Liberian woman commands mercenaries in Korhogo

Awa Michel, a short dark robust woman in her mid 30's, busies herself cooking rice and fish soup over two coal pots outside her house in Cote d'Ivoire's northern city of Korhogo. She is sitting on a rough wooden bench wearing a simple cloth wrapped over her breasts, not a military uniform, and her AK-47 assault rifle is nowhere in sight. But Michel is a seasoned Liberian bush fighter who is second in command of the 42-strong mercenary bodyguard of Adama Coulibaly, the Ivorian rebel warlord who controls Korhogo. He is known locally as "Adams." Michel is loud-mouthed and aggressive in the way she talks and is contemptuous of most men she knows. You can hear her voice a block away. Michel says she has killed men in combat and was nearly killed herself in early 2003 while fighting alongside Ivorian rebel forces. Now she guards her boss, smokes marijuana and sells beer and soft drinks from a big fridge inside her air conditioned bedroom of the spacious villa which she shares with several Liberian comrades near the police headquarters in Korhogo. Like the other Liberian mercenaries in Adams' bodyguard, Michel is given food, but is rarely paid. She would dearly love to go and see her mother who lives in a refugee camp in Guinea. But she doesn't have the money to get there. This is her story, told to an IRIN correspondent visiting Korhogo as she cooked dinner. Michel belongs to the Mandingo tribe of northern Liberia. During the early 1990's she and her older brother joined ULIMO-K, a faction in the civil war that was backed by Guinea. It drew most of its support inside Liberia from Mandingos and Muslims. ULIMO-K eventually allied itself with Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). Following Taylor's victory in the 1997 presidential election, Michel gained entry into Taylor's elite fighting force, the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU). Her brother, "Jungle Jabah", had risen to become a senior commander of ULIMO-K and chose instead to follow the movement's leader, Alhaji Kromah, to the United States. But Michel was determined to pursue a military career at home. Mandingos were regarded as being of suspect loyalty within the ATU, so she changed her surname from Jabateh to Michel - the surname of her foster mother - in order to hide her ethnic origins and gain promotion within the force. She spent 21 months undergoing special forces training with the ATU. Towards the end of 2002, Michel and a group of her ATU colleagues were called to the Executive Mansion in Monrovia where Taylor and his military commander, Benjamin Yeaten, told them they were to be sent on a special mission. They were to go to Butuo on the Cote d'Ivoire border and cross over to attack Ivorian government forces. Michel said she was surprised but did not dare to question orders. She and her group were told that members of Liberia's Krahn tribe were being attacked in Cote d'Ivoire by government forces so they had to go and help out. Michel and more than 200 other ATU soldiers traveled overland to the Ivorian border where Sam Bockarie, the former military commander of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel movement, was waiting for them. Under his orders, they crossed the border to attack the nearby Ivorian town of Bin-Houye and advanced rapidly from there to Zouan-Hounien, and then Danane, a large town near the Liberian border. Michel said she saw helicopter gunships piloted by white men dropping bombs on towns in the area. The Bockarie-led ATU force then headed east to help the Ivorian rebels recapture Man, a large city which changed hands several times during the fighting before ending up under rebel control. The Liberian intervention force fought alongside two small Ivorian rebel movements based in the west of the country; the Ivorian Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP) and the Ivorian Popular Movement of the Great West (MPIGO). Man fell to them after several days of fighting. Without resting, the Liberians then headed south with the aim of capturing San Pedro, the second largest port in Cote d'Ivoire, from which much of the country's exports of cocoa and timber are shipped. However, they were soon halted by government forces and a heavy battle for the town of Bangolo, 50 km south of Man, nearly proved fatal for the Liberian female fighter. A bullet struck her in the back and came out through her left breast. She was seriously wounded, but not quite out of action. "I killed the white man who shot me," she gloated. "I didn't let him escape. Imagine shooting me and then going Scot free. No way, I deal with that man, I finish him off". Bockarie entrusted her to the care of an Ivorian warlord called Adams, who took her to hospital in Man. Michel has been with him ever since. When Adams was forced by a more powerful faction of the rebels to move out of Man at the end of April, she and her Liberian comrades in arms followed him north to Korhogo. She said Bockarie told Adams "Look after