Word: tolbert
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...first shot." A third promised a foreign journalist: "Don't worry, we'll kill every one of them." On a beach in the capital of Monrovia, the new military rulers of Liberia last week executed 13 members of the civilian government of President William Tolbert, who had been killed in a coup d'état ten days earlier. Among the witnesses at the savage ceremony was TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Jack White, who sent the following report on the first days of the new regime...
...normal. Reported White: "On the 30-mile drive from the airport into the city, there were few visible signs of the revolution. A red-and-white banner draped on a building read, OUR EYES ARE OPEN: THE TIME OF THE PEOPLE HAS COME. At the modernistic executive mansion where Tolbert had died, security was minimal. A lone trooper stood watch at the gate, while a mere handful of armed soldiers milled around inside. At the seaside Ducor Inter-Continental Hotel, a sign in the lobby admonished guests to obey the dusk-to-dawn curfew. Its message: STAY OFF THE STREETS...
...coup set off a wave of elation among Liberia's native population, usually called "country people." Waving palm fronds and chanting anti-Tolbert slogans, thousands poured into the streets. Many of them flocked to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center to jeer at the exhibited corpses of Tolbert and the others who had been killed in the fighting. Later the bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave in downtown Monrovia as hundreds looked on approvingly...
Like most of his political predecessors, Tolbert was one of the "settlers," or Americo-Liberians, descended from the freed American slaves who founded the West African nation in 1847. Throughout Liberia's history, the settler group dominated both the government and the economy of Africa's oldest republic, despite the fact that it represented only about 3% of the country's 1.7 million people. Tolbert, a Baptist minister who had served 20 years as vice president, made a degree of headway in reforming the top leadership after he assumed the presidency in 1971. Alarmed by an outbreak...
Sergeant Doe, now Africa's youngest strongman, became enraged at Tolbert during last year's rice riots. A brisk, jaunty, slightly built man, he is the son of an impoverished farmer from the small Krahn tribe. He left school after the eleventh grade and joined the army. Last year he took an advanced training course from a U.S. Army special forces detachment in Liberia. Like Flight Lieut. Jerry Rawlings, 33, who led a coup in neighboring Ghana last year, Doe has a flair for the dramatic. During his first TV address as head of state, he wore sunglasses...