Prince Johnson, a former warlord who calmly sipped a Budweiser and had a woman fanning him as he watched his soldiers mutilate and murder Liberia’s president, Samuel K. Doe, died on Nov. 28 in a suburb of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. He was 72.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed in a news release from the Liberian Senate, where Mr. Johnson served. No cause was given.
Though a 2009 government report highlighting Mr. Johnson’s atrocities in Liberia’s civil wars urged that he be brought to justice, he was never prosecuted.
Instead, elected to the Senate in 2005 from his native Nimba County, he held office until his death and acted as a power broker in presidential elections. Liberian news media last week showed two former presidents, including Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, paying respects to the former warlord’s relatives.
Mr. Johnson’s name was the first on Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s list of “notorious perpetrators” during the country’s two civil wars, from 1989 to 2003, which introduced the world to the sight of child soldiers wearing fright masks and wedding gowns and brandishing automatic weapons. His crimes, according to the commission, included killing, extortion, massacre, destruction of property, forced recruitment, assault, abduction, torture, forced labor and rape.
In May, Liberia’s current president, Joseph Boakai, established a war crimes court. But after decades of impunity for former military leaders and their followers for wars that killed an estimated 250,000 people, many Liberians have dim hopes of seeing justice done.
Mr. Johnson, a former officer in the Liberian army, was at first aligned with the rebel leader Charles G. Taylor, who launched an insurgency in 1989 against the dictatorial Mr. Doe.
The war’s roots were entwined in Liberia’s past as a nation founded by freed American slaves, whose descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, tightly held political and economic control, excluding indigenous groups. Mr. Doe, a member of the Krahn ethnic group, seized power in a bloody coup in 1980. His corrupt rule, during which power and patronage were showered on the Krahn, was at first supported by the United States government as a bulwark against Communist advances in the Cold War.
Early in their insurgency, Mr. Taylor, an Americo-Liberian, and Mr. Johnson, a member of the Gio ethnic group, fell out with each other. They commanded rival factions of militias in assaults on Monrovia.
In September 1990, soldiers from Mr. Johnson’s Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia abducted Mr. Doe and filmed his torture and death. In a video broadcast worldwide, Mr. Johnson is seen sipping beer, his feet on a table, taunting a bloodied Mr. Doe, whose ear has been sliced off by Mr. Johnson’s henchmen. He died soon after.
Mr. Johnson briefly claimed the leadership of Liberia, but he was soon marginalized by Mr. Taylor and left the country for Nigeria. He remained there for 12 years, saying he had become a born-again Christian and an evangelical pastor. He watched from the sidelines as Mr. Taylor held the Liberian presidency from 1997 to 2003.
Mr. Taylor was arrested in 2006 on charges of committing mass atrocities in the conflict in neighboring Sierra Leone and was convicted by an international tribunal in 2012. He is serving a 50-year sentence in England.
Mr. Johnson returned to Liberia from exile in 2004, declaring his intention to enter electoral politics. He expressed regret for Mr. Doe’s murder but defended his role as a warlord.
“I have done nothing criminal,” he said in 2011, as quoted by Agence France-Presse. “I fought to defend my country, my people, who were led to the slaughterhouse as if they were chickens and goats by the Doe regime.”
Prince Yormie Johnson (Prince was his first name, not a title) was born on July 6, 1952, in Nimba, the largest of Liberia’s counties and once an important source of iron ore, gold and diamonds.
After winning a senate seat from Nimba in 2005, Mr. Johnson, widely known in his country by the initials P.Y.J., ran for president in 2011. Though his bloody past was well known, many Liberians, including in his populous home county, were willing to look the other way. He finished third, with more than 11 percent of the vote. By throwing his support to Ms. Johnson Sirleaf in the two-candidate runoff, he played a role as kingmaker in her re-election.
In 2017, his backing helped elect George Weah, a former professional soccer player, in a presidential runoff. Mr. Johnson later said he had traded his support for a promise that residents of Nimba County would get top government jobs.
In 2021, the United States imposed sanctions on Mr. Johnson for corruption under the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows the government to seize the assets of individuals responsible for corruption or gross human rights violations. Mr. Johnson was accused of receiving kickbacks from Liberian government ministries and of vote-buying “in multiple Liberian elections.”
Mr. Johnson denounced the sanctions. “America’s sanction is not a storm for me,” he was reported to have said at the time. “I’m standing strong.”
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
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