Terrorizing defences: Sport in the Liberian civil conflict

Introduction

Many people believe that sport has an inherent ability to integrate people at odds with each other or function as an antidote to social disorder. In 2000, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair justified £750 million of investment in school sport by proclaiming that ‘It is not just a sports policy, it is a health policy and education policy, an anti-crime policy and an anti-drugs policy’ (BBC News, 2000). A year later the United Nations adopted sport as a tool in both peacekeeping and development projects; a declaration ¹ and a series of associated conferences followed (Armstrong and Rosbrook-Thompson, 2011). Chief among the evangelists was Adolf Ogi, former United Nations Special Advisor on Sport for Development and Peace. ‘My task is to spread the idea that sport is an excellent instrument which must be used to improve health, education, development and peace’, Ogi told journalist Thomas Stephens in a 2006 interview. The interview also gave Ogi the opportunity to deliver his own testimony – oft-repeated in ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ symposia throughout the world – that ‘I have seen with my own eyes what sport can do’. His erstwhile superior, Kofi Annan, was similarly enthused with the facility of sport to effect social change. Speaking in Dubai in 2010, Annan endorsed the ‘economic potential’, ‘unifying benefits’, ‘universality’ of sport, underlining its ability to ‘shape our societies and world for good’ (kofiannanfoundation.org). The clarion call of figures such as Ogi and Annan has seen the rise of the ‘Sport, Development and Peace’ (SDP) sector, whose key institutions include nation-states, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental organizations, international sport federations, transnational corporations, and grassroots community-based organizations (Giulianotti, 2010) who share the belief that the promotion of sporting practice will offer an antidote to a variety of social ills and disorder. Implicit in such an enthusiasm would be ‘Terrorism’.

We accept the argument that sport can contribute to the quest for the shared identities, but beyond this an observer may ask what it is exactly that sport is expected to promote (Allison, 1986; Wagner, 1989). Whether within a conflict or post-war milieu, we need to ask what might provide for a sense of national consciousness and where this can be most obviously witnessed.

This inquiry begins with a brief consideration of the issues surrounding the term ‘terrorism’ itself. We then seek to contribute to such discussion by examining acts of terror within the socio-political history of Liberia, and more specifically, the setting provided by Liberian football.

What is ‘terrorism’?

As Cooper (1978: 14) has argued ‘we can agree that terrorism is a problem, but we cannot agree what terrorism is’. There is no precise or widely accepted definition of terrorism (Gastou and Hübschle, 2006; Hoffmann, 2006; Riley et al., 2005; Seldon and So, 2004). That said, most commentators on this phenomenon would agree that terrorism, however defined, is a political concept which has the component of planning mass killing as central to its pursuit of power and intimidation (Hübschle, 2006). But where do we start when searching for the Ideal Type and the progenitor? As a political system the reign of terror manifest in France in 1789–1794 might be said to constitute the evolution of this genre. ² In recent times the United Nations has sought to define the acts of terrorism and resolution 1566 – written in 2004 – argues that terrorism includes:

criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act, and all other acts which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism, are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature, and calls upon all States to prevent such acts and, if not prevented, to ensure that such acts are punished by penalties consistent with their grave nature . . .

This lengthy tract suggests that the task at hand, that is, attempting to define terrorism, is very difficult and that Nietzsche’s statement (in The Genealogy of Morals, 2003) that ‘Only that which has no history can be defined’ is prescient.

The state – both the UK and throughout the world – has never been innocent of acts that could be classified as ‘terrorism’ when carnage suited its political aims. Such acts were particularly evident in the anti-colonial struggles of the 1940s and 1950s (Anastasiou, 2008; Anderson, 2006; Elkins, 2005; Heller, 1995; Horne, 2006; Lecours, 2007; Ramsey, 1983; Stefanidis, 2007), as Palestinian leader and Laureate of the Nobel Prize, Yasser Arafat, argued at the UN General Assembly in 1974:

The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the colonialists, cannot possibly be called a terrorist . . .

In later decades terrorists were so-labelled despite not fighting invaders, settlers or colonialists. The Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhof groups that terrorized Germany (along with the Red Brigade that did similarly in Italy) resisted the state apparatus and the ideology of global capitalism (Becker, 1978; Cipriani, 2004; Galli, 2004; Labrousse, 1973). Few were spared their fanaticism. Meanwhile the 1980s produced many an example of the state doing its own dirty work or paying proxies to ‘do’ terrorism for them (Chomsky, 2004; Foster, 2006; Jagan, 1999). By the 1990s a new lexicon entered the debate – that known as ‘narco-terrorism’ denoted killing thousands, mainly in South and Central America (Davids, 2002; Ehrenfeld, 1990). The new millennium has and will inevitably bring new terrorisms (Brzezinski et al., 2010; Burke, 2007; Khosrokhavar, 2005; Kollerstrom, 2009; Logevall, 2002; Ness, 2008; Neumann, 2009). We should note that at times state terrorism is as consequential as that which defines the state (Green and Ward, 2004) and as those in the genre of ‘critical terrorism’ have illustrated, the state and its agents can be the main provider of insecurity (Jackson, 2009).

