Word: monrovia
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...People's Redemption Council (P.R.C.). Last month five members of the P.R.C. itself, including Doe's deputy, Thomas Weh Syen, were shot after a military tribunal convicted them of planning to assassinate Doe. TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Jack White, who witnessed the 1980 executions, returned to Monrovia last week and sent this report...
...military image; in-place of the camouflage fatigues and jaunty beret that were his trademark in the early post-revolution period, he now occasionally wears well-tailored suits. The modest Honda Civic in which he drove himself last year is seldom seen these days. Instead, he races around Monrovia in a chauffeured black Mercedes-Benz limousine flanked by motorcycle police with wailing sirens. A hairdresser comes to his suite in the Israeli-built Executive Mansion each morning to fluff up his luxuriant Afro. As one Liberian official puts it: "He is getting comfortable as the head of state...
...figures associated with the old regime. The widow of the President, Victoria Tolbert, was released from house arrest, and 38 political prisoners who had been rounded up during the early days of the revolution were freed. Conditions have improved for the 140 prisoners who remain in the stockade at Monrovia's Barclay Training Center. But Tolbert's son is still behind bars...
There has been less progress on the economic front. The P.R.C. inherited a country on the verge of bankruptcy. Says a U.S. banker in Monrovia: "If this were a company, Liberia would be in liquidation." Only $5 million was left in the national bank-not enough to cover Liberia's immediate debt payments. The country faced abnormally high costs for imports that had been negotiated by the Tolbert government. The council broke some of these contracts, but has failed to renegotiate a long-term oil-shipment deal that costs the nation 30% more than the current going rate...
These sensible steps, however, are being undermined by the quixotic behavior of some of the council's more impulsive members. The soldier who executed Tolbert, Harrison T. Pennue, marched into Monrovia's John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center shortly after the coup and pistol-whipped a doctor in the middle of an operation. Pennue was subsequently imprisoned for a week and demoted to "co-member" of the council. In July, P.R.C. Co-Chairman Thomas Weh Syen went on a rampage in eastern Liberia, demolishing a century-old monument to the country's founders and ordering the discharge...