now suffering. He was also living beyond his means: often after buying
drinks all round at a local saloon, he would often be arrested the next day for drunkenness and vagrancy. But on 5 March 1876 Hickok surprisingly married
Agnes Thatcher Lake, a 50-year-old circus proprietor to whom he was deeply
attached. Wild Bill met his end unexpectedly. The retired lawman was quietly drinking and playing poker at Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon number 10 in the lawless mining community of Deadwood, in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory on the fateful
afternoon of 2 August 1876. He had been unable to find an empty seat in a corner, where he usually sat in order to protect himself against sneak attacks from behind. Instead, he sat with his back to one door and facing another. Sure enough, a man named Jack McCal entered through the door behind Hickok and shot him in the back of the head with a .45 calibre revolver. The bullet penetrated below his left ear and exited out of his right cheek. Hickok slumped forward on the table, shuddered slightly and then crashed dead to the saloon floor. Legend has it that at the moment he was shot, Hickok was holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights. The fifth card had not yet been dealt, and remains unknown. ‘Aces and eights’ in poker thus became legendary as a ‘Dead Man’s Hand’. McCall’s motive for killing Hickok remains debated. He had lost all his money to Hickok the day before, and may have been enraged at the
condescending manner of the former marshal who gave him a poker chip,
representing just enough cash to pay for his breakfast. At his hasty trial by a miners’ jury, McCall claimed that he had been avenging his brother’s death by Hickok’s hand years earlier, and for that the defendant was amazingly acquitted of murder. (By some quirk of reasoning, a plea of ‘legitimate’ revenge was enough to ensure an acquittal among the uneducated jurors at Deadwood). This led to an angry editorial in the ‘Black Hills Pioneer’ newspaper: ‘Should it ever be our misfortune to kill a man; we would simply ask that our trial may take place in one of the mining camps of these hills,’ wrote the editor. McCall was subsequently re-arrested after bragging about his cowardly deed, and a new trial was held. The authorities did not consider this to be a case of ‘double jeopardy’ as at the time the Deadwood community was not recognised by the government as a legitimately incorporated town because it was in Indian country and the jury was irregular. The new trial was held in Yankton, capital of Black Hills territory and this time McCall was found guilty, sentenced to death and duly hanged. During the trial it was determined that McCall had never even had a brother to avenge. But Hickok’s death was not mourned by everyone. Monroe McCanles stated that it was ‘poetic justice’. Just as ‘Wild Bill’ had shot his father in the back at Rock Creek in 1861, so Hickok had suffered the same fate at the hands of Jack McCall as he sat playing poker in Deadwood fifteen years later.
Evil Iran
Coming from the two top surrogates to Republican presidential candidate Senator
John McCain, the Lieberman-Graham piece - a preemptive strike proclaiming the
success of the “surge” - should be taken as the very essence of McCain’s foreign policy, a presidential candidate that still can’t tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite. As it happens, it is also a formidable piece of fiction. The overall martial theme remains unmistakable: we need war, war, war. MR SURGE GOES TO WASHINGTON. Lieberman-Graham hail Petraeus as “having led one of the most remarkably successful military operations in American history”
while deriding “antiwar critics” as essentially a bunch of losers. What they don’t say is that the “surge” is in fact not over - it has been reconverted into a “pause”, according to Petraeus himself, before things start surging again. Lies. Lies. Pause. More lies. Lieberman-Graham rebrand the “surge” as a “noble cause” - insisting on the drop of American casualties (“down by 70%”). But they don’t tell how. They insist on magical surge “liberation” of former al-Qaeda strongholds - but they don’t say that “empowered Iraqi Muslims” - actually Sunni Arab guerrillas - decided, wisely, to rake in US cash ($300 a month in a 70% unemployment economy) instead of fighting three enemies at once (al-Qaeda, the Baghdad government and the Americans themselves). They also don’t mention that any “success” of the “surge” is also directly conditioned by Muqtada al-Sadr’s truce, imposed last autumn; and by decreased ethnic cleansing in Baghdad (which had in fact been turned from a Sunni-majority to a Shi’ite-majority city even before the “surge” began). Lieberman-Graham talk of “Muslims taking up arms against Osama bin Laden”. Al- Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers - although extremely violent - is a negligible militia among the jaw-dropping 28 militias in Iraq, no more than 3,000 fighters compared, for instance, to around 100,000 Kurdish Peshmergas. Lieberman-Graham hail the deer-caught-in-headlights [Nuri al-]Maliki government In Baghdad, “encouraged” (“under heavy pressure”, rather) by US ambassador Ryan Crocker, to pass US-designated benchmarks. Even Sunnis rejected the new de-Ba’athification law. Not many are “encouraged” to vote in the next elections (Lieberman-Graham are certain they will, “by the millions”); their collective feeling is that the government remains a Shi’ite Kurdish private affair. Not surprisingly, there’s not even a passing mention by Lieberman-Graham of theholy of holies: oil. In fact, the only benchmark that Washington really cares about is the new Iraqi oil law - which no serious Iraqi nationalist member of parliament would dare to approve. On the other hand, Lieberman-Graham exult that “the Iraqi economy is growing at a brisk 7%”. Good for dodgy car smugglers from the Gulf, not for a 70% unemployment economy.