The old and the new are ever-evident. Some commentators have adopted the concept of ‘new terrorism’. According to Laqueur (2000), it is best defined by loose cell networks and the potential acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. It has politically vague or religious or even mystical motivations and manifests ‘asymmetrical methods’. By contrast, that considered ‘traditional’ terrorism was generally characterized by variously: a clearly identified organization or movement, usage of conventional weapons (usually small arms and explosives), an ability of the protagonists to state their specific grievances, generally championed specific social classes or ethnic groups and was relatively ‘surgical’ in target selection (Martin, 2009). For another author, the variety of terrorist activities can be reduced to six categories: bombing, hijacking, arson, assault, kidnapping and hostage-taking (Jenkins, 1985). But technology has added to the complexities of addressing such procedures; technologies can be utilized for terrorism from a distance and transnational support is ever-available both via global flows of media and finances. Religious fanaticism provides for a need to reconsider the appropriate antidotes.

Debates surrounding notions of ‘terrorism’ are thus contested and conflicted; discussion is ever-ongoing (Chomsky, 1991). The task might be considered in terms of semantics and power. Is the label terrorist fundamentally about the successful application of discourse applied by one group to another? There are undoubtedly ideological constructions at play; criminal law is an ideology. It should be obvious that the socio-historical context within which acts of terror take place are crucial to our understanding of these acts – and responses to them – as social phenomena.

The context and the problem

Africa is a continent that has historically seen European empires systematically conquer every nation, with one exception: Liberia. Despite this, Western influences impinged upon this sovereign society founded after the abolition of slavery in the northern territories of the United States in the 1790s. Freedom was offered to some 160,000 Black Africans, a number which increased to 250,000 by the 1820s. Tens of thousands were assisted in their departure ‘home’ and those that survived the transatlantic journey found themselves on the west coast of Africa in a land given the nomenclature ‘Liberia’ (Clapham, 1989; Jubwe, 1994). Liberia experienced ‘Americanization’ some 150 years before university campuses discovered the term. The new ‘settler’ arrivals set up an imitative government which at first sight promoted democracy and the concept of ‘rights’ as it mimicked the society its founders had left behind. ³

The exclusivity of the ‘settler’ ruling class was not lessened until 1944 when William Tubman became President. He encouraged other ethnicities to become politically involved; but was guilty of discriminatory practices and allowed foreign capital to exploit resources in the hinterland using indigenous labour. After visiting Liberia during Tubman’s reign, American journalist John Gunther (1953: 273) described the nation as ‘sui generis – unique. I could use several adjectives about it – “odd”, “wacky”, “phenomenal”, or even “weird”’. He substantiated this list of adjectives with a clutch of assertions: in some areas of Liberia infant mortality had reached 75 percent, only two Liberians had ever qualified as doctors, and described the capital city of Monrovia as beset by theft and corruption.

Tubman noted the benefits that sport might bring to his profile. The game of association football (soccer) had come to Liberia in the early 1930s via West African men working on ships that travelled from the Gold Coast along the Atlantic seaboard of Portugal and ultimately to Liverpool. The game was obviously witnessed in the footballing cities of Lisbon and Liverpool and brought back to West Africa. Further dissemination of the game came as a result of fishermen bringing the game inland via river fishing (Armstrong, 2002).

Tubman’s previous vice-president, William Tolbert, became President in October 1975 following an election which saw him standing as the only candidate. When ‘human rights’ were debated the source was more likely to be divine not Mammon-led in this very religious society. ⁴ Tolbert was globally connected as an ordained Baptist pastor and one-time President of the World Baptist Alliance. Tolbert had thus global recognition alongside local credentials as the first Liberian president able to speak a native tongue. He was instrumental in the building of the national sport stadium a few miles outside Monrovia (actually built by the Taiwanese in return for iron-ore concessions). However, Tolbert became entrenched in arguments with extended families in his political party. His ostentatious nepotism also infuriated observers. Tolbert was dramatically – and publically – executed by Samuel K. Doe’s soldiers in Liberia’s first military coup in 1980. An enthusiastic amateur footballer, Doe assumed the role of the armed forces Commander-in-Chief. He also came to power as the Tolbert-commissioned stadium was completed and so named it after himself. The Samuel K. Doe (SKD) Stadium thus stands as a tribute to the man’s power, vanity and murderous reign. Many would argue that the football stadium is a fitting structure to the realpolitik of late 20th-century Liberia. Integral to this was the death of the President and a reign of terror inflicted on sections of the population.

Charles Taylor: Ambition, invasion and atrocity

A former civil servant, government Quarter Master and adviser to Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, fled Liberia in 1983 when accused of embezzling $900,000 of government monies. Finding his way to the Liberian diasporas in the USA, Taylor was eventually arrested by the US authorities but, despite being housed in tight security, escaped from an American jail while awaiting extradition. How he survived and with whose assistance he subsequently left the USA, few people can explain. Taylor was then to be found in Libya training a militia with the funding of Colonel Gaddafi, a man associated for three decades with supplying weapons to a variety of ‘terrorist groups’ in Europe and the Middle East. Taylor then took up residence in the African state of Burkina Faso, plotted his intended coup and recruited support from Liberia’s Ghio tribe. The civil war was begun when Taylor and his forces crossed the border from the Ivory Coast in late 1989. The reign of Doe and his Krahn people was ended in September 1990 when the Mano and Ghio people caught up with him. Continuing the Liberian trend of public executions, Doe was mutilated and killed on a Monrovian beach.

Doe’s death created confusion as multiple claims to the presidency from members of various indigenous peoples were voiced. The era of the military ‘Big Man’ followed. For some observers such men were ‘war lords’, the architects of terrorist activities. For others, such men and their militias were business entrepreneurs, albeit with a penchant for taking their objects of desire by force and negotiating at the barrel of a gun (Ellis, 1999). They could trade the diamonds, iron ore and timber of the country under their control for the small arms and payments from South African, Dutch, British and French corporations (Reno, 1993). The local and global thus exchanged cultural necessities. Western currencies bought weaponry that was used to terrorize the Liberian population for the best part of 14 years.

