Donate NowJina Moore, for the Pulitzer Center (Photos by Glenna Gordon)
Last week, for the Christian Science Monitor, I headed to Congo Town, home of beloved warlord Charles Taylor. Seriously. Beloved. Warlord. More on that in the story, when it runs. One of the guys I met there is Bill Akar, a general under Taylor. Today, he sits under a tree just down the road from Taylor's old house, foreboding even in its emptiness…and kinda creepy, always wishing people "Season's Greetings." Akar charges people's cell phones with a small generator and spends the rest of his time preaching in ghettoes, he says. One of the Liberian journalists who went with me said, "This is a guy everyone knew. People would hear his name and run."
But today, Akar says, he is a man of peace and Jesus. The first thing Akar said to me? "I was a general for Charles Taylor, a great man for him. Today I bless God for Victory Outreach [Church], which came with the vision to evangelize us, to reclaim our lives from drugs, alcohol and other abuses. Today, I testify. I am an evangelist."
A reformed man, my Liberian colleagues and I expected him to be a bit more confessional than he ended up being. Sure, Taylor committed crimes, and Akar says it would be better if Taylor confessed, made "people understand why, and say 'I'm sorry.'" But justice? "Man can prosecute him," Akar said, but "wherever Taylor is at now, no man can free him from that."
And what of Akar, a man whose name once made people run with fear? Does conversion lead to confession?
Not so much.
Akar insisted he was "my man age" when he joined Taylor – he wasn't a child soldier, was his point, but it also opened the door to intention and culpability. So why did he join? "That's best known only to me," he said. Then he added, "I saw people going against me; I saw people killing Gio and dumping them into the valley. We had to take arms."
Ah, the old "kill them before they kill you" defense. I've heard this one before.
What did Akar do during the war? He dodged the question. I tried a different angle: Did you do anything during the war you should be punished for? "That's best known only to me," he said again.
He admitted that he was an infamous guy during the war. "I was more greater than some" of the men recommended for prosecution by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he said. But he was also, he insisted, no different. "Everybody holds the gun [in the war], but today every man…shall live by his character."
Nice words, but what about the people who remember the old Bill Akar? Can they forget what he did?
"I see myself as a role model," he told me. "Many days I go to the [radio] studio, and people say, 'If God can forgive Bill Akar…'"
Maybe God forgave him, I said, but do the people who remember him want to see him punished? Some do, he concedes.
"If you want to prosecute me as a living sacrifice, I'm willing. But I've already been seeking forgiveness from God. Second Corinthians 5:17 says, 'Behold all things have passed, and all things are new,'" he said. "Now I'm carrying with Jesus. So why? Why?"