The Liberian Brutal Civil War: How Professor Alhaji G. V. Kromah Turned A ” Bad Boy”
Every man’s history, from tomb to womb, is fraught with the good and the bad dosage of biography.
There is no philosophical justification in trying to defend the outcome of any man’s life as angel above others, afterwards no man is an angel.
Professor Kromah, like George Boley, Prince Johnson, Roosevelt Johnson, Tom Woiwoyu, and Charles Taylor, among other war blacklegs, played heinous role in the Liberian internecine and gruesome civil war which by the dictate of natural event of death could not proffer him, Koromah, opportunity to face his day in court at acquitting himself from war crime charges and settle his disputed side of history.
Facts and speculation speak volumes to reality that Koroma joined the rank of Taylor to mete out war crimes on Liberians for years.
Koromah’s tribal origin as a Mandingo could have likely denied him his meteoric rise in politics and public service were it not for his educational perfection in the fields of communication and economics which are traced to his academic sojourning in St. Patrick’s High School, the University of Liberia, and American University.
His CV, so colorful, attracted stellar services as research assistant to the Veep’s office in 1978 before the junta coup of 1980.
Subsequently, he served as Director General of ELBC and Minister of Information under Samuel Doe before joining the rank of exiles after the break of civil war in Liberia.
Erelong, the intimacy Koroma had shared with dictator Doe, casting long shadow over the defensive propaganda of Doe’s atrocities by his communication feat, the grapevine was already reporting that Doe was on the inelutable verge of nominating Koroma as his running mate in the ensuing Second Republic’s second election if events were not disrupted by the 1990 civil war.
Koromah joined the rank and file of Doe’s officials who betrayed him as absconders after detecting an incipient defeat of Doe as government forces kept losing battle grounds to invading rebels of Charles Taylor and Johnson.
Professor Koromah joined a bevy of Doe’s escaping soldiers in Guinea and , under the shield of Muslim and Mandingo redemption Movement ( MRM), conjoined rank with Krahn men resilient forces in Sierra Leone , who grouped under the LURD headed and founded by D. Arma Youlo, to hit back at the high level of systematic expulsion of their kinsmen, by Taylor’s NPFL, who were already paying the high cost of their accidental placement with the Krahn and Mandingo ethnicity.
The capture of Doe by Prince Johnson exaerbated the invading forces, and out of aligning common value of seeing Taylor as the banal enemy, LURD and MRM integrated into a phoenix of ULIMO which would later claim war on Taylor, but ironically turned out as atrocious as the Taylor’s movement itself.
The ULIMO’s invasion was offered a bay by the Sierra Leone government under President JS Momoh under whose influence a buffer zone with Liberia was established in order for ULIMO to gain a breathing space.
Apparently, the rebel forces of ULIMO under Gen. Koroma gained de facto and de jure recognition, first by regaining some of Liberia’s western territories from the notorious armed group of NPFL, and second, given a recognition stature in the Geneva Meeting with final endorsement at the Cotonou Agreement under Nicephore Soglo.
Before the height of General Koromah’s villainous and ruthless atrocities, which mismarked on repelling Taylor and stretching tentacles on imaginary enemies, ULIMO plunged into an inimical schism, wherein, splitting the force into ULIMO – J and ULIMO – K squarely on tribal line between the Mandigo and Krahn blocs.
The problem sparked when Koroma revoked a Krahn appointee, Thomas Ziah, membership on the Kpomakpor’s Council of State to be replaced by Dr. Mohammed Sheriff which Johnson, who headed the splintered Bloc of Krahn irritably refuted, hence, as the repercussion wreaked, the ULIMO J went into gory battle with ULIMO K leading to the former capturing all of the western territories including the major seat of Tubmanburg.
Koromah lost control over his ULIMO K forces which surrendered its original focus on repelling Taylor, and subsequently the disarrayed forces settled for notorious destruction of Lorma traditional shrines and systematic murdering, enslavement, extermination, conscription, raping, and deportation of most of the northern tribal groups, including the elimination of moderate Mandigo men and women as enablers.
The worst case scenario of Koroma and war, reflecting a civil character who turned to a flawed character; a prudent mass comm. professor processed into a notorious general, showed its monstrous face when Councilman Koroma entered into Complicity with Councilman Taylor to orchestrate or conspire the heinous April 6 fracas which plunged Monrovia under the cloud of untold blood pouring and heartless massacring of civilians led by ULIMO- K and NPFL ruthless gangsters on one hand and the loose ULIMO – J on the other hand.
Koroma, in his latter days, masked on the face of diplomacy and joined the political cause with two presidential contentions in which he was denied power by the Liberian voters in 1997 and 2005.
He hibernated from politics, but returned to the academia where not much was productive of him, anymore, until he kicked the bucket.
But History will leave of him as death denying him his opportunity to stand war crime trial inorder to have exonerated himself from war crimes and crimes against humanity in Liberia.
