Watchdog group warns of oil corruption in Liberia
Voice of America
By James Butty
A new Global Witness report says corruption is rampant in Liberia‘s oil sector even before any oil is discovered
The international watchdog group Global Witness says corruption is rampant in Liberia’s oil sector, even before any oil has been discovered. In a report Monday, the group said government and business officials have been involved in bribery to get contracts approved.
Global Witness campaigner Natalie Ashworth said some government officials choose to “break their own laws.
“There were three findings which highlight the problems. First, we discussed evidence of the payment of lobbying fees. NOCAL, which is the National Oil Company, paid lobbying fees to the legislators to get oil contracts passed. The second is an inadequate legislative framework to protect communities and the environment and, thirdly, there is a lack of capacity by the National Oil Company and by the EPA, which is the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the environment sector,” she said.
Ashworth said the report calls on the government to investigate evidence of corruption in the oil sector.
“When it comes to the National Oil Company, we’re recommending a number of things. One, we’re recommending that all the allegations that are in the report and in the General Auditing Commission audit of the National Oil Company need to be investigated. We are also recommending that the power to regulate be taken away from the National Oil Company and given to a separate agency,” Ashworth said.
The report said the actions by some lawmakers to accept bribes are against Liberian laws.
“Liberia’s penal code makes specific reference to bribery, and the general auditor has deemed these lobbying fees to be bribes,” she said.
The report said Monrovia has made some promising improvements in the resource sector. But, Ashworth said these changes have been poorly managed.
Christopher Neyor, president and CEO of the National Oil Company of Liberia, questions the timing of the global witness report, especially as Liberia prepares for next month’s presidential elections.
He said the government was already implementing some of the recommendations contained in the global witness report.
“Our position on this Global Witness report is clear. We are delighted that they have acknowledged that the president has appointed someone with a reformist agenda and they had earlier spoken with us and we had given them the outline of our agenda. So, basically, while we appreciate the input of Global Witness, just about all what they are recommending are things that we initiated and, not only initiated, we [are] implementing at the National Oil Company,” Neyor said.
He said, in a sense, the government agrees with much of the findings in the Global Witness report.
Neyor said there is nothing new about NOCAL paying members of the Liberian legislature lobbying fees to ratify oil contracts between 2006 and 2008.
“That again is nothing new; it’s been around for a while in the media. It has been debated and the debate had centered on the definition of the lobbying fee, or facilitation fee, or what you may call it. There are some people who like to call it a bribe,” Neyor said.
Related articles
===========================
| By Mark Huband
Legal
protection played absolutely no part in the Liberian conflict. No side
considered establishing camps for holding prisoners of war. Instead, all
perceived enemies, soldiers and civilians alike, were executed—many
after having been tortured. Indeed, from the point of view of simple
morality, not to mention international humanitarian law, the Liberian
civil war of 1990–1997 was a horror story pure and simple, a conflict in
which the law was ignored and every possible act of brutality was
committed. Still, however anarchic events in Liberia seemed to outsiders and however barbarous they were, the country’s collapse into civil war during the early months of 1990 was not an unavoidable event, the man-made equivalent of a natural disaster. Instead, it was the culmination of years of political crisis. For, in reality, Liberia had lost its way long before the rebels led by Charles Taylor launched the war that left their nation in ruins. Outside actors, particularly the United States, played a central role in the Liberian catastrophe. For the Americans, Liberia had had an historic relationship with them and had been a useful Cold War ally, and they were unwilling to oppose any regime that came to power in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. The decision of the United States to support the 1980 coup of an obscure Liberian army master sergeant, Samuel K. Doe, and, subsequently, to bolster Doe’s corrupt and chaotic dictatorship for the decade that it lasted, led ineluctably to the disaster of the civil war. For if the war to overthrow Doe soon became a grotesque story of horror, greed, and atrocity in which every tenet of humanitarian law was broken on a daily basis by all sides, the seeds had been sown in the period of Doe’s rule. Once the fighting began in earnest, though, it was clear that the factions had no intention of even paying lip service to the laws of war, nor to the laws governing the protection of civilians during wartime. All the factions acted with a sense of complete impunity, and they were not wrong in sensing that the outside world cared little about what was going on in Liberia and certainly would do nothing to prevent the atrocities that were taking place there. At no time, for example, was there any talk, as in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, of setting up an international tribunal to try the worst offenders. And this impunity gave the slaughter a further momentum. But the collapse of Liberia’s State structures was at the root of the descent into savagery. As the government forces lost territory to the approaching rebel force led by Charles Taylor, its administrative authority rapidly collapsed. The Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) effectively took over, imposing military rule. But by this time the military itself could no longer be considered a national institution. Doe’s tribal