The overthrow in 1980 of President William Tolbert by Sergeant Samuel Doe, opened a convulsive period that lasted until 2003 when a national reconciliation agreement put an end to the orgy of aggregate that drowned this country with the blood of half a million human beings and at an estimated cost of 100 million dollars.
“To all the victims of our civil war, to all the broken families, to all the destroyed dreams, we say We are sorry; the State could have done more”, the president said at the burial of the ousted president Tolbert and 12 of his closest collaborators, in a symbolic tomb because their remains have never been found.
Tolbert was the last of the Liberian presidents descended from freed slaves repatriated to Africa by order of U.S. President James Monroe in the 19th century.
The program was based on the settlement of these people in a territory to return the Africans forced into slavery to their roots in an artificial state created for them, whose capital adopted the surname of the U.S. president who came up with the idea.
But as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the newcomers soon became an elite that subjugated the indigenous population of what is now Liberia.
jdt/jav/mem/msl







