Posted: Wednesday July 25, 2001 6:17 PM

By S.L. Price
Issue date: April 16, 2001 

Jack the Rebel came calling in May of that year, as the rainy season began and the civil war spun into endgame. 
     The streets of Liberia's capital, Monrovia, bore the latest bad fruit of Charles Taylor's seven-year drive for power: boy soldiers killing for fun, 3,000 dead within the previous two months, U.S. Marines evacuating thousands of foreigners, and warlords and their armies looting the city in a final spasm of greed. Jack the Rebel pulled up at George Weah's house in a convoy consisting of one military transport and five pickup trucks, some 70 men spilling out the sides. Jack the Rebel stood with a piece of paper in hand and shouted, "Everybody out! Get your asses out!" When the dozen or so men and 17 women in the house--friends, relatives and employees of Weah's--emerged and saw the waiting troops, they began to tremble like leaves in a howling wind, because they assumed it was time to die. 

         The men were told to line up with their hands on a wall that shielded the house from the street. The women were sent back inside. Jack the Rebel waved the piece of paper and said, "George Weah has written a letter saying he wants to be president of this country. He doesn't want to play football anymore. He's getting into politics." Then the troops began beating the men. 

     One soldier proclaimed, "Each woman will receive seven men here tonight! If anybody shakes, we'll kill every one of you!" The air echoed with the cocking of automatic weapons. A pack of soldiers went into the house. The screams began not long after, and sometime later a soldier came out and said to the troops guarding the men, "If you stay there, you'll miss everything we're enjoying!" 

     That is how the soldiers came to leave the men with their hands on the wall, and the men took the opportunity to flee. The troops began sacking Weah's home, emptying it of everything of value: furniture, clothing, crockery, spoons, doors, cameras, someone's pet crocodile, a prized album of photos from Weah's brilliant career. The soldiers also took two of Weah's cars: a Mercedes and a Land Rover. "If they couldn't carry it," says one witness, "they destroyed it." Then they splashed the house with gasoline and set it on fire. 

Weah was in Italy, starring for the European soccer power AC Milan, when he heard that his house had been burned and that all the women inside, including two of his teenage cousins, had been raped. Only four months earlier the international soccer federation (FIFA) had named Weah World Player of the Year for 1995; he was the greatest soccer talent Africa had produced, Liberia's proudest export. Being a national hero, however, did not make him untouchable. On May 20, 1996, three days before the assault on his house and family, The New York Times had quoted Weah as saying the U.N. should move into Liberia, supplant the battling warlords and teach his country democratic ways. 

     Later Taylor, a former government minister who would be elected president of Liberia in July 1997, insisted that he had not ordered the attack on Weah's house, but who believed him? Taylor had assured Weah that his belongings would be safe. He had, in fact, charged Jack the Rebel--the nom de guerre of Taylor's loyal lieutenant George Dwannah--with protecting Weah's home. Nonetheless, the day before the troops surrounded the place, Jack the Rebel had told Weah by telephone that the arrangement was over. The soccer player was now seen as a political threat. 

In the ensuing days Taylor declared that those responsible for the attack would be found and punished, but nothing of the kind happened. Today Jack the Rebel is a colonel in President Taylor's personal army, the Special Security Service. Immediately after the attack Taylor's longtime aide Reginald Goodrich, now his press secretary, took possession of Weah's Mercedes and drove it proudly through the city. 

When Weah and his wife, Clar, returned to Liberia for the first time after the attack, in the spring of 1997, they attended a gathering at the home of Alhaji Kromah, who had been an ally of Taylor's during the 

citywide carnage of the spring of '96. Clar gasped, and George hissed at her not to say a word. There, according to a witness, was the table that had sat in the Weahs' living room. 

Friends had advised Weah not to return that spring. Clar had implored him to stay away until peace returned. Even today, with Liberia relatively calm and Weah's stature further enhanced by his stewardship of the potent national team, the Lone Star, Clar fears the worst. "Whenever George goes to Liberia, I'm afraid," she says in their house in Queens, N.Y. "The country's happy because the Lone Star is winning, but I still tell him, 'George, call me as soon as you get there.' I was afraid they were going to kill George." 

Weah doesn't listen. He has returned to Liberia time and again in the last five years, even though Taylor has retooled his brutal rebellion into brutal rule. Weah, 34, has always believed that a man who burns the bridge to his past is lost. If someone else does the burning, "you build a bridge and go across," he says. "You always have to come back." 

This time, a late night in February 2001, Weah flies to Liberia from France, where he now plays for the team Olympique Marseilles. As he strides across the tarmac in Monrovia, people rush out of the darkness to touch him. A huge crowd waits at one end of the runway, some members waving a banner of welcome. He steps into the pack and disappears, wrapped in its embrace. "Silence!" one man commands. "Let the king speak!" 