Taylor’s invasion began a seven-year civil conflict that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives and produce one million refugees and displaced persons. This conflict had regional resonance and global implications for the transiting population. At times eight factions fought one another. As British commentator Ellis (1999) argued, the civil conflict was at times nihilistic in practice and confused in both in its origins and factions. This confusion was evident in the guerrilla style of warfare fought by the – often tribal – sects. Commenting on the prospect of American intervention in 2003, BBC Special Correspondent Fergal Keane argued that John Gunther’s verdict of Liberia under Tubman still holds true: ‘The country was then as it is now: a basket case.’

The confusion that the most astute of political commentators find in Liberia has echoes in our application of the paradigms of ‘terrorism’. The roots and causes of specifically African terrorism have interested scholars (Cilliers, 2003, 2006; Gastou and Hübschle, 2006). And like terrorist acts elsewhere in the world, extreme violence to the point of mass murder and arbitrary killing was visited upon innocent citizens in the Liberian conflict. Nobody knows the exact figure, but probably some 250,000 people were killed between 1989 and 2003 in the Liberian civil conflict, most of them non-combatants. Terrorizing people was a systematic and widespread tactic of variously: government soldiers, rebel militias and armed gangs. The violence and murder were at times carried out in the name of the state, the sub-state, commercially inspired interest groups and inspired by religion (and animist) belief systems. All involved perpetrated acts that define ‘terrorism’, that is undermining the legal system, a disregard for democratic procedures, a refusal to seek a peaceful reconciliation and a disregard for processes of law (Makinda, 2006). Those involved were motivated by variously: long-standing ethnic tensions, marginalized economic situations, exclusion from the political process, lingering injustice, belief systems that convinced them they were invincible and identity issues with, at times, both a domestic and international dimension. In the latter part of the conflict, Charles Taylor collaborated with Al Qaeda operatives who funded his cause in exchange for Liberian diamonds (Farah, 2004). With so many rival entities it would be apt to describe the Liberian context as primarily terrorism of the sub-state manifest in guerrilla warfare.

Boys doing business?

What was unusual in the Liberian context within the terrorism narrative was the fact that around 10 percent (15,000) of the combatants were aged 15 or under. The various militia were attempting to seize control of the state apparatus but contained in their midst tens of thousands of child combatants content to loot and eat what was readily available. Their political consciousness was not readily evident. The victors of the mid to late 1990s conflict, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) led by Charles Taylor had a Small Boys Unit containing armed combatants as young as eight. The same boys were to campaign for Taylor in the subsequent 1997 democratic election. As the man who started the conflict, the electorate obviously considered Taylor the most appropriate figure to end it. Taylor won the vote with 74 percent of the electorate backing him (Harris, 1999). The early years of Taylor’s reign brought a peace dividend in that the regional and international community were prepared to give Taylor time to implement peace and democracy. While ostensibly at peace between 1997 and 2001, armed conflict never actually ended in Liberia’s remote border areas but became more low-key and at times avoided public debate. Then in 2002 a full-scale war began again when the forces known as Liberian United for the Restoration of Democracy (LURD) attacked from the north and eventually overwhelmed Taylor’s forces in Monrovia in 2003. Taylor stepped down from the Liberian presidency in August 2003 under pressure from the USA and African Presidents and that entity the news media call ‘the international community’. The departure of Taylor was to make way for a peace deal that brought 14 years of on-off civil war to an end but required a 15,000-strong UN force of police and military personnel to enforce. Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo offered Taylor exile in a sea-front mansion in the southern Nigerian town of Calabar where he lived with his retinue in considerable comfort. His presence however was unsettling to the region. Many considered his supporters in Liberia were carrying out his instructions. Eventually in 2006, under UN instructions, Taylor was extradited to Sierra Leone where he faced 17 counts of war crimes spanning a decade. Today, Taylor is imprisoned in The Hague in the Netherlands awaiting trial on charges of Crimes Against Humanity.

The unorthodox ‘all against all’ Liberian civil conflict made it hard for organized sport to function. Domestic football league fixtures were still played in the years of conflict, albeit the football league programme was not always finished due to the proximities of war. This fact may be an indication of the intrinsic nature of football – and potential the game held – in Liberia; even as the conflict raged amidst the atrocities, the populace – particularly young men – sought out the game. Such a search was heartfelt and practical – the game was seemingly the only practice all in conflict would agree to cease killing for (Armstrong, 2006).

Youth: Tradition, modernity and terrorism

Those who could claim to represent the entity that is ‘Liberia’ have, over the past two decades, proven to be contestable and ambiguous – to the point of mass murder of the social and political ‘other’. Analysts would be sensible in seeking anything that might collectively represent and indeed reconcile the fractious forces that constitute contemporary Liberia. The game of football is the practice that all believe in and the social practice that sees the people enjoying the collective sense of being ‘Liberia’. The game is the world over a celebration of youth and masculinity albeit one which is played within rules and which rarely produces casualties.

In the cessation of hostilities in Liberia in 1997 football was the main recreational practice of the thousands of young men who had been involved in militias since their mid- and even pre-teens, and who hardly knew any mode of life other than violent conflicts and looting. Many such young men had lived up to five years alone in the bush, that is, the rural hinterland of Liberia, devoid of education and at times deployed to attack their own community (Armstrong, 2006). Older pre-war notions of understanding and existence were destroyed; consequently new idioms of social incorporation had to be invented. This is where some commentators considered that sport and specifically football might have a role to play.

