A BOAT-LOAD of refugees from Monrovia travels back and forth along the coast of West Africa, desperately seeking a port or country which will give it haven. A young girl flies to Britain from Freetown to have a bullet removed from behind her eye. The media images surrounding the brutal six-year long civil war in Liberia, and its spill-over into neighbouring Sierra Leone, portray yet another tribal conflict in faraway Africa. But the west is far from innocent. BOB WOODexamines of the roots of the war. The state of Liberia has its origins in the settlement by freed slaves from the United States in the early ninereenin centur.
The existence otiree, saves was a problem for both southern planters and northern liberals. Those Celebrating views.
May/June
and Its kawa on Ruth Science Caribbean Today • Tim Dayton on the Utopian Marxist Legacy of Ernst Bloch.
One-year overseas sub: $25 ATC • 7012 Michigan Avenue • Detroit MI 48210 who set up the American Colonisation Society could see no better way of ridding themselves of this embarrassment than shipping the exSaves acro c The first settlers arrived on the West African coast in 1822. Their AGAINST THE CURRENT its l0th anniversary, ATC is a U.S. socialist bimonthly of news analysis, reand dialogue. The issue features: Sol Dollinger, Nelson Lichtenstein & Charlie Post on the Flint Sitdown Historians • Rene AraHubbard's Feminist Critique of • Cecilia Green on Imperialism in the leaders were often of mixed race, their views of Africa essentially those of nineteenth century United States whites. The indigenous peonie were comerimes reterred to s heathen savages" and the tribal people reciprocated by calling the Americo-Liberians "whites", a habit that persisted well into the twentieth century.
Independence was declared in 1847, the settler regime maintaining its cohesion through a single party, the True Whig Party, and its dominance through limiting the franchise through a property qualification, a practice that continued as long as the True Whig Party maintained its ascendancy. Trade ana a plantation economy kept the new state viable but the worldwide depression in the 1880s led to a period of instability before the po. tential for rubber production was seen by Firestone, who established their first plantations in 926. Much of the labour required on the plantations was forced and at one stage the Liberian government was implicated in the "recruitment" of forced labour for the spanish island of rernando Po, a tremendous irony given their origins as freed SIERRA slaves. LEONE, From the midforties, Liberia was ruled by one man for nearly thirty wears. President William Tubman. Following the defeat in the early fifties of the "patriotic" wing of the ruling class, who wanted to develop an indigenous capitalism, Tubman proceeded to open up Liberia to international capital through what became known as the Open Door Policy. Huge deposits of iron ore were discovered in the north of the country, near to the border with Guinea, to suooiement the income from GUINE rubber, and the Liberian rain forest was piundered by a new timber industry. Monrovia /IVORY In the sixties and COAST seventies, the economy grew LIBERIA steadily at an average of 1 per cent per annum, but it was growth without develop. ment. The mining and 100 miles agricultural businesses operated as enclaves within Liberia without any noticeable links to the local
Socialist Outlook 103 • June 8, 1996. Jose Perez, a French rail worker from of Ken Loach's Land and Freedom and a the forum, on internationalism. The Zapa-