79 JFK AND BEYOND

The Night He Almost Died
Carr Fellow Talks About the Torture and Pain

HE REMEMBERS EVERYTHING about that night, as if it had just happened. Names. Smells. Exact times. Whole conversations. It was the night two years ago when he was beaten so badly by his own government that he thought he would die, naked and covered in melted candle wax, on the floor of a dirty jail cell. It was the night that eventually forced him, a well-known lawyer, to flee Liberia with his wife and two children.

Tiawan Gongloe’s charge? There never officially was one, but, unofficially, it was for giving a speech in Guinea on peace and violence in Liberia, which, under the direction of then-president Charles Taylor, had been at civil war since 1980.

He doesn’t regret what happened.

“I have regrets, not for what I did, but for having to leave,” he said.

Despite leaving, Gongloe, currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights, where he is studying Liberia’s judicial system, has already found a place in Liberia’s history.

“Liberians in trouble always knew Tiawan Gongloe’s door would be open,” said Binaifer Nawrojee of Human Rights Watch, when the nonprofit honored him with its highest award in 2003.

Helping others, often for free, saved his life. The day Gongloe was arrested, the government also shut down the newspaper that ran a copy of his speech. Luckily, other media pulled together, and word spread that he was in jail. With outside pressure mounting, there was no way that Taylor’s people could kill him.

“Every lawyer, every journalist, was agitating for my release,” he said. “I was a lawyer for almost all of the independent papers. I rarely got paid, but I felt paid that morning.”

Was there a chance he would die?

“Three others had been put in the cell that day too. One was a special police officer. One was a member of the anti-terrorist unit, and the third, a member of Taylor’s security force,” Gongloe said. “They were kind to me. At about 10:30 p.m., a man came to the station, when everyone else except the guards had gone home. He was from a group that did nasty things for Taylor. I gave up then and said, ‘I’m dead.’”

The three men were sent for. When they came back, they had a new attitude. They yelled and forced him to stand naked in a tub filled with urine. They told him to do 2,000 squats.

“I was punched and kicked every time I couldn’t do it,” he said, demonstrating the exercise. “The smell was awful. I was slipping and falling. At one point, I collapsed. When I came to, there was candle wax all over me.”

The next morning, the trio came back, beat him again, then told him his lawyers were waiting.

“I had to crawl out of the cell,” he said.

The lawyers eventually convinced them to let Gongloe go to a hospital, where he stayed under house arrest for a week, surrounded by military guards. A few of the nurses on the take tried to feed him slow poison. Eventually, after being released, he left the country, although not without hesitation.

“Amnesty International came to my house and said they were going to take me that night to Sierra Leone because the government was going to charge me with treason,” he said. “I said, if I escape with you, they’ll say flight is an admission of guilt. I’m not going to make it easy for the government. The public stood up for me, and I’m not escaping.”

He did leave when it became clear that his death would be an “accident.” He settled first in Philadelphia with his sister, a journalist also in exile. Last spring, he came to Harvard, first to the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute then the Carr Center. Now with Taylor out of power, he hopes to return to his country.

“When the security situation improves, I’ll go back,” he said. — LH