Lieberman-Graham laud Maliki’s “political will” to “take on the Shi’ite militias and
criminal gangs, which he recently condemned as “worse than al-Qaeda”. Here pops
up for the first time the dizzying amalgam now relentlessly established by the Bush
administration and McCain himself of Wahhabi, al-Qaeda and Shi’ite Iran - the Islamic Republic branded guilty, with no evidence, of supporting these militias and gangs. Lieberman-Graham seem to believe the Iraqi security forces have “shown significant improvement”. Whatever rhetoric they employ cannot modify the end result of the battle of Basra, where these “Iraqi security forces” deserted en masse and were routinely humiliated by the Mahdi Army and/or rogue Mahdi Army units. Not to mention the supreme humiliation: the ceasefire was broken by the commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), in Qom, the religious capital of Iran, and behind Maliki’s back. The IRGC, branded by Washington as terrorists, were actually the peacemakers. Unstoppable, Lieberman-Graham go on to say that al-Qaeda “still retains a significant foothold in the northern city of Mosul” where “Iraqi and coalition forces are involved in a campaign to destroy it”. The true story, reported by Asia Times Online (The other Iraqi civil war) is rather that Americans are helping Kurds in their slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs in Mosul and the surrounding region. BLAME, BLAME IRAN The full demonization of Iran - and the heart of Bush and McCain’s foreign policy - is on show when Lieberman-Graham accuse Iran, with no evidence whatsoever, of continuing “to wage a vicious and escalating proxy war against the Iraqi government and the US military”. The Iranians have American blood on their hands” and are responsible, through ghostly, undetermined “extremist agents”, for “the deaths of hundreds of our men and women in uniform”. There’s no evidence these American-christened “special groups” even exist - or are just a counterinsurgency fabrication. It doesn’t matter. The whole project - Bush’s and McCain’s - is spelled out quite frankly: “Our fight in Iraq cannot be separated from our larger struggle to prevent the emergence of an Iranian-dominated Middle East.” This is code for regime change - a newer, “softer” surge of the old neo-con maxim “Remen go to Tehran”. The amalgam is duly reinforced when Lieberman-Graham stress “continuing threats from Iran and al-Qaeda” - underscoring once again that McCain’s gaffe (Iran is
training al-Qaeda) was not a gaffe at all. Lieberman - who recently went out of hisway to elevate McCain to JFK status - even manages to blame “antiwar politicians” for turning “John F Kennedy’s inaugural address on its head, urging Americans to refuse to pay any price, or bear any burden, to assure the survival of liberty.” Then it’s amalgam redux - the specter of a fictional world “in which al-Qaeda and Iran can claim that they have defeated us in Iraq and are ascendant”.
As for the bread-and-butter daily horror in Iraq, nothing will change. No significant “troop withdrawals in the months ahead”, and no “political timeline”. Butthen Lieberman-Graham soar to unparalleled brotherhood heights when they write that “thanks to the surge, Iraq today is looking increasingly like Osama bin Laden’s worsnightmare: an Arab country, in the heart of the Middle East, in which hundreds of thousands of Muslims - both Sunni and Shi’ite - are rising up and fighting, shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers, against al-Qaeda and its hateful ideology”. Bin Laden is patient - he knows the occupation itself will continue to be a magnet to thousands of aspiring jihadis. Sunni Arab guerrillas have learned to be patient; they’d rather breathe now, paid by US cash, and then relaunch their offensive, at the right time, to recapture Baghdad. As for those “hundreds of ,thousands of Muslims” - in fact millions - their main battle cry is not al-Qaeda, but rather “Occupation out”, as in the Million Man March called by Muqtada al-Sadr for this Wednesday in Baghdad and then canceled. Why the abrupt cancelation? Because the immense Sadr City slum, as well as other Sadrist bases, have been totally encircled by Maliki’s and Petraeus’ “surge” troops. In a press conference at Firdous Square - where exactly five years ago today the marines staged the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, with the help of a few Baghdad locals - Sadrist spokesman Salah al- Obaidi said Muqtada would not risk the safety of his millions of supporters.