As Richards (1997) argued in his work on a similar scenario in neighbouring Sierra Leone, wider reference points for the former boy-soldiers were provided by the popular cultures of youth, namely music, sport and world religion. The shared enthusiasm for football was interesting because the game was – and is – considered a ‘neutral’ pursuit – a common cultural property unspoiled by war. But former war combatants in both Sierra Leone and Liberia are only part of the equation. Thousands of young men and women did not take up arms but when hostilities ended were left to face a frightening and inhospitable future. The child combatants might have been photogenic and the cause célèbre of certain Western aid agencies but it is important to note that they were not the full picture.

Suffer the children?

The behaviours that such children visited upon innocent people had a degree of precedence in the socio-cultural practices of child-rearing in Liberia. While children playing games is an immensely seductive reality such activity can run parallel with lives lived in harsh conditions. In the decades before the conflict began, a militarized society and its children were subject to brutality from many sources (Ellis, 1999; Williams, 2002). Racism, unemployment, economic exploitation and a decaying infrastructure created a massive stratum of disaffected youth. The militias that emerged out of the 1990s conflict gave many children the opportunity for individual agency (Moran, 2008; Utas, 2003; Waugh, 2011). In many militias young Liberian men ceased to be marginal. The majority of fighters took up arms voluntarily in pursuit of social and economic mobility. As a consequence looting became an aim in itself manifest in individualized competition for the limited items of Modernity that Liberia held (Utas, 2003). Immediate financial gain could be earned from protection money extorted from fearful adults. A gun barrel brought power over elders and – often – the company of females as concubines. In controlling their lives, the child combatants controlled space but the levels of violence manifested went beyond what might be termed ‘legitimate’ to that which can only be described as atrocious – or even terrorist. One might equate the term ‘youth’ as denoting a suppressed citizen with a dependency on elders. At the same time, the term ‘rebel’ (and occasionally ‘terrorist’) applied by the elders to the personnel that constituted the militias is not as pejorative as the accuser might imagine, signifying to those so-labelled, agency above dependency.

Causation is ever-sought. One could blame the parents for producing such terrorists. A massive use of violence in child-rearing was a characteristic of Liberia. Childhood was controlled by the violence threatened and actual of the secret societies. Away from the rites de passage children were given labouring duties and beatings (often in public) to illustrate culturally sanctioned ownership (Utas, 2003). The educational system was characterized by physical beatings and the prevalence of children living with foster parents and other non-kin family structures did not come with any promises of decent treatment (Utas, 2003). Perhaps it is no coincidence that many children in such domestic arrangements ran away to join the militias.

Traditional rural authority was located within the war-chief, accompanied by his warriors and celebrated in the distribution of the spoils of war. His entourage always consisted of children, the young were expected to fight and at times partake of human sacrifice and cannibalistic practices. ⁵ But Tradition in the shape of the Poro and Sande sought accommodation and stability above conflict. Ironically, the efforts of the Liberian settlers and the Christian missionaries to control the influence of such elders paved the way for the power of the war-chiefs (who were often at loggerheads with the Poro) and ultimately armed youth rebellion. The elders in high (urban) political office offered little by way of an alternative moral guidance. From their first landing the settlers were involved in acts of war with the peoples of the hinterland. Via the badly trained and undisciplined personnel of the Liberian Frontier Force the indigenous peoples who survived their murderous forays suffered sporadic looting, rape and extortion. But the state’s military personnel held an appeal to disaffected youth in that it offered mobility via a wage and a chance to start anew away from Tradition. Furthermore, the chance to carry a gun signified a commitment to Modernity. Acts of war and terrorism signified inclusion in the wider society of both the domestic and the global. The latter was often mediated by virtual media. What was both real (and lived) and global in its idiom was an enthusiasm for football.

Watanga: All the president’s men?

Positive adult role models from beyond the nation’s boundaries were equally hard to come by. The virtual heroes of Hollywood bad boys provided fascination and imitation in nomenclature and style. Thus one could witness the ATU personal militia of Charles Taylor wearing the tie-dye blue camouflage uniforms (inappropriate to the Liberian military context) accompanied by the simply essential wrap-around reflector sun shades as they carried their automatic rifles and rocket-launchers while hanging on to the sides of the Mercedes vehicles which accompanied the journeys of their paymaster. Their football team, named Watanga after the barracks they lived and worked out of and which was synonymous with torture and death, was a name borrowed from a Hollywood film. Such aspects of Modernity combined with the sub-cultural kudos offered by the urban ‘rascal boy’ persona working in the plantations and mines, and the ‘homeboy cosmopolitan’ manifest by an urban individualism complete with drug use and commodity possession (Utas, 2003). Central to both the political and military narratives was the belief that good leaders were ruthless. Not for nothing was the President known as Charles Gankey (Strong Man) Taylor. The admiration for ruthlessness did not make concessions to concepts around human rights.

The brief ethnographic account listed below gives a 2001 flavour of the remit and realities of Watanga:

The rendezvous was 3.30pm at the well adjacent to where the Bosco ⁶ team trained and played in Sinkor, a suburb of Monrovia. Arriving on time were the 16 plus players, plus club officials and a few players who not chosen to play were acting today as supporters. By the time the club President arrived in the minivan obtained for the afternoon from the Don Bosco Homes service the gathering consisted of 28 young men, all of whom – somehow – fitted in the dilapidated 12-seater vehicle and enjoyed the call-response chants which lasted until the arrival at the opposition pitch some two miles further outside of Monrovia.