Weah thanks the welcomers, whispers a few pleasantries, says nothing earthshaking. It doesn't matter. The crowd cheers the moment he stops speaking, because what's important is that George Weah is home when he doesn't have to be; when he could be in the U.S. with his wife and three children; when he could be in Marseilles, where the water actually flows out of faucets and the buildings aren't pocked by gunfire. The people cheer because as Liberia sinks further into the ranks of pariah states, Weah not only returns but also comes bearing the ultimate gift: distraction. For this week, at least, there's a chance for Liberians to obsess about the national team and drink a bit and forget that, after 11 years of unrelenting misery, their world is still going straight to hell. 

Each day passes, and each day he smiles, dances, betrays no nerves, though the stars have aligned to make this trip extraordinary. Not long ago Weah--name and fortune made over two decades with his dazzling play for AS Monaco, for Paris-St. Germain and, especially, for the 1996 and '99 Italian league champion, AC Milan--had resigned himself to retiring without representing country and continent in the World Cup. Playing for his third professional team in 10 months and having been relegated from striker to midfield, he seemed sure to become the greatest player since England's George Best to miss out on sport's greatest event. Then, handed one last chance, Weah began to concoct a sporting miracle. 

Since last June, when he took over as the Lone Star's technical director and coach as well as its star player, Weah has set up goal after goal and led Liberia to nine wins in 10 games, including upsets of Ghana and powerhouse Nigeria. But the upcoming home game on Sunday, Feb. 25, against the pathetic team from Sierra Leone, will be "the most important of all," he says, because if Liberia wins, it will vault past Nigeria to the top of Africa's Group B in the 2002 World Cup qualifying tournament with four games to go, putting untold pressure on Nigeria--only one team from the group qualifies--and giving the Lone Star's players a taste of rarefied air. 

Like all of life in Liberia, though, the match has been complicated by Taylor. In December a U.N. report called Taylor "the single most destabilizing force in West Africa," accusing him of supplying the rebel forces of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front with arms in exchange for diamonds. That wasn't Taylor's first dose of international condemnation. A fugitive from Liberian justice who had been charged with embezzling $900,000 from the government, Taylor used a hacksaw and knotted bedsheets to break out of a Massachusetts jail where he was awaiting extradition in 1985. He then fled to Libya, where he cultivated a close relationship with its strongman, Mu'ammar Gadhafi. Taylor returned to Liberia on Christmas Eve 1989 and, with a small group of rebels, began a campaign of terror. Human-rights groups have charged Taylor with the gamut of wartime atrocities: systematic dismemberment of civilians; use of rape to spread fear; injection of heroin and cocaine into child soldiers to blunt their aversion to killing. 

The U.S. has placed a travel ban on Taylor and members of his government, and the December U.N. report recommended that the ban be extended worldwide, along with embargoes on the purchase of Liberian diamonds and timber. Now, as military skirmishes along Liberia's borders with Sierra Leone and Guinea foster one of the world's worst refugee crises, the Liberian football association hasn't heard from its Sierra Leone counterpart. On Tuesday, Feb. 20, word comes that Sierra Leone has petitioned FIFA to cancel Sunday's game or move it. The team is too frightened to come to Monrovia to play. 

"Sports people can protect the players," Weah says. "Whatever it costs to safeguard the Sierra Leone players, we will do it." 

Thus the week unfolds as a strange dance of contrasts: Weah extending an open hand, Taylor shaking his fist. On Wednesday, Taylor jails four Liberian newspapermen for treason after they report that Taylor's regime spent $73,000 on Christmas cards and helicopter repairs at a time when Monrovia's main hospital was closed for lack of funds and civil servants were going unpaid. On Thursday the government raids four newspapers and shuts them down. Weah, meanwhile, makes preparations for a small peace ceremony that he has arranged before Sunday's game, and when, on Thursday, FIFA denies Sierra Leone's petition to cancel or move the game, he sends word that he will host a postgame party at his house for the Sierra Leone team, win or lose. 

This is why Weah collects nicknames, such as Big Papa, that try to capture his essence, and why Liberian customs agents need write only KING GEORGE in their ledgers to mark his arrival. It is why, when a sour-faced Liberian official upbraids a foreign photographer for snapping pictures of kids playing soccer, only to hear that the man is a guest of Weah's, the official softens. "The Ambassador?" he asks, referring to Weah. "Welcome to Liberia!" 

Liberians, like most soccer fanatics, hate losing; a poor performance guarantees the heaping of insults and threats on any available player. "If you lose in this country, they will kill you," says Francois Massaquoi, Liberia's minister of youth and sports. "But I sleep; I snore in the night. Even if we lose on Sunday, the fans know this team has