From General Butt Naked, to Joshua the Evangelist: Is LIberian War Criminal Penitent or Pretending?

An excerpt from a fascinating read at Spiegel Online:

On a Tuesday about six years ago, an attempt was made to quantify Joshua Milton Blahyi's guilt. The president of his native Liberia had appointed a nine-member commission of human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and priests to determine what he had done during the civil war. At the beginning of the 132-minute hearing, they asked him a question: "How many victims were there?" The camera images from the hearing show Blahyi sitting there, dressed in white trousers, a white shirt and white shoes, pondering the question. How many had he killed?

He looked in front of him, into the large, opulent room in which the hearing was taking place. He seemed both focused and completely relaxed. During the war, the spot where the commission was now sitting had been occupied by an overturned presidential throne, a pile of feces and a shiny black Steinway piano. Its legs had been carefully removed, as if surgically amputated. At the time, Blahyi controlled the streets of the Liberian capital Monrovia and went by a different name.

The war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003, claimed 250,000 lives. A million people left the country and up to 20,000 children were recruited as soldiers. Reporters brought home photos of child soldiers wearing Halloween masks and women's wigs, eating human hearts and decorating streets intersections with bones. Families paid for magic spells that they hoped would offer them protection, either with money or by sacrificing a family member. The leaders adopted noms de guerre that could have been taken from films, or nightmares, which they often were: General Rambo, General Bin Laden, General Satan.

Blahyi had a reputation for being more brutal than other military leaders. Everyone knows his nom de guerre, which he says he will never lose: General Butt Naked. He was a cannibal who preferred to sacrifice babies, because he believed that their death promised the greatest amount of protection. He went into battle naked, wearing only sneakers and carrying a machete, because he believed that it made him invulnerable -- and he was in fact never hit by a bullet. His soldiers would make bets on whether a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or a girl, and then they would slit open her belly to see who was right.

Blahyi is now a priest who goes to chess club on Saturdays.

When asked about his victims, he turned his head to the side and wiped his neck. He had only learned to speak English a few years earlier, and he chose his words carefully. He had shaved his cheeks and his massive head, and sweat was running down his forehead. In the end, he said: "I don't know the entire… the entire… the entire number… but if I… if I… were to calculate it… everything I have done… it would be… it shouldn't be fewer than 20,000."
 
A Murderer with Few Peers

There are only a few people in the world accused of a similar number of murders as Blahyi. But no one responded to the accusations against him in the same way he did. Kaing Guek Eav, the head of the Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia, where about 15,000 people were tortured and murdered, referred to himself as an ordinary secretary who had obeyed orders, like everyone else in the machinery. Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, accused of acts of genocide that led to the deaths of 8,000 people in Srebrenica and 11,000 in Sarajevo, called the accusations "monstrous words" that he had never heard before. And General Augustin Bizimungu, who helped write the death lists in Rwanda, said nothing at all.

Blahyi answered each question conscientiously, even when he was asked about the taste of human flesh. The record of the hearing, in which he is confronted with his earlier statements, is kept on file in Liberia's national archive.

"'I recruited children who were nine or 10 years old.' Is this correct?"

"Yes."

"'I planted violence into them. I explained to them that killing people was a game.' Is this correct?"

"Correct."

"'When I shot and wounded an enemy, I would rip open his back and eat his live heart.' Is this correct?"

"Let me be more precise…I also laid down the body and had my child soldiers cut the person to pieces, so that they wouldn't have any feelings for people."

"Are you the same Joshua Milton Blahyi they now call Blahyi the Evangelist?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why did you decide, in light of this … past, to come to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?"

"For my faith. I was told that I should tell the truth, and the truth will set me free."
 
Man of God, or Fraud?

On a Sunday in July, five years after the hearing, Blahyi is preaching to his congregation. The odor of slaughterhouse waste permeates the church in Monrovia. Outside, a child is urinating in the sand. It's the rainy season, but the church is filled with young women in colorful dresses, businessmen wearing ties and parents cradling their children. They have spent three hours singing, dancing and praying. It was more like a festival than a church service, and now, as the event reaches its climax, the man they have been waiting for appears: Pastor Blahyi. He is wearing a white vest. He takes the microphone in his hand and says: "Take your seats. Hallelujah. I want to talk to you about blessings. Praise the Lord!"

