Liberia has a unique history among African states. It was originally established as a colony by the philanthropic National Colonization Society of America as a homeland for freed American slaves. Land was obtained by treaty with indigenous tribes in 1822, and was subsequently settled. In 1847, Liberia proclaimed itself an independent republic, but failed to live up to the name. Later generations of American Liberians established a slave-state of their own, enslaving the indigenous Liberians.

Slavery continued until the 1936, when it was abolished in the wake of scandal and League of Nations investigation. The scandal did not manage to unseat the True Whig party from its then more than half-century of domination of Liberian politics.

Liberia continued as a republic under the Whigs until April of 1980, when M.Sgt. Samuel K. Doe and his People's Redemption Council staged a bloody coup. The PRC established itself as an interim regime until 1985, when elections were held. Doe and the PRC were returned to power among allegations of election fraud.

The 1990 Civil War:

In late December of 1989, a group of rebels entered Liberia's Nimba county from the Cote d'Ivoire. They were led by Charles Taylor, a former member of Doe's cabinet who was removed from office on charges of embezzlement. Doe's response was a harsh crackdown on his own people in an attempt to stop Taylor's group, which called itself the National Patriotic Front. But Doe's crackdown served only to drive many Nimba county residents into the NPF ranks.

By February, the war had settled into a predictable pattern of low-intensity skirmishes and atrocities. The NPF held Nimba county and was slowly taking other parts of Liberia away from Doe's forces. In the meantime, Doe's military was deserting and taking their weapons. Many ended up in NPF ranks. Doe, in a frantic attempt to enlarge his military, press-ganged thieves from the Waterside district, only to have them desert and use their new-found weapons to enhance their old profession.

The atrocities came quickly now and followed tribal lines. Four of Liberia's sixteen tribes were prominent in the civil war. The Krahn and Mandingo tribes supported Doe, while the Gio and Mano tribes backed the NPF. The tribal animosities among these groups verged on genocidal. In one incident, Doe's death squads slaughtered more than 600 Gio and Mano civilians inside the St. Peter's Lutheran Church of Monrovia; the civilians were seeking asylum from Doe's troops. NPF forces were also accused in one case of breaking into a mosque and killing Mandingo members.

The rebels encircled Monrovia in June. On June 4, an NPF squad was ambushed and Taylor's strategist, the American mercenary Elmer Johnson was killed. Shortly afterwards, Prince Yormie Johnson left the NPF with a group of followers to form the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL). These two events crippled the NPF and rendered it mostly ineffective for the rest of the conflict. The NPF spent the rest of the war looting and executing civilians.

In August, the flow of refugees into neighboring states caused the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to send in the 3000-member ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). However, ECOMOG was unable to stop the fighting and the INPFL continued to advance on Monrovia, eventually being able to exercise control over portions of it. Doe spent the last months hiding in his presidential mansion in the company of his "Satue" presidential guard battalion. Whether he was there by choice or under house arrest by his Satue was never clear, as Doe's guards said that he would not leave Liberia without them.

Doe left the presidential mansion on September 9th and travelled to the ECOMOG headquarters but was intercepted by Prince Johnson. Doe's accompanying bodyguards were killed, and Doe was mutilated and tortured before being killed.

On Doe's death, there were no less than four people claiming control of Liberia. ECOMOG tolerated these for awhile, but later supported Professor Amos Sawyer as head of an interim government based in Ghana. In February 1991, ECOMOG forced the rival factions to sign a peace treaty and begin disarming, but Charles Taylor claimed he would continue to protest Sawyer's government. Taylor's NPF was recently reported to be engaging in banditry and raiding in neighboring Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire. Both Johnson's INPFL and General Hezekiah Bowen's Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) have chosen to support Sawyer.

The war created an estimated 700,000 refugees and an unknown number of civilian casualties. International trade channels had been eliminated by the fighting, cutting off food shipments and causing deaths from starvation among more civilians. Power-sharing negotiations following the peace treaty remain bogged down, mostly due to Taylor's resistance to any such agreement. Liberia's immediate future remains grim.