allies within the army hierarchy first isolated and then began killing troops from other tribes, whom they assumed to be sympathetic to Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). Before very long, a combination of the AFL’s inherent indiscipline and ineffectiveness as a fighting force, and the failure of the government to rally tribes other than Doe’s Krahn to its side, transformed the government army into just one more warring faction. This loss of legitimacy was itself a major factor in furthering the violence, since AFL soldiers came to regard the war as a fight for personal survival. The burning of villages and the slaughter of their inhabitants came to characterize the AFL’s strategy. And as rebel forces drew closer to Monrovia, the AFL unleashed a reign of terror on the capital. Civilian disappearances became commonplace, and bodies began to pile up in the streets. Predictably, it was civilians from tribes associated with the NPFL who were the most vulnerable. One of the worst of these massacres occurred in Monrovia’s St. Peter’s Church on July 29, 1990. A survivor recounted what had happened: “The soldiers shot the door open, and took all the food they could see inside, and they killed the woman who had the key to the [church's] warehouse, after raping her. Guards stood at the gate and we stayed inside. Nobody could leave, and then it got dark, and the soldiers came back the same night… There were around 200 [AFL] soldiers who came in. And they began cutting a boy with a knife, and they cut and cut everybody with their knives and machetes.” The night of terror left six hundred people dead. Neither senior AFL officers nor government officials ever denied responsibility. The church was unprotected and had a large Red Cross flag on its gate. The leader of the massacre, Michael Tilly, had committed numerous acts of grotesque violence before and enjoyed the protection of individuals within the AFL and the government. Obviously, such attacks on civilians by troops under the command of a government are totally prohibited by international law. Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions imposes on military units the obligation to protect civilians, and to distinguish in their operations between combatants and civilians. Noncombatants are protected persons in civil wars as they are in wars between States. This does not mean there was no purpose to massacres like the one perpetrated at St. Peter’s Church. The AFL’s victimization and murders of civilians was ostensibly meant to discourage recruitment to the NPFL. But pressure of this kind is also illegal under international humanitarian law. The AFL’s attacks on what it perceived as “enemy tribes” might be regarded as attempted genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. For although genocide was not the declared aim of the AFL, their attacks on the Gio and Mano tribes arguably amounted to an attempt at extermination of all or part of those peoples. Predictably, AFL atrocities were matched by those of the NPFL led by Charles Taylor, whose election as president of Liberia in 1997 marked an end to the war, as well as by those of the breakaway Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL), led by Prince Johnson. The direct testimony of countless rebel fighters attests to this. As an NPFL soldier named Elijah McCarthy told me, “I wear a ring and two fetishes on rope around my neck. If you are my enemy, the ring will burn me. If somebody is my enemy I will take him on one side. People beg. They say: ‘Please don’t kill me.’ But I don’t trust them. I have killed fifty people. I cut off their heads or shot them. They begged for their lives. But I didn’t trust them.” As life in Monrovia became intolerable, and refugees fled into NPFL-controlled territory, the sight of fleeing government officials being executed at NPFL checkpoints became almost routine. And it was not only government officials. Numerous NPFL fighters, most of them teenagers, admitted to routinely killing civilians to whom they took a dislike. To talk about the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions may seem almost bizarre in the circumstances, but the 1949 Conventions demand protection for civilians and aliens. Yet foreigners, in particular Nigerians, were routinely killed, in part as a message to the Nigerian government that it should not send a peacekeeping force to end the conflict. The 1992 murder of five American nuns living in rebel territory may also have been intended as a warning. At one point, Prince Johnson ordered his INPFL fighters to hold forty-eight foreigners hostage, apparently in an effort to draw the world’s attention to Liberia. Such hostage taking is specifically prohibited by Article 4 of the 1977 Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions. But then, that violation was perhaps the least of Johnson’s offenses against international law. It was Johnson who captured and tortured Doe to death in 1990. He had the deposed president’s ears cut off and then ate them while the entire event was captured on film. Paradoxically, Johnson’s troops were probably less guilty of violence against civilians than the other belligerents. Such acts of physical mutilation, however, were a hallmark of the Liberian conflict, and ritualistic killings were committed by all sides. That they are prohibited by Common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions, of Additional Protocol II, and further contravened the customary principles stated in the the articles of the Brussels Conference of 1874, the Hague Conventions on land warfare of 1899 and 1907, and the Geneva Convention of 1929 governing the treatment of prisoners of war, was always obvious, and, alas, totally irrelevant. Perhaps, if there had been, as in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide of 1994, the expectation of a tribunal to try the worst offenders the situation might have been different. But there was not. The result is that, just as they were during the war, the criminals who survived are still very much on the loose, and one of them now occupies the presidential palace in Monrovia. |
Crimes of War: A-Z Guide of Liberia ..........
