Liberia In the Heart of Darkness

MONROVIA -- The civil war in Liberia is about hatred: personal hatred based on political rivalry, brutally used to turn tribe against tribe. Charles Taylor, head of the rebel National Patriotic Liberation Front, and President Samuel Doe, the harsh ruler of the country's 2.5 million people for the past decade, loathe each other. Says Taylor: "The only good Doe is a dead Doe." In the past eight months Taylor's 10,000-member army has overrun most of the country, leaving only small pieces of Monrovia, the capital, in Doe's control and setting the Gio tribe, which supports Taylor, against one of Liberia's smallest but most powerful tribes, Doe's people, the Krahn.

Few soldiers or rebels have died in battle, but thousands of civilians have perished. Two weeks ago, two bodies lay by the side of the road leading to a Monrovia airport, hands tied behind their backs. A third man, denying he was a Krahn, pleaded with the rebels for his life -- but to no avail. Creating yet more violence, Prince Yormie Johnson, a Gio, split away from Taylor last February. By the summer, Johnson and his few hundred men had swept into the center of the capital, taking on both Doe's and Taylor's forces.

Last week, in an effort to halt the tribal carnage, 3,000 troops of a five- nation West African peacekeeping force began to fan out in besieged Monrovia (pop. 500,000). Doe and Johnson welcomed the troops, but Taylor, challenging their legitimacy, vowed to kill them all. If the fighting cannot be stopped, the attempted overthrow of Doe could threaten the stability of the whole West Africa region. Already, the intervention has ignited bitter controversy among Liberia's neighbors.

Taylor is unimpressed by outside efforts to calm the civil strife. "I am not going to roll over and play dead," he told TIME. "This is an attempt to rescue Doe. A peacekeeping force means all sides agree. We have not agreed. If we're attacked, the price will be expensive. The world is going to remember."

Most of the world has paid little attention to the war, and Liberia's neighbors are only belatedly showing concern. When the Economic Community of West African States, a 16-nation body formed 15 years ago to promote regional cooperation, held an emergency summit in early August, only seven members bothered to attend. Determined to solve their problems without the help of uninterested superpowers, they hastily decided that ECOWAS should go into the peacekeeping business. To achieve a cease-fire in Liberia and supervise free elections, they created a West African force, the Economic Community Monitoring Group. Yet when the time came to pass out white ECOMOG helmets, only five countries sent troops: Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Gambia.

Taylor does not trust any of them. "Peacekeeping?" he scoffs. "We've arrested Guinean soldiers here in Liberia. How can they come to keep the peace? We've captured Nigerian weapons from Doe's soldiers. How can you bring a jaguar into the house and say he has come to make the peace? ECOWAS is going to make this another Vietnam -- a war that never ends."