At first sight, the hosting venue was idyllic. Atlantic waves broke some 350 metres from the football pitch which sloped gently towards the beach. The playing surface however was poor, containing rubble and shards of glass. Adjacent to the pitch was a impressive residential building, a one-time foreign embassy, the walls of which ran down one side of the pitch and which now announced in large painted figures the Watanga ‘Awareness and Re-Evaluation (football) Tournament’ which had been sponsored a year previously by the Taiwanese embassy. This nation had big business interest in Liberia mostly in iron ore and timber. That they sponsored a ‘football-for-peace’ was not surprising – all NGOs and other outside agencies in what was referred to as ‘post-conflict’ Liberia had tapped into the national sporting obsession and sought to be associated with an activity which was synonymous with youth. That the Taiwanese chose to promote the game at this particular locale had more to it than meets the eye.

The name ‘Watanga’ was commonly attributed in questions put to Liberian football enthusiasts to both a Chuck Norris film and the Rambo film starring Sylvester Stallone. It was thus the Hollywood heroic warrior genre typified by mass killings and the – usually – simple, even childish, fixed plot-line of good defeating evil via acts of violence. As such it was inevitable that some form of emulation would find its way to the world of the child combatants who constituted large parts of both the rebel and governmental militias of the Liberian conflict. At its most innocent ‘Watanga’ was a place – a barracks in fact – on the main road that linked the suburban Presidential Palace of Charles Taylor with the city boundary of Monrovia. But the word had connotations and associations with people and practices. It was a location renowned for death; Watanga was an ecology of terror.

Ostensibly Watanga served the purposes of peace. The military who occupied it were recognizable and chosen specially chosen by the democratically elected President. The soldiers within it wore a uniform of navy and dark blue camouflage and sported a black beret as they rode the armoured vehicles that constituted the cortege that was the movement of the President from his home to the governmental offices. The more ‘Hollywood’ amongst their ranks wore designer sunshades which reflected the eyes of the watching and revealed nothing to the soul of the wearer. This ATU personal bodyguard of Charles Taylor had appeared on the streets in June 1998 constituting a deliberate challenge to the peace-keeping ECOMOG forces. ⁷ The latter had made the faux-pas of preventing the movement of Taylor’s son Chuck at a road-block. The ensuing argument had seen the President’s swear vengeance on the soldiers for their humiliating of his son. Days later the 200-strong Presidential bodyguards – better known as the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU) – appeared. Most stationed themselves at Watanga. They were fit, strong and prone to violence when involved in official duties. In respite from such service they formed a football team and played their peers both home and away. The Taiwanese thought their sporting activities worthy of patronizing. Such largesse no doubt pleased the President. Not all practices at Watanga were sporting and life-affirming. The place and name was synonymous with state-sponsored torture and murder for it was here – among other places – that the opponents of Taylor were detained to be tortured and eventually murdered. Their bodies were usually thrown into the ocean or disappeared into the nearby swamps.

At other times the pitch in front of the barracks was the location for endeavour and enchantment. This place of dreadful association was at other times a place to play football. Watanga’s opponents were Bosco, a team funded by a Scottish-born Catholic priest for the dispossessed and war-orphaned children of Monrovia. The Salesian religion order he was ordained into was founded by a 19th-century Turin-based Catholic priest – Don Bosco – who gave his life to the relief of destitute youth. His was a celebration of life that promoted the route of righteousness in those in his care; the opponents were the team of a man who daily perpetrated murder and intimidation. At night the young men of Watanga manned road-blocks and abducted to order. Such a dualism in the respective teams’ existence was not articulated as the game kicked off.

A crowd of around 100 gathered as the match began, including the ever-evident small children selling boiled eggs and polythene bags of cold water for a pittance but for an income crucial to their daily sustenance. The poverty of the society was evident in more than its children. Despite Presidential patronage, the pitch had no markings, the goal posts were the product of enterprise with old scaffold poles and not all the players on the pitch wore football boots – or any footwear. The language of football, however, was that heard the world over. Before kick off the Watanga head coach stressed the need to chase the loose ball, pass the ball accurately and ‘avoid anything fancy’. The assistant coach merely added to his injunctions the instruction ‘take it seriously’. The Bosco team played in the replica kit of Paris St Germain courtesy of one of their players having once trialled with the French club. Watanga played in plain yellow shirts with words on the back which simply proclaimed their club’s name. Their supporters gathered on one side of the pitch sporting the tie-dyed camouflage. The match took its own (serious) shape by virtue of the state of the pitch’s surface, littered as it was by debris from explosions and rutted by damage caused by incendiaries. Accurate passing was virtually impossible; as was judging bounce of the ball. Tackles were few and physical challenges rare. As a consequence, athleticism in the form of speed and turns abounded but the first attempt on goal took 20 minutes to arrive. Considering their notoriety for violence and murder, it was a surprise to see dissent towards the referee manifest by any Watanga players being met by a vocal berating from their coach that such behaviour ‘is not done’.

The Bosco team scored in the 70th minute and narrowly missed two more goal chances. They hung on to win. The game ended with just a few silent handshakes between teams but no further formalities. The visitors returned to their vehicle and joyful in their achievement sang songs praising God throughout the journey home. No mention was made about their peers whom they were aware they may well meet in other circumstances in the course of that very night and who, if the mood took them, would assault or murder their momentary footballing opponents in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting the Father of their democracy.

