The first time I went into prison, I was in prison with a lot of students, and the U.S. Congress took a very strong position on that. And, you know, the sense of the Congress was they were even going to cut off support because, you know, we had become a folk hero by taking the position I took against the military regime.
And so that rallied a lot of international attention and support and, ultimately, the U.S. institutions – some of the NGOs and all of those that rallied to the cause and wrote their congressman. And so that was very helpful.
And the second time, like I said, I was Vice President of Citicorp when I went home to form this political party; and then got into trouble then. And so, ultimately, I had to leave Citibank; but they rallied around me and got the banking community, the financial institutions to weigh heavily again through the U.S. Government to make sure that we got out.
And, frankly, the women in our country rallied too. I mean, you know, thousands and thousands of them wrote petitions, but that rallying domestically also brought a lot of international attention, international support. There were foreign journalists that went to cover this emerging drama, you know, of taking on a military regime; and that in itself brought a lot of pressure on the regime, and they perhaps helped to get us all – finally we all got freed.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the president of Liberia. She was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
Sirleaf served as minister of finance in Liberia until the 1980 coup d’état by Samuel Doe. She left the country and served in senior positions with the World Bank and later Citibank.
Sirleaf returned to Liberia in 1985 and was arrested and imprisoned by the Doe government. After her release, she went into exile in the United States where she remained throughout a brutal Liberian civil war between the Doe government and a rebel group headed by warlord Charles Taylor. Following a peace agreement ending the war, Sirleaf returned home to run unsuccessfully against Taylor for the presidency. Taylor’s election has been attributed in part to a fear by the Liberian public that he would restart the war if he lost.
Following a second Liberian civil war, Taylor was exiled in 2003. Sirleaf again sought the presidency and was elected in 2005, the first woman democratically elected to serve as a head of state in Africa.
In 2008, Sirleaf published her memoir, “This Child Will Be Great.”
The Republic of Liberia was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, but the majority of the population was and continues to be members of indigenous ethnic groups. The nation modeled itself on American principles and adopted a constitution similar to the United States. Indigenous groups were excluded from citizenship until 1904 and frequently clashed with the Americo-Liberian settlers.
Americo-Liberians dominated politics for most of the country’s history. The True Whig Party was de facto the only political party for much of the 20th century. In 1980, Samuel Doe led a military coup d’état that overthrew and killed President William Tolbert, who had been in power since 1971. The Doe regime was characterized by widespread human rights violations and was challenged by armed insurgencies consisting of members of other ethnic groups.
After a long and bloody civil war during which Doe was executed by a rival group, a peace agreement among the warring factions led to the election of guerrilla leader Charles Taylor as president in 1997. Under Taylor, the government continued to be characterized as brutal and corrupt. Taylor sponsored an insurgent army in the civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone that killed and injured thousands.
Taylor left the country in 2003 and was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in 2012. A broad-based transitional government ruled Liberia until 2005 when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected. Sirleaf called for the extradition of Taylor and cooperated with the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Her government established a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to deal with issues arising from the war. Since 2005, the human rights situation in Liberia has improved, although international watchdog groups continue to express concern over aspects of the judicial system and other issues.
President Sirleaf was elected to a second term in a November 2011 election that was characterized by international observers as free and fair.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2013 report, Liberia was rated as “partly free.” The country earned a rating of three in political rights and four in civil liberties, with one being the most free and seven being the least. Liberia faces serious issues of corruption, which affect the functioning of the bureaucracy and judicial system.