By Mark Huband
Legal protection played
absolutely no part in the Liberian conflict. No side considered establishing
camps for holding prisoners of war. Instead, all perceived enemies, soldiers
and civilians alike, were executed—many after having been tortured. Indeed,
from the point of view of simple morality, not to mention international
humanitarian law, the Liberian civil war of 1990–1997 was a horror story pure
and simple, a conflict in which the law was ignored and every possible act of
brutality was committed.
Still, however anarchic events in
Liberia seemed to outsiders and however barbarous they were, the country’s
collapse into civil war during the early months of 1990 was not an unavoidable
event, the man-made equivalent of a natural disaster. Instead, it was the
culmination of years of political crisis. For, in reality, Liberia had lost its
way long before the rebels led by Charles Taylor launched the war that left
their nation in ruins.
Outside actors, particularly the
United States, played a central role in the Liberian catastrophe. For the
Americans, Liberia had had an historic relationship with them and had been a
useful Cold War ally, and they were unwilling to oppose any regime that came to
power in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. The decision of the United States to
support the 1980 coup of an obscure Liberian army master sergeant, Samuel K.
Doe, and, subsequently, to bolster Doe’s corrupt and chaotic dictatorship for
the decade that it lasted, led ineluctably to the disaster of the civil war.
For if the war to overthrow Doe soon became a grotesque story of horror, greed,
and atrocity in which every tenet of humanitarian law was broken on a daily
basis by all sides, the seeds had been sown in the period of Doe’s rule.
Once the fighting began in
earnest, though, it was clear that the factions had no intention of even paying
lip service to the laws of war, nor to the laws governing the protection of
civilians during wartime. All the factions acted with a sense of complete
impunity, and they were not wrong in sensing that the outside world cared
little about what was going on in Liberia and certainly would do nothing to
prevent the atrocities that were taking place there. At no time, for example,
was there any talk, as in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, of setting up an
international tribunal to try the worst offenders. And this impunity gave the
slaughter a further momentum.
But the collapse of Liberia’s
State structures was at the root of the descent into savagery. As the
government forces lost territory to the approaching rebel force led by Charles
Taylor, its administrative authority rapidly collapsed. The Armed Forces of
Liberia (AFL) effectively took over, imposing military rule. But by this time
the military itself could no longer be considered a national institution. Doe’s
tribal allies within the army hierarchy first isolated and then began killing
troops from other tribes, whom they assumed to be sympathetic to Taylor’s
National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL).
Before very long, a combination
of the AFL’s inherent indiscipline and ineffectiveness as a fighting force, and
the failure of the government to rally tribes other than Doe’s Krahn to its
side, transformed the government army into just one more warring faction. This
loss of legitimacy was itself a major factor in furthering the violence, since
AFL soldiers came to regard the war as a fight for personal survival. The
burning of villages and the slaughter of their inhabitants came to characterize
the AFL’s strategy. And as rebel forces drew closer to Monrovia, the AFL
unleashed a reign of terror on the capital. Civilian disappearances became
commonplace, and bodies began to pile up in the streets.