The match described above was manna from heaven for those propagating the power of football for social good, the rebuilding of society, or the great catch-all ‘capacity building’. We do not challenge the potential the game holds nor do we wish to deride the efforts and intentions of those arranging and partaking in the game. We just note that the teams pursuing the football-as-facilitation (of a variety of ideals) were on one side funded by a man representing a religion and educational doctrine that had global enthusiasts, on the other by a man who perpetrated mass murder, ritualistic killing and alleged cannibalism.

Charles Taylor wasn’t the only figure to loom large in the national psyche in and around football. In a country where football represented the national game par excellence, it was perhaps inevitable that a footballing hero could amass huge power – both personal and political. This could at times benefit such an individual. At other times it threatened his life. In later years this man could – alongside his supporters – terrify electoral hustings. Years previously he was sufficiently terrified of both football supporters and the President to flee his native land.

Good will and the king: George Weah

In 1998 only one statue existed in Monrovia. Located in the middle of Broad Street, the busiest street in the capital city, the bronze casting was dedicated to George Obong-Weah, and was paid for by well-wishers. Brilliant dribbling skills and goal-scoring abilities as a 16-year-old with Young Survivors of Claretown saw Weah become by the age of 17 a very dependable player with Invincible Eleven, Liberia’s best-supported club side. By the age of 18 he was the league’s highest goal-scorer. A tournament in 1987 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Liberian FA saw five teams taking part. One was Tonnerre Yaounde of Cameroon. The performance of Weah against them saw the club refuse to leave the country without him as part of their entourage! A two-week trial saw them pay his club a $5000 transfer fee. After six months with his new club, Arsène Wenger, then coach of Monaco visited Africa, noticed Weah and bought him for less than $20,000. Other transfers followed, the biggest being a move to AC Milan from Paris St Germain. With the transfers came the awards, most notably European Footballer of the Year, not once but twice. In 1995 Weah was awarded the accolade of World Footballer of the Year. Other titles followed; the most unusual for a footballer being the one given by UNESCO that saw Weah carry the title of Goodwill Ambassador for Sport. Later he was to become FIFA Ambassador for Football. Weah was never short of public statements declaring the power of good that football could bring to the world.

For many Weah was a national hero and a figure of hope who exemplified what hard work and moderation produce in opposition to the instant gratification exemplified by the looting, murdering militias. ⁸ Weah became known in his homeland as ‘The King’. In return for this accolade he bankrolled the national team’s away games and paid all the costs so that they could compete in the African Nations tournament in South Africa in 1996 (Armstrong, 2004, 2007; Armstrong and Rosbrook-Thompson, 2011). Owning a large residence on the beach in a swish part of the capital and a large house on the edge of the city, Weah at one time seemed to support a whole industry of Weah worshippers many frequenting his hotel and bar.

National heroes, however, carry a burden and Weah was aware of the depths of the Liberian political process. A cousin was raped by the militia of Charles Taylor and Weah’s house in 1996 had been attacked by Taylor’s Special Operations Unit: although the footballer came to no harm, his home was circled by neighbours acting as both witnesses and protectors. In response – and out of the country – Weah had pleaded for international military intervention against the Taylor regime. He and Taylor had subsequently sorted out their differences (nobody knew the precise nature of the conversation) but everyone in Liberia knew this was a fragile – but public – show of unity.

Weah carried the unenviable burden of being both icon and ambassador to a nation by virtue of being able to co-ordinate thought and movement in pursuit of a football quicker than most people on Earth. Such a status proved precarious. In July 2001 a World Cup qualifier saw Liberia lose 2–1 at home to Ghana. A victory would have almost certainly seen Liberia qualify for the first time for the World Cup tournament to be co-hosted the following year by Japan and South Korea. The defeat resulted in Weah being vociferously denigrated by a home crowd of 30,000. After the game he vowed both never to play again for his country and never to return to Liberia. He was talked out of these threats within a week after a meeting with Charles Taylor but the Liberian footballing public considered the behaviour of the Liberian squad in the day preceding this vital game reprehensible. Some of the players were seen out partying on consecutive nights prior to the game. The eve of the game coincided with one of the squad’s wedding anniversary which saw celebrations late into the night in a city centre bar. The first choice goalkeeper driving to a party the previous night crashed his car and sustained an arm injury and controversy when $10,000 given to him by the President as an incentive to recover caused consternation in the squad as to who were the rightful owners of the cash. The line-up next day was both under-strength and contained players on the bench who it was well known had fallen foul of Weah. The most important game in the nation’s history saw an angry mob hours later approaching the home of Weah which resulted in him becoming a recluse for days after as armed police kept permanent guard outside. Weah was also one of the players who fought out their post-match personal animosities via the local media which resulted in – somewhat ironically – President Taylor calling the warring factions together in an attempt at reconciliation. Football in this instance was not the harbinger of national unity and pride and Taylor considered it his duty as a statesman to broker peace.

The ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ genre proved a useful dualism for Weah. The adulation and patronage he received in a variety of sporting and diplomatic milieus and the ambassadorial roles he performed convinced him in the early part of the millennium that he could move into formal politics. Weah was assisted in his aim by the absence in Liberia – indeed Africa – of any predecessor, who sought to combine footballing celebrity with political acumen. Weah was thus able to present himself as a new (non-political) broom – a mere footballer trying to do good – and a facilitator of hope, indeed, a candidate of national unity unburdened by previous political baggage. He duly announced his Presidential candidacy in autumn 2004 for the election scheduled for the following April but delayed until October. The establishment by ‘King’ George Weah of a radio and TV station in Monrovia in 2003 (modestly titled ‘Royal Communications’ – with the insignia of a crown) was undoubtedly a gesture towards assuming the position of the Liberian Presidency. In 2004 as the streets of Monrovia were patrolled by the UN police and armed forces. ⁹ Weah declared his candidacy and creating a new political party, the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), campaigned to represent himself as the candidate of national unity. His party sought to appeal to first-time voters and stressed that it was a movement that did not carry any of the baggage of the polarized party politics of the previous century.

