The Fall Of Samuel Doe -- Liberia Tumbled Into Chaos Under Its Brutal Leader

NAIROBI, Kenya - The end of the line for Liberian President Samuel Doe was as ignominious as most of his 10-year reign: reportedly killed after being shot, captured and interrogated by a rebel force as he arrived to confer with the Ghanaian commander of a six-nation ``peacekeeping'' force in his capital of Monrovia.

Five months ago, Doe managed to mark his 10th anniversary as head of one of Africa's oldest independent countries. That was April 12, when he provoked snickers at a thinly attended banquet by saying, ``We recall the events of the past 10 years with considerable pride.''

Doe, who was 38, has left behind him an economy in tatters, the complete dissolution of civil order amid vicious tribal warfare, and the near-evaporation of his country's hopes, modest as they were, for democratic government.

The events leading to his reported demise began with an insurgent force about 200 strong that crossed the border from Ivory Coast last Christmas Eve. By the time of his capture Sunday, there were four forces under arms in Monrovia: the remnant of Doe's own army, thought to number in the hundreds; two separate rebel groups of several thousand men each, and ECOMOG, a force of between 2,500 and 3,000 men from six West African countries, sent in by regional leaders to try to establish and monitor a cease-fire. Each controls some portion of Monrovia or its port.

The British Broadcasting Corporation's correspondent in

Monrovia, Elizabeth Blunt, said Doe had been ``fairly badly shot in both legs'' in a battle with forces of Prince Johnson, one rebel leader. Witnesses said Doe was interrogated by Johnson about millions of dollars of state funds which allegedly disappeared during Doe's 10-year rule.

Doe's reported death evidently further muddies the waters of Liberian leadership. No fewer than four individuals now claim to be president of Liberia, where nothing resembling formal government now functions.

Johnson yesterday declared himself president and said he would run the country until elections can be held. To make that stick, he will have to continue to battle Charles Arthur Taylor, the one-time Doe lieutenant who led the original insurgent force from which Johnson's band splintered in February. Taylor named himself president this summer.

Yesterday the commander of Doe's mansion guard, David Nimley, was named by the guard itself as interim president.

Meanwhile, the leaders of West African states sponsoring the ``peacekeeping'' force currently keeping a tenuous grip on the Monrovia port have named their own candidate for provisional president: Amos Sawyer, a former dean of humanities and social sciences at the University of Liberia who was jailed as a dissident by Doe in 1985, escaped the country in 1986 and became an exile leader in Washington.

It was characteristic of Doe's administration that his reaction to the rebel invasion made matters worse. In the first six months of this year, brutal army reprisals against civilians living in the path of the rebel advance drove thousands of people over to the rebel side. By late May, when the force reached the coast a few miles from the capital, it had 4,000 men under arms, almost equal to Doe's own desertion-plagued army.

Because the massacres were tribal-based, targeting the Gio and Mano peoples, retaliatory tribal bloodshed by the rebels was inevitable. They made members of Doe's tribe, the Krahn, their targets, and thousands of Krahn fled to Sierra Leone.

Taylor, 42, was a government officer until Doe accused him in 1984 of embezzling $1 million. He escaped to the United States but was arrested in Boston. While awaiting extradition, he managed to escape again, this time by bribing prison guards with $30,000, he told associates. Recently, he said that the charges against him would be dropped in Liberia once he ousted Doe.

Johnson is a former Liberian army lieutenant who joined a coup attempt led by army officer Thomas Qwiwonkpa in 1985. The attempt failed, but Johnson escaped Qwiwonkpa's fate, which was to be captured and dismembered by Doe's forces.

Even with the best intentions, any of these leaders would have enormous difficulty rebuilding Liberia from the trough in which it fell during the Doe years.

At times it was tempting to mistake Doe for his own caricature as a buffoonish incompetent. Early in his regime, the South Koreans beguiled him into letting them mint a new Liberian coin to supplement what was then the country's official currency, the U.S. dollar.

Liberia got a supply of thick, heavy and unwieldy five-dollar coins instantly dubbed ``Doebucks,'' and the South Koreans got millions of U.S. greenbacks held until then in Liberian banks and maintained as foreign exchange. For his part, Doe got an honorary doctorate from a South Korean university.

The Liberian dollar, until then officially treated as par to the American dollar, quickly sank to half the U.S. value.

A few years later, Doe and his vice president enrolled, to great fanfare, in a postgraduate political-science course at the Ibrahim Babangida Institute of the University of Liberia. At the conclusion of the course, the head of the institute said soberly that the semiliterate president had been the best student and the vice president the second-best.

But the comic-opera trappings masked a ruthless administration. Doe, who came to power in a coup, began his regime with a bloodthirsty display: He invited the public to a beach in Monrovia to witness the executions of 13 senior officials of the ousted government of William Tolbert Jr., who was killed during his overthrow. The victims included six Cabinet ministers, the chief justice, the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives.

Doe used other intimidating measures to keep political opponents and critical journalists at bay. In 1984, he unleashed his army on protesting students at the University of Liberia campus. The wave of looting, flogging and rape that followed left the campus community stunned for years.

The editor of the opposition Daily Observer, Kenneth Best, was jailed four times, and his offices burned down twice.

Two other newspapers, Footprints Today and the Sun Times, were banned, and last year Doe shut down the Roman Catholic Church's radio station, the only source of nongovernment broadcast reports reaching the countryside. The newspapers and radio station were allowed to reopen earlier this year, when Doe was desperate for good publicity.

Strong political opponents were also jailed. They included Gabriel Kpolleh, head of the Liberian Unification Party, also recently released after two years in prison, and Sawyer, who had been chairman of the National Constitutional Drafting Commission and head of the banned Liberia Peoples Party.

By all accounts, prison conditions for the detainees were brutal. Most were incarcerated at the infamous Belle Yalla prison, located in a remote part of the country.

``This is a place that in the 20th century should not exist in the world,'' said Rufus Darpoh, a Sun Times editor jailed for six months.

Doe's 1980 coup was not universally deplored when it ousted Tolbert, who did not have the popular support that had helped keep his predecessor, William Tubman, in power for 27 years. Tubman and Tolbert were both descendants of the American ex-slaves, a class known popularly in Liberia as ``Congos,'' who had ruled the country since they arrived on its shores in a ``back-to-Africa'' movement in 1847.

By 1980, the successive Congo regimes had enriched a corrupt and feckless Liberian elite while the rest of the country suffered.

By contrast, Doe, who kept his existing rank of master sergeant at first but later promoted himself to general, was the first descendant of native Africans to run Africa's oldest independent state.

In 1985, Doe made a show of keeping his promise to return Liberia to civilian rule by legalizing political parties. But he chose to run for president himself. Two weeks after the vote, the government announced that Doe had won the presidency with 50.9 percent of the votes cast. An attempt by a coalition of opposition parties to challenge the results as rigged was undermined when the U.S. State Department, in a report to Congress, accepted the outcome and praised Doe for resisting the impulse to claim a majority of more than 90 percent.

By last year, the government was almost entirely out of business, unable to enforce even the few regulations or laws.

``The atmosphere here is like a gold-rush town,'' said one international banker in Monrovia, remarking on the flood of business charlatans infesting the streets and the inability of the government to police any activity.

Doe's fiscal misadventures made it even more difficult for Liberia to overcome the real pressures on its economic well-being. Among these is the depletion of its iron-ore mines, which have been managed for decades by foreign concessionaires and traditionally supplied about half the country's foreign-exchange earnings. The mining companies have lately begun to close the increasingly empty mines, in part because a slump in iron-ore prices makes it pointless to dig further.

Overall, Liberia's gross domestic product fell in virtually every year of the Doe regime, dropping from $400 per capita in 1983 to $185 in 1988.

Such circumstances made it ever harder for Doe to maintain an army. His unpaid, ill-equipped and untrained soldiers deserted at a high rate this year.

``They are a frightened, illiterate, superstitious bunch expected to put their lives on the line for $1.50 a day,'' said one diplomat.

The surprise, say some observers, is that Doe was able to survive for so long.

-- This article contains material from Reuters and Associated Press.