Former Liberian warlord, Prince Y Johnson, a key player in the 1989-2003 back-to-back civil wars, died Thursday aged 72. Officials from his party and the Senate told AFP.
Johnson, who was seen sipping beer in a video as fighters loyal to him tortured then president Samuel Doe to death in 1990, was an influential senator.
“Senator Johnson was the longest-serving senator,” said Siaffa Jallah, deputy director of press at the Senate.
“Yes, we lost him this morning. He passed away at Hope for Women (health centre)”, Wilfred Bangura, a senior official in Prince Johnson’s Movement for Democracy and Reconstruction party, told AFP.
The death of Doe was an early bloody episode that would plunge Liberia into two civil wars, which killed some 250,000 people and ravaged the economy.
Prince Johnson, who hailed from the northern region of Nimba, later became a preacher in an evangelical church where he enjoyed wide popularity.
He was also a leading opponent of the creation of a tribunal that would try civil war-related crimes.
In 2005 Liberian general election he founded a political party, the National Union for Democratic Progress (NUDP) in 2010, before being expelled from it in 2014.
He founded a new party, Movement for Democracy and Reconstruction (MDR) in 2016. He has since been re-elected to the Senate in 2014 and 2023. He was also an unsuccessful candidate for President in 2011 and 2017, respectively finishing in third and fourth place in the first round.
Johnson was born in Tapeta, Nimba County, in the east-central interior of the country, and was brought up by an uncle in the capital city of Monrovia. In 1971, while living in Monrovia, he joined the Liberian National Guard (LNG), which was transformed into the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) in the aftermath of Samuel Doe’s 1980 overthrow of President William R. Tolbert.
He rose to the rank of Lieutenant, receiving military training in both Liberia and the United States, where he was instructed in military police duties in South Carolina. A stern, often draconian, disciplinarian, he served as aide-de-camp to Gen. Thomas Quiwonkpa, the Commanding General of the Armed Forces of Liberia,[4] and accompanied him into exile in 1983, after Quiwonkpa was accused of plotting a coup against Doe.
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