Jane Hahn for The New York Times
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, is
lionized by the outside world as the woman who calmed a country ravaged
by years of civil war.
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: October 7, 2011
MONROVIA, Liberia — The day began in this battered seaside capital with
shouts and drumming for a leading Liberian politician — but not the one
honored with a Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
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Jane Hahn for The New York Times
A women's group organized by Leymah Gbowee prayed and
fasted on Friday in Monrovia, Liberia, calling for peaceful elections.
While Liberians widely acknowledge that peace and security have improved markedly during her tenure, Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf’s success in securing forgiveness for billions of dollars in Liberian debt and the transformation she has effected in the nation’s once infamous international image are often less appreciated here than abroad.
Indeed, as the world absorbed the news of her prize, Monrovia was virtually shut down by a previously scheduled rally to energize the opposition before the presidential election on Tuesday. The early-morning shouting reverberating through the city was for the former sports hero, George Weah, one of Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf’s opponents.
In Oslo, though, she was honored as a peacemaker, along with two women who share the prize with her this year, Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen.
“Three women receiving the Nobel Peace Prize is really overwhelming,” Ms. Gbowee said. “It’s finally a recognition that we can’t ignore the other half of the world’s population.”
Ms. Gbowee led a grass-roots women’s protest movement credited with helping to end the 14-year war in Liberia in 2003. She was at the forefront of mass open-air demonstrations at a Monrovia fish market in defiance of the warlords who ruled the country, shaming them into heeding the women’s demands.
About 250,000 people were killed in the war, and the country’s infrastructure, institutions, and economy were ruined. With its accounts of mass killings, rape and cannibalism, Liberia — the first independent republic in Africa — had become a poster child for Africa’s ills.
The country has been at peace since then, roads have been built, children in uniform again attend classes, the country’s $4.6 billion in foreign debt has been wiped out, and Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf is credited with presiding over the change. In 2005, she became the first woman elected as a head of state in Africa, and the Nobel committee, in highlighting the gender of this year’s recipients, acknowledged the central role that the Liberian war’s most brutalized victims — women — have played in healing the country.
“We are now going into our ninth year of peace, and every Liberian has contributed to it,” Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf said Friday in Monrovia after the Nobel announcement. “We particularly give this credit to Liberian women, who have consistently led the struggle for peace, even under conditions of neglect.”
But peace may not be enough to guarantee re-election. The gap between expectation and accomplishment, like that between international perceptions of Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf and domestic ones, is wide, especially in a nation that ranked 162nd out of 169 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index in 2010.
The Nobel award was dropped into the midst of a heated re-election campaign in which Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf is given only an even chance. Her campaign billboards — “Monkey Still Working, Let Baboon Wait Small” — plead with voters in Liberian patois to let her finish the job. But a potent opposition slogan plastered through Monrovia — “Too old to hold” — sums up the counterview of the 72-year-old president: that she has not tackled the country’s myriad problems with sufficient energy.
“She gave out a lot of promises, that she would bring water and light,” said Napoleon Bloe, an unemployed man in a shack-lined waterfront slum of dirt streets in the capital. “The people are suffering.”
Mrs. Sirleaf Johnson’s opponents dismissed the prize and its potential impact on the race. “I don’t think there are many Liberians who pay attention to the pronouncements of the Nobel committee,” said Robert Tubman, a spokesman for the nominal head of Mr. Weah’s ticket, Winston Tubman.
The frenzy here all week has been for the former soccer star, and on Friday Monrovia was mobbed by supporters of the Weah-Tubman ticket. Traffic was paralyzed and streets were jammed in the final pre-election rally.
“Let the international community know that we are tired with this woman,” said Nathaniel Eastman, an unemployed man. “In fact, a woman cannot be the head. Man will always be the head.”
Mr. Weah, who lost to Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf in the 2005 election, brings traffic to a standstill wherever he appears, leaning out of his olive green Hummer.
“That man is my life,” said Salia Konneh, a self-employed businessman, beaming as Mr. Weah passed this week. “He’ll electrify this country, because we live in darkness.”
At Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf’s residence on Friday, several hundred supporters showed up to celebrate, though the atmosphere was considerably more subdued than at the rally for Mr. Weah. Many on the streets here said they knew nothing of the announcement from Oslo, though some expressed obvious pride.
“Since she got in the chair, for me, we are experiencing peace; so I think she deserved it,” said Emmanuel Ogbodu, a teacher. “Through her, peace came. Before, we were in the chaos of fighting.”
Nobody disputes that the political atmosphere in Liberia, once a byword for repression, has lightened beyond recognition under Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf. A veteran of Liberian politics, she has a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard, once served as minister of finance in a government overthrown in a bloody coup, and later spent years in political exile.
“You hear that noise?” said a doctor who lived here through the years of turmoil, Moses Massaquoi, gesturing out the window at the din from an opposition political rally. “In America, people talk like that, too,” he said, suggesting that Liberia had reached a level of democracy in which government opponents could campaign openly, even boisterously.
But analysts say more tangible benefits are harder to pin down. Corruption “remains pervasive at all levels” amid “widespread claims of malfeasance in government circles,” a recent report on Liberia by the International Crisis Group noted.
A leading anticorruption official was not reappointed, and Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf has ignored a report by a commission set up to investigate crimes committed during the war. It recommended that she be banned from office for 30 years because of her early involvement with the warlord Charles Taylor, which she later said she regretted. There have been no prosecutions, rankling many voters.
“If people are not penalized, other people might have similar mind to do the same thing,” said Agrippe Nyanti, a pastor.
This mixed picture dampened expressions of enthusiasm for the newest Nobel laureate.
“Progress, generally, yes — we’re not at war,” said John Kollie, head of Liberia Media Initiative, a good-governance organization. But he adds that Mr. Weah’s camp “have the people behind them,” and it will be “tough” for the president.
Those who support her insist that the scale of her task — putting a country in ruins back together — makes the yardstick unfair.
“No one ever lives up to expectations,” said Christopher Blattman, a Liberia expert at Yale University. “She doesn’t seem to be an effective president in some ways. She’s very mired in the details.” Still, Mr. Blattman added: “I don’t think there’s a serious possibility of Liberia going back to war. That’s a big change.”
One of the biggest boons she has brought to this small coastal nation of just under four million people is invisible on the ground and appears to be largely a matter of indifference to the impoverished citizens here.
“Liberia was a fearful, frightful, violent place,” said the American ambassador here, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. “She’s changed that image. She’s made Liberia a country that’s respected.”
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