Doe’s bloody legacy recalled

When a 28-year-old Master Sergeant Samuel Doe took power in 1980, he set in motion a series of events that reverberate in Liberia to this day. In a surprise night-time attack on the executive mansion, the 28-year-old and his accomplices brutally murdered President William Tolbert Jr, ending 133 years of rule by black American settlers and their descendants (known as Americo-Liberians). Having dispensed with Tolbert, Doe became Liberia's first President of ‘exclusive indigenous heritage’. In the subsequent decade, Doe inflamed ethnic politics and eked out a suspiciously close victory in the 1985 elections, before he met an even less dignified end than his predecessor. A report on the allAfrica site notes that at the end of the Cold War, his previously unwavering support from the US evaporated and, as Liberia erupted into civil war, Doe was left vulnerable. On 9 September, 1990, he was captured during a visit to the recently deployed Ecowas Monitoring Group in Monrovia. Doe was stripped to his underwear, interrogated on film, and his ear was sliced off. Today, 25 years after Samuel Doe's bloody death, his legacy continues to reverberate in Liberia. Prince Johnson, for example, is now a Liberian Senator, while a range of actors tied to Doe's overthrow, including current President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, remain prominent in politics. While Doe's decade-long rule is often remembered for brutal atrocities, he also has some defenders like William Glay, a cousin and former advisor who claims that many of the most egregious atrocities under Doe's watch, such as a massacre at a Monrovia church, were perpetrated by undisciplined commanders.