Liberian warlord returns to repent ‘20,000 murders’

ONE of Liberia’s most notorious rebel commanders, known as Gen Butt Naked for charging into battle wearing only boots, has returned to confess he is responsible for 20,000 deaths.

Joshua Milton Blahyi, who now lives in Ghana, returned last week to face his homeland’s truth and reconciliation commission. His nom de guerre is derived from his platoon’s practice of charging naked into battle, a technique meant to terrify the enemy.

Other former warlords, though, have refused to ask forgiveness, dismissing a commission many in Liberia see as toothless. Blahyi is urging other killers to come forward as the country struggles to recover from past horrors.

“I could be electrocuted. I could be hanged. I could be given any other punishment,” the 37-year-old Blahyi said following his truth commission appearance last week. “But I think forgiveness and reconciliation is the right way to go. I have been looking for an opportunity to tell the true story about my life.”

The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of three million, was characterised by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women’s wigs, gowns and carrying stolen purses.

Before he led his fighters into battle, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil. The sacrifice was typically “the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat”, he said.

He appeared before the commission on January 15 — and put a figure to his killing spree for the first time.

“More than 20,000 people fell victim [to me and my men],” said Blahyi, who dated the beginning of his murders to 1982, when he was ordained as a ritual priest responsible for making human sacrifices before battle.