Predictably, it was civilians
from tribes associated with the NPFL who were the most vulnerable. One of the
worst of these massacres occurred in Monrovia’s St. Peter’s Church on July 29,
1990. A survivor recounted what had happened: “The soldiers shot the door open,
and took all the food they could see inside, and they killed the woman who had
the key to the [church's] warehouse, after raping her. Guards stood at the gate
and we stayed inside. Nobody could leave, and then it got dark, and the
soldiers came back the same night… There were around 200 [AFL] soldiers who
came in. And they began cutting a boy with a knife, and they cut and cut
everybody with their knives and machetes.”
The night of terror left six
hundred people dead. Neither senior AFL officers nor government officials ever
denied responsibility. The church was unprotected and had a large Red Cross
flag on its gate. The leader of the massacre, Michael Tilly, had committed
numerous acts of grotesque violence before and enjoyed the protection of individuals
within the AFL and the government.
Obviously, such attacks on
civilians by troops under the command of a government are totally prohibited by
international law. Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions imposes on
military units the obligation to protect civilians, and to distinguish in their
operations between combatants and civilians. Noncombatants are protected
persons in civil wars as they are in wars between States.
This does not mean there was no
purpose to massacres like the one perpetrated at St. Peter’s Church. The AFL’s
victimization and murders of civilians was ostensibly meant to discourage
recruitment to the NPFL. But pressure of this kind is also illegal under
international humanitarian law. The AFL’s attacks on what it perceived as
“enemy tribes” might be regarded as attempted genocide as defined by the 1948
Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. For
although genocide was not the declared aim of the AFL, their attacks on the Gio
and Mano tribes arguably amounted to an attempt at extermination of all or part
of those peoples.
Predictably, AFL atrocities were
matched by those of the NPFL led by Charles Taylor, whose election as president
of Liberia in 1997 marked an end to the war, as well as by those of the
breakaway Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL), led by
Prince Johnson. The direct testimony of countless rebel fighters attests to
this. As an NPFL soldier named Elijah McCarthy told me, “I wear a ring and two
fetishes on rope around my neck. If you are my enemy, the ring will burn me. If
somebody is my enemy I will take him on one side. People beg. They say: ‘Please
don’t kill me.’ But I don’t trust them. I have killed fifty people. I cut off
their heads or shot them. They begged for their lives. But I didn’t trust
them.”
As life in Monrovia became
intolerable, and refugees fled into NPFL-controlled territory, the sight of
fleeing government officials being executed at NPFL checkpoints became almost
routine. And it was not only government officials. Numerous NPFL fighters, most
of them teenagers, admitted to routinely killing civilians to whom they took a
dislike. To talk about the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions may
seem almost bizarre in the circumstances, but the 1949 Conventions demand
protection for civilians and aliens. Yet foreigners, in particular Nigerians,
were routinely killed, in part as a message to the Nigerian government that it
should not send a peacekeeping force to end the conflict. The 1992 murder of
five American nuns living in rebel territory may also have been intended as a
warning.
At one point, Prince Johnson
ordered his INPFL fighters to hold forty-eight foreigners hostage, apparently
in an effort to draw the world’s attention to Liberia. Such hostage taking is
specifically prohibited by Article 4 of the 1977 Additional Protocol II to the
Geneva Conventions. But then, that violation was perhaps the least of Johnson’s
offenses against international law. It was Johnson who captured and tortured
Doe to death in 1990. He had the deposed president’s ears cut off and then ate
them while the entire event was captured on film. Paradoxically, Johnson’s
troops were probably less guilty of violence against civilians than the other
belligerents.
Such acts of physical mutilation,
however, were a hallmark of the Liberian conflict, and ritualistic killings
were committed by all sides. That they are prohibited by Common Article 3 of
the four Geneva Conventions, of Additional Protocol II, and further contravened
the customary principles stated in the the articles of the Brussels Conference
of 1874, the Hague Conventions on land warfare of 1899 and 1907, and the Geneva
Convention of 1929 governing the treatment of prisoners of war, was always
obvious, and, alas, totally irrelevant. Perhaps, if there had been, as in
Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide of 1994, the expectation of a tribunal
to try the worst offenders the situation might have been different. But there
was not. The result is that, just as they were during the war, the criminals
who survived are still very much on the loose, and one of them now occupies the
presidential palace in Monrovia.
Related posts:
Children as Killers
- See more at:
http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/liberia/#sthash.NTEKGZnG.dpuf
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