Weah’s presidential candidacy was in part a courageous statement in defiance of the continued atrocities evident when the Liberian conflict began again in 2001. It had ended in 2003 but was ever-likely to flare up again. In this uneasy peace, the election hustings beginning in early 2005 saw Weah as the youngest of the 22 presidential candidates. His primary challenger was Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, known within the militaristic nature of Liberian politics as the ‘Iron Lady’ of Liberia. She had been in politics since the 1970s and had twice been exiled for her opposition to regimes. In the mid-1980s she was jailed on a charge of treason under the Doe regime and was jailed again for alleged involvement in a coup attempt later that decade. Imprisoned with 12 others, the laces that bound her shoes were used to bind the hands of the other 11 who were then shot dead. She had literally stared death in the face. ¹⁰ She was to campaign on a promise of installing a water well in every village within two years and to provide universal education and health care, further promising a broad-based representative government. As a mother of four and grandparent of six, Johnson-Sirleaf spoke of bringing ‘motherly sensitivity and emotion’ to the Presidency. The t-shirts of her supporters read ‘All the men have failed Liberia – let’s try a woman this time.’ She avoided any football-as-salvation rhetoric. Hers was a mandate based on essentials.

By contrast, Weah’s rallies saw him proclaimed ‘the messiah’ by his predominately young male entourage who would chant in celebration of his absence of formal education: ‘you know no book, we vote for you’. All 22 candidates were appealing to an electorate of 1.3 million registered voters, 80 percent of whom were unemployed. The outcome in a 74.9 percent turnout was Weah attracting 28 percent of the vote and Johnson-Sirleaf 20 percent. However, under the 2003 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, ¹¹ a second vote was stipulated if any candidate failed to poll 50 percent of the vote plus one. A presidential run-off between Weah and Johnson-Sirleaf took place a month later in November. This saw Johnson-Sirleaf the clear winner with 60 percent of the vote (in a 61.0% turnout). When the result was announced UN peacekeeping personnel in Monrovia had to baton-charge the thousands of pro-Weah faction protesting against the result. ¹²

Weah claimed electoral fraud. This may have been expected considering his fixation on the corrupt practices within Liberian politics. The claim fell on deaf ears and a few weeks later Weah issued a statement: ‘I kneel down in peace to all my supporters and peace-loving people in Liberia.’ Considering his previous suggestion of electoral fraud, Weah seemed easily silenced.

The future for Liberia: Football and ‘terror’?

For all the sound and fury the game of football generates it is essentially a meaningless exercise that means so much to so many. The game can be divisive and cohesive at the same time, its binary divisions embodied in symbolic contexts wrapped in a winner–loser culture (Armstrong and Giulianotti, 2001). One could argue that any project seeking reconciliation through football might be simplified if an alternative collective emotion, most notably a shared sense of nationalism – one capable of integrating recalcitrant and marginalized young men (Blacking, 1987) – could be established and sustained. But the very term ‘nationalism’ is perhaps too complex to attempt to define and therefore address in the Liberian context. It would be difficult to argue that any sport could be emblematic of a nation as devastated as Liberia. The best that football can claim to be able to offer is a reflection on life, and occasionally it can act as a workable metaphor. Its triviality is its burden; it has become a receptacle for meanings and loaded with significances and identities (Armstrong, 2002; Armstrong and Giulianotti, 1999).

All nations have some ideology as to how to use the body often linked to the defence of territory (Guttmann, 1994). There is an irony evident here in that while sport historically was a way of preparing for war, the late 20th and 21st century have seen Western governments and NGOs recognize in the floundering wish to ‘do something’ in war-zones that sport and particularly football is a possible way to prevent armed conflict and acts of ‘terror’. However, as illustrated here, its efficacy needs to be related to the wider power relations evident in Liberian society. Hence we can see that while football can momentarily subjugate the ethno-political tensions which remain, it has not – and cannot – unite or sell its appeal to all groups. The existence of ‘rebels’, ‘dissidents’ and ‘terrorists’ in Liberia to this day illustrates that more than kicking a ball or the club organization associated with the game will be needed to provide for the serious and lasting political solution which will banish ‘terrorism’ to the annals of Liberian history.

While Liberia is currently at peace the potential for armed rebellion has not gone away. Liberia’s perennial problem remains that of building a sustainable civil society central to which is the need to make people think of themselves as homogenous or at least not too different. Central to this are the following issues: access to land, gainful employment, a more egalitarian distribution of income, elementary health provision, the construction of decent and affordable housing, elementary educational opportunities, the availability of clean water and a campaign that might somehow address the growing incidence of AIDS. The political and national unit are fragile; football alone cannot solve such issues. In the search for something that provides for shared enthusiasm, the game of football has been burdened with the task of engendering that which the politicians were unable and until recently unwilling to do.