He now calls himself Joshua, after the biblical successor to Moses. He preaches the Word of God. He has built a mission for former child soldiers he finds in the streets, and he gives them food and clothing. He has adopted three children. He has more than 2,500 friends on Facebook. He is grateful when he is praised, and he is as happy as a small child when someone embraces him. "He is a good boy," says his mother, who now cooks for the former child soldiers. "Generous and funny," say his children, who now live with him. "A new person," says his wife.

Is it possible that a war criminal can become a man of God? Or is he a fraud? That's the accusation: that he puts on the mask of a preacher every Sunday, but that beneath the mask he remains a murderer.

Blahyi, 42, is sitting on the terrace behind his house in the northern part of Monrovia. He is a heavyset man who once had the body of a fighter. Neighbors are hanging up their laundry. Children are shouting in the garden of the house next door. His daughters, who are on school vacation, are in the kitchen making a salad for the chicken dinner that is about to be served. Blahyi likes having his family around him. He talks about his eldest son Joshua, who is now 12 and about to enter high school, and who wants to become an aeronautical engineer. Blahyi watches a butterfly flying over the palm trees. His eyes become soft when he talks about his children. "I think they're proud of me," he says.

"Do you sleep well at night?"

"I am blessed with good sleep."

"Are you happy?"

"Yes, very."

"Will you go to heaven?"

"That's what it says in the Bible. He who believes in Jesus shall not be condemned."

Blahyi was never punished for his crimes. The Truth Commission's only mandate was to investigate the crimes. The International Criminal Court in The Hague only has jurisdiction over crimes committed since it was founded in 2002. A special tribunal with the power of prosecuting earlier crimes, like the ones for Rwanda, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, was never established for Liberia.

Such a tribunal could be created through a resolution by the United Nations Security Council. But the UN has no clear rules of procedure for cases like Liberia, and there is often a trade-off between justice and stability. In Liberia, stability was chosen over justice, because if everyone in the country who has killed someone were charged with murder, it would probably turn into another Somalia. Nevertheless, Blahyi is convinced that there will eventually be a special tribunal for Liberia.

"Would you be prepared to spend the rest of your life in prison?"

"I would accept it willingly, as well as the death penalty. Even if I could run away, I would not run away. My Lord Jesus says: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's."

"How do you atone for your sins?"

"I visit the people I have hurt, the victims of my crimes. I try to help them."

"You ask for forgiveness?"

"Yes. That's the most difficult moment. I couldn't feel anything in the past. Now I feel their pain."

"What are you afraid of?"

"That I will meet the Lord tomorrow, and he will say: 'You have wasted the opportunity that I have given you.'"

Lyn Westman, an American psychologist who accompanied him for several years, tells the story of Blahyi's encounter with a former enemy who was threatening him with a machete. Blahyi sank to his knees and said that he would be willing to die if it would help the man. The man eventually left him alone.

"There is no trace of his old life," says his wife. But that isn't true. Blahyi has been visiting his victims for years, until they forgive him. And he doesn't want ordinary forgiveness. "Complete forgiveness," he says, forgiveness that must come from the depths of their hearts. That, he says, is God's wish, just as the Bible states in Ephesians 4:32: "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." Nineteen of 76 victims have forgiven him, he says. But most of the victims want nothing to do with him. They lash out at him, berate him or simply walk away in silence.

There are two possible explanations for what Blahyi is doing. The first one is that he has been playing a cynical game for 17 years, the game of the pious man. But in a country with complete impunity for war crimes, that doesn't make much sense. "Here they honor the people without honor," says Blahyi. General Prince Johnson, who had the former president's ears cut off and then let him bleed to death, all the while sitting at his desk with a can of Budweiser, is now a senator in the Liberian parliament. When asked about his former crimes, he says: "It was war. I was a soldier." Why should Blahyi behave as if he were a priest, and trace a past that no one is really interested in? He could have gone into politics or opened an auto repair shop, and no one in Liberia would have been surprised.

The second possibility is that Blahyi has truly changed.