my wife and treat her well. If she dies, you die". A few weeks later, Bockarie, who was nicknamed Mosquito, because of his ability to strike suddenly and then melt away into the bush, met his own end. Taylor said Bockarie was killed by Liberian government forces while trying to move back across the border from Cote d'Ivoire with a band of Sierra Leonean mercenaries. But diplomats in Monrovia said he was shot secretly in Monrovia on Taylor's orders after an argument with his boss at the Executive Mansion. Michel simply says that Bockarie was killed because he ran wild and failed in his mission, which was to put a stop to the killing of Liberians in Cote d'Ivoire. "Mosquito started killing Liberian people, he was killing them for no reason. He betrayed my people and he paid for his betrayal," she said. Although Bockarie, a notorious womaniser, refered to Michel as his "wife" when commending her to the care of Adams, Michel said she never had an intimate relationship with the Sierra Leonean mercenary. She is not sentimental about him. Michel said Bockarie and Felix Doh, the leader of MPIGO who he worked with closely, had both betrayed Taylor. As far as she was concerned that was why they were gunned down in unexplained circumstances within a few days of each other. "The price of betrayal is death," she said grimly as she stirred her cooking pots. Master sergent Ousmane Cherif, who is now the military commander of the rebel capital Bouake, was sent to Man in early May 2003 to restore order. But Adams saw the writing on the wall and fled to Korhogo with his Liberian escorts before Cherif arrived at the head of a large force of troops from the largest rebel movement, the Patriotic Movement of Cote d'Ivoire (MPCI). Their task was to control the volatile situation in Man and Danane and the rest of the "Wild West" of Cote d'Ivoire and deal with the Liberian and Sierra Leonean mercenaries there who were making trouble there. Before Cherif's arrival and for many weeks afterwards rival rebel factions fought gun battles with each other every night in the streets of the Man and Danane. But Cherif dealt swiftly with the Liberian and Sierra Leonean mercenaries, who had been accused of committing widespread atrocities against civilians. Michel said bitterly that Cherif killed many of her Liberian comrades. She has sworn to take revenge against him. "He has to die too, you can't just kill Liberians like that" she said. After arriving in Korhogo, Adams talked his way into being given command of the armoured batallion that is based there. Michel and 41 other Liberians stuck alongside him. Now, sitting by her cooking pots while an Ivorian boy pounds onions, tomatoes and peppers into a hot sauce for her fish, Michel talks nostalgically about her mother whom she has not seen for several years. She lives in a Liberian refugee camp near the town of N'zerekore in Southeastern Guinea. Michel would love to go and visit her, but she cannot as she has no money. None of the Liberians in Korhogo are on a payroll, she said. They are fed, clothed and housed, and are given just enough pocket money to buy drinks at least once a week in the local bars. Just before Christmas, 20 of the Liberians were sent to patrol the northern border with Burkina Faso and Mali following a clash between rival rebel factions in the Ivorian border town of Pogo, which left several people dead. But usually all the mercenaries do is hang around the grounds of Adams' residence, acting as his personal security guards. Adams basks in the reputation of being the warlord who captured Man. But he refuses to publicly acknowledge the existence of his Liberian mercenaries, who are led by a man nicknamed "Ellis." Their presence, however, is an open secret in the town. Under the terms of an agreement on 4 July 2003, formally ending a state of war in Cote d'Ivoire, the government and rebels both committed themselves to getting rid of any mercenaries remaining in their ranks. But two senior rebel commanders openly admitted on Friday that Adams was quietly ignoring this requirement. Fofana Idrissa, the head of rebel security in northern Cote d'Ivoire, known as "Fofie, told IRIN by telephone from Korhogo on Friday: "After the mopping up operations in the West which were aimed at removing all Liberians from our ranks, Adama Coulibaly left Man about four or five months ago with some Liberians who serve as his personal bodyguard." "Only he knows why he is still surrounded by Liberians because the international community has banned all foreign soldiers from Ivorian soil." he added. Losseny Fofana, the rebel commander of the western region in Man, also confirmed to IRIN by telephone that Adams was continuing to employ Liberian gunmen. He noted that this was in contravention of orders. Meanwhile, Michel stirs her pots. She won't have any of her young boy helpers do the cooking for her. "No-one can do it the way I want, no-one is as clean as I am, and the cooking has to be done in a certain way in order to taste right," she said.