Many Liberians have over the past decade claimed to speak via the game. Others make fine declarations of supporting the people’s footballing interests but are compromised by their need to exemplify patronage, even if these appear as corruption. Football has thus not altered some of the political structures which seem endemic to the country (Brown, 1989; Tonkin, 1981). In this context it is football that binds together notions of exclusion, nepotism, masculinity and militarism – the knot has proven notoriously hard to untie.

That said, for some of the people the game offers, as Richards (1997) has argued, a neutral place in which ex-combatants and the wider society might begin to seek mutual accommodation before assisting in the hard task of re-forming shared identities and understandings. Across the country, rich and poor, women and men, Muslims, Christians and Animists enjoy the game and football pitches are found in the remotest villages as well as the densest urban areas. The game is providing an avenue for linking local populations and groups of displaced ‘outsiders’. The community football clubs have provided a justified source of pride for thousands of young people, be it in playing, spectating or organizing. In the absence of any other opportunities to hone their organizational talent and, for some young men whose principal skill had hitherto been reserved for war or various forms of violent or acquisitive crimes, running and managing football competitions may be one way of building quickly and constructively on such tenuous social capacities.

The snapshot analysis as to what football – and indeed sport – might or can do in zones of conflict can be seductive but also delusional. In 2001 one could find in Monrovia a network of community football clubs which inspired by the outreach work of the Bosco project were promoting issues of health, child rights and a variety of capacity building for the locales they existed within. Proof surely that football was the antidote to future conflict and that the seduction the game carried was greater than that of the militias? When the call to arms came, the footballers newly embedded with a sense of surrogate kinship and communitarianism would ignore the call? They would see the value of peaceful co-existence in a football-inspired civil society – wouldn’t they? Possibly, but not all were given that choice. The two teams that Armstrong (2002) detailed were no longer in existence by 2004 – half of both teams were dead. One team of teenage boys while training had a rocket-propelled grenade land in their midst killing five instantly. The other team while training illustrated the physicality sought by the military of Charles Taylor’s forces. They were press-ganged at gun-point to leave their playing field and take up arms on behalf of the President against the rebel forces encroaching on the capital. Half the team were killed in the ensuing gun-fights.

Terrorism is evident in the poorest of African contexts and the Liberian context is certainly bound up with ethnic antagonisms, ‘Big-Man’ politics and the control of globally desired commodities. At times, it has an economic justification, at other times it part of a sense of ‘pay-back’ for decades of ethnic discrimination. Its perpetrators are at times trained by dictators with broadly Pan-African ambitions yet at other times those perpetrating acts of terror are illiterate children brutalized by circumstances and out of their minds on a cocktail of hallucinogenic drugs, locally distilled alcohol and Animist belief systems. The killing can be done by the technologies of the most advanced nations or by the utilization of implements meant for the most primitive forms of farming. Lingering resentments and a need for revenge, loyalty to a cause – however abstract or factual – pride in collective achievement and the enjoyment of camaraderie are what perpetuate many armed conflicts. The same qualities arguably perpetuate many football clubs. Against the backdrop of brutal civil war and its attendant acts of terrorism and atrocity, to expect the values bound up with football to lessen the severity of conflict and antagonism is, at best, far-fetched. In this setting the game is as likely to provide a forum for terror as it is to meliorate social division. Indeed, to the ‘Big Men’ of Africa’s Lone Star nation, football and terror appear two sides of the same coin.

The SDP genre is currently fashionable and not shy of self-promotion. Giulianotti (2010) has described how the various forces evident within global civil society are reflected in the burgeoning SDP sector. ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ programmes undertaken by private transnational corporations, such as Nike and Coca-Cola, incorporate SDP work. National and international governmental institutions, intergovernmental institutions, such as the UN and EU, the IMF, World Bank and a number of UN agencies support SDP programmes. Traditional ‘third sector’ agencies (non-governmental and community-based) contribute heavily to the SDP sector (examples include sport-specific agencies such Right to Play, streetfootballworld and general non-governmental organizations which undertake sport-related activities such as SOS Kinderdorf, Christian Aid and Sarvodaya. The more critical moves within the sector are often taken by new social movements and radical non-governmental organizations. Their efforts are often motivated by social justice and corporate and state abuses of human rights (for example, the Clean Clothes Campaign ¹³ ). Liberia has – as illustrated in this article – seen its fair share of SDP interventions. Such interventions show no sign of ceasing. In August 2000, the Liberian FA collaborated with various United Nations agencies to stage a one-week ‘Peace-Building through Fair Play’ workshop in Paynesville (Williams, 2002). In 2007 former French international footballer, Lilian Thuram, visited Liberia as a guest of the United Nations ‘Mission in Liberia Sport for Peace’ programme, imploring Liberians to ‘do away with violence’ and ‘work harder to change the image of the country’ (Jarkloh, 2007). Other such exhortations will be heard.

Those promoting SDP have evidence to support their concerns and programmes. Football clubs the world over are significant in creating neighbourhoods and wider identifications; they can also offer educational narratives. But questions have to be raised as to whether the game can inculcate nationally agreed values pertaining to justice and egalitarianism (Barry, 2000). Furthermore, what proof is there that the regular athlete – or the elite one for that matter – has by virtue of their sport a more rounded moral vision or is a better citizen? Why, we might add, are team games like football promoted as an antidote to future or ongoing conflict when the ethos they often promote – esprit de corps, win at all costs and a willingness to stand up and be counted – are those considered ideal in war be it for those in the uniform of regular armies or those in the flip-flops and looted apparel of armed militias? Sometimes those promoting sport might manifest greater modesty with regard to its abilities to instil moral values and with it a richer appreciation of the complexities evident in host societies.