Word: tolbert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stung by worldwide condemnation of the seaside executions in April 1980 that followed his ouster of President William R. Tolbert, Liberia's new head of state, Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe, promised a quick return to civilian rule and a halt to the killings. Seventeen months later, Doe, 30, remains in power-and the killing has resumed. In June, 13 soldiers were executed after confessing to a plot to overthrow Doe and his 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...
...renewed terror has muted Doe's critics, it has understandably done little to reassure foreign investors or Liberian businessmen of stability any time soon. One reminder is the conduct of Colonel Harrison Pennue, a former corporal and Doe loyalist who likes to boast that he disemboweled President Tolbert. Doe appointed Pennue to a P.R.C. committee charged with collecting $36 million owed by private debtors to the defunct Bank of Liberia. So far, says a foreign businessman, "not one cent" of the millions of dollars in cash that Pennue collected has been turned over to the central bank...
Despite the P.R.C.'s excesses, the U.S. Government remains supportive of the regime. While total foreign aid has been drastically slashed by the Reagan Administration, U.S. annual assistance to Liberia has leaped from $8 million during the last year of Tolbert's presidency to $68.3 million this year, an increase, at a time of general retrenchment, that Washington explains as due to the fact that there is "no visible alternative" to the Doe regime. The U.S. is helping to pay Liberia's monthly oil bill of $12 million, supplying more than 20,000 tons of rice...
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...
Modestly spurning the trappings of power, Doe has stopped using Tolbert's presidential Mercedes-Benz limousine except for rare ceremonial, occasions. Instead, he drives around town hi a Chevrolet Chevette, sometimes heading out alone for late-night excursions. Doe is said to be wearying of the demands of political office. "If it were up to him, the soldiers would be back in the barracks by Christmas," says a friend...