Asia Times Online sources confirm Iraqi “security” - in fact Badr Organization
ommandos - have been detaining every single young Shi’ite male from 15 to 35 and
preventing them from entering the city center. This is also what the “surge” is about -
massive popular repression, although no one will hear it from Lieberman-Graham.
The war on Iraq ended five years ago today. No: the war on Iraq actually started
five years ago today. For those who still live under the spell of a Bush “we create our
own reality” administration, the Lieberman-Graham piece is soothing. For McCain supporters, it’s confirmation ofthe road map ahead - The Hundred Year War plus“bomb,bomb, Iran”. As for the majority of the American public,which has had enough of an endless war that has torn the country apart, it’s nothing but an insult to their collective intelligence.
Obscure Tour - Liberia
So you have been everywhere have you? you have faced up to missing luggage, dodgy taxi drivers, kids using the back of your seat for football practice, boring in-flight movies and connecting flights that do not connect. you sit back wi th a smug
look on your face comparing destinations wi th other grizzled, seasoned travellers. been there, there...and there! well we are delving into those last few destinations left on the planet you may not have been to, fasten you seat belt for your journey to... liberia. Liberia is known as a land of freed slaves, boy soldiers and blood diamonds. In the 2005 movie, ‘Lord of War’ starring Nicolas Cage (as the Ukrainian arms dealer Yuriy Orlov), there are some grim scenes of Monrovia, capital of Liberia. Men armed with AK-47 rifles and belts of ammunition casually stroll the trash-ridden city streets, and outside Cage’s hotel entrance is a dead human body, being picked over by a vulture. And when Cage (Orlov) enters his grimy hotel room, he finds two scantily clad prostitutes; a gift of the President, eagerly waiting to ‘entertain’ him.
The drug of choice for Orlov was ‘brown brown’, a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine, snorted by Liberia’s boy soldiers to make them totally reckless in combat. Orlov takes his hit before dancing under the stars of a black African sky. Visions of hell. If Liberia was ever like that, it has certainly changed today. A second civil war finally ended in 1997, and order has been restored to a large extent under the current
President, Mrs Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Vice President Joseph Boakai. But it is still an African venue suitable only for the most hardened travellers, or perhaps those people known as ‘war junkies’. Outside the capital, a Chinese-made version of an AK-47 rifle can be bought for 50 US dollars. (Don’t expect to be allowed to fly home with your war trophy, however!) If guns are cheap, then so is human life. Tourism is still a little understood concept in Liberia and banditry is not unknown outside the capital. In 1461 Portuguese explorers named the area ‘The Grain Coast’ because of the abundance of ‘grains of Paradise’ (Malegueta pepper seeds) and in 1663 the British installed trading posts there only to have them destroyed by the Dutch a year later. Liberia was Africa’s first republic, founded in 1822 as a result of the efforts of the American Colonisation Society to settle freed American slaves in West Africa. The contended that the ‘immigration’ of black men and women back to Africa was
an answer to the slavery problem as well as what was felt to be the ‘incompatibility’ of the races – a view that would be considered very politically incorrect these days.
Over the course of the next 40 years, some 12,000 slaves were voluntarily relocated tothis West African dumping ground. Originally named Monrovia, the colony became
the Free and Independent Republic of Liberia (‘Land of the Free’) on 26 July 1847,
which of course is Liberia’s Independence Day. The capital city was named after
American President James Monroe. The English-speaking Americo-Liberians, descendants of former American slaves, make up only five per cent of the population but have historically dominated the intellectual and ruling class. Liberia’s indigenous population comprises 16 ethnic groups with the Kpelle in the central and western
parts of the country being the largest. There are also sizeable numbers of Lebanese, Indians and other West African nationals who comprise part of the capital’s
growing business community. The government of Africa’s first republic was unsurprisingly modelled after that of the USA, and Joseph Jenkins Roberts of Virginia was elected the first President. Ironically, however, Liberia’s constitution denied indigenous Liberians equal rights with the lighter-skinned American emigrants and their descendants. The Liberian constitution restricts citizenship to people of African-American descent, and land ownership is restricted to established citizens. After 1920, considerable progress was made towards opening up the interior, a process that was speeded up in 1951 by the building of a 69 kilometres long railroad to the Bomi Hills from Monrovia. In July 1971, whilst serving his sixth term as President, William V S Tubman died following surgery and was succeeded by Vice President, William R Tolbert, Junior. Tolbert was ousted in a military coup on 12 April 1980 led by Master Sergeant Samuel K Doe, with backing by the US Government. Unfortunately Doe’s rule was characterised by widespread corruption and brutality, and Charles Taylor, a former Doe aide, led a rebellion of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), in December 1989. Doe was assassinated the following year, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) negotiated with the new government and rebel factions in an attempt to restore order. By April 1996, intense factional fighting amongst the country’s warlords had destroyed any last vestige of a civil society in Liberia. The only real winners were amoral arms dealers who flooded the land with automatic weapons and were usually paid in whatbecame known as ‘conflict’ or ‘blood’ diamonds. Overseen by International observers, Taylor won a general election in July 1997, taking around 75 per cent of the vote, and the fighting stopped. But the nation was in bad shape: there was no health care system, and the capital was without electricity, running water or any other public services.
Taylor supported neighbouring Sierra Leone’s rebel army, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in hopes of toppling the government there in exchange for diamonds
and cash for his own personal wealth. As a consequence, the United Nations issued
sanctions. After more savage fighting in 2002, Taylor went into exile in Nigeria, but not before siphoning off around 100 million US dollars into his personal Swiss bank accounts. According to the ‘New York Times’, he left Liberia the world’s poorest nation and in 2004, international donors promised over 500 million dollars in aid to the country. Currently Taylor faces charges of condoning torture and other
human rights violations leading to the deaths of around 300,000
people and is on trial in The Hague. In the last Presidential election in November 2005, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist who had
worked at the World Bank, defeated George Weah, (a former world-class soccer star), and in January 2006 she became Africa’s first female President. Liberia has borders with The Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivorie), Guinea and Sierra Leone and boasts a total land area of 111,370 square kilometres. Most of the population resides in Monrovia. The official language is English, spoken by about 20 per cent of the population, and the currency is the Liberian dollar, pegged at the exact exchange rate as the US dollar. The literacy rate is reckoned to be 58 per cent, and public and private schools are now flourishing after years of civil war. Monrovia is also home to the University of Liberia. There are 10,600 kilometres of highways in the country, but only 657km of these are paved. No trains currently run on the 490 km rail system because of war damage to the lines, but that will change soon. On the 579 kilometres of coastline facing the North Atlantic the major ports are Buchanan, Greenville, Harper and Monrovia. Boats link the capital with Greenville and Harper, and the only international airport is Roberts International 60 kilometres away at Robertsfield.
The capital city’s economy is dominated by the large harbour, which was expanded by American troops during World War II. Principal exports are iron ore, coffee, timber, rubber, diamonds and gold and Liberia’s principal trading partners are Denmark, Germany, Poland, USA, Greece, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Singapore andCroatia. The Saint Paul River lies directly north of the city, and the harbour also has a large amount of storage and facilities (dry docks) for repairing ships, which has also become a flourishing industry. Monrovia is listed as the home port by some 15 per cent of the world’s merchant shipping, registered in Liberia under Flag of Convenience arrangements. Outside Monrovia, it is advisable to travel everywhere in a four-wheel drive SUV and with an armed escort. Most ‘roads’ are badly rutted and some locals are armed, looking on rich foreigners as tempting targets. The climate is tropical and the muddy tracks serving as roads can very quickly flood when it rains. There is a landline telephone service in Monrovia, though over 160,000 of the locals
prefer to use mobile phones, and for businesses, there are two local internet service
providers. The unrestricted sale of ‘conflict’ diamonds, which were mined in Sierra Leone and then smuggled over the border into Liberia, has been largely halted under the new President’s rule. This means that young boys are no longer exploited as cannon fodder in brutal civil wars. Among the attractions in Monrovia are the Liberian National Museum, the now ruined Masonic Temple, the busy Waterside
Market, a cultural centre on Providence Island (that American influence again!) and several beaches where vendors sell food and drink at very reasonable prices. There is also a zoo, and Monrovia can also boast one of the biggest sports stadiums in West Africa, with seating for 40,000 spectators. Numerous tabloid-style newspapers are printed on a weekly basis and there are radio and television stations that broadcast
local and international news. UMIL Radio has been broadcasting since 1 October 2003, and is the first radio station to broadcast 24 hours a day in the region. The ‘Daily Talk’ is a compilation of local news written up daily on a roadside blackboard in the Sinkor region of Monrovia. In addition to news items, it also features extensive quotations from the Christian Bible. Both private taxis and minibuses are plentiful in the city, supplemented by larger buses run by the Monrovia Transit Authority.
CONCLUSION: Only consider a trip to Liberia if you are a hardened traveller. Going
anywhere outside the capital city without a reliable armed escort would be unwise.
In the future Liberia might well be worth a visit when they become aware of the advantages of the tourist trade. In general Liberia is not as bad as it once was, but it still has a long way to come. Liberia today is probably a place that the fictional arms dealer Yuriy Orlov (Nicolas Cage) would dislike, as he would be unable to snort ‘brown brown’ or continue to trade as a merchant of death.
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