LAGOS, Nov 6 (AFP) - The 10-year exile of former Liberian warlord Yormie
Johnson, who had president Samuel Doe tortured to death, may be coming to
an end, he said Wednesday.
Speaking to AFP at his modest Lagos house, Johnson said he wanted one
day to become president of his country "through democratic means" but was
not yet ready to leave Nigeria.
"I do not want to go to any country in Africa. I beg Nigeria not to send
me away. I am not safe if I am on my own," he said, claiming that the
Nigerian government had told him it was time to go.
"Forcing me to leave will not be in the interest of Nigeria or West
Africa, " the 50-year-old born again Christian warned.
Johnson's forces, then allied to those of current Liberian ruler Charles
Taylor, captured Doe, a brutal dictator, in September 1990.
Doe was taken to Johnson's headquarters, where his own savage mutilation
was recorded on video and he was put to death.
"I asked him to explain what he did with Liberian money. I also asked
him why he played deaf to the cries of Liberians," Johnson said, in a
graphic account of Doe's final minutes.
"Since he played deaf, he had no reason to have ear lobes again. His ear
lobes were then cut off for him to chew. He was tied down during all this
period and he was in pain."
Doe's death paved the way for an interim government to take power and
Nigerian peacekeepers from the west African ECOMOG force began the job of
disarming Johnson's faction.
In Liberia, however, outbreaks of peace often prove shortlived. Fighting
in the early 1990s left 150,000 dead and brought Taylor to power.
Now, the new strongman is fighting a new generation of rebels.
But in 1992 Johnson found himself plucked from the mayhem by Nigerian
peacekeepers, who flew him to exile.
"I was brought by ECOMOG on November 9, 1992 to create room for peace in
Liberia. I do not know if I was a problem. I did not come to Nigeria
begging anybody for a place to stay," he said.
"There was then no government in Liberia that was after my life," he
said.
"I had removed Samuel Doe from power, installed Professor Amos Sawyer as
interim president and disarmed."
Since then Johnson has lived an apparently peaceful life with his
ten-strong family in Ikoyi, an upmarket suburb of Lagos, under the
protection of successive Nigerian military governments.
But after Nigeria's 1999 return to civilian rule, his position became
more precarious.
In 2000 President Olusegun Obasanjo first cut off his privileges,
forcing him to pay for his own water and electricity, then, recently, asked
him to leave the country, Johnson said.
Since coming to Nigeria, Johnson has "found God" and been ordained as a
pentecostalist pastor. The one-time warlord insists he will not bring more
bloodshed to Liberia, but will work for peace.
"When the man of God like me is in politics, there will be
righteousness,"
he said. "I am interested in reconciliation ... I don't not want to be
involved in any conflict in Liberia."
Despite his recent conversion to democratic politics, Johnson expresses
no regrets about his brutal treatment of Doe, whom he accused of leading a
tyrannical regime.
"Doe had also cut out the heart of Liberia's former army chief General
Thomas Quawonkpa and ate it in 1985," he claimed.
But he is sorry that his action allowed Taylor's rise to power.
"I am a revolutionary. I fought for a cause that I do not see happening.
I regret having removed Doe to see that monster on the throne," he said.
Johnson broke away from Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia,
the rebel group which started the war in December 1989, after Doe's death.
He said that Togolese President Gnassingbe Eyadema had invited the
former comrades-in-arms to Lome twice between 1995 and 1996 and tried in
vain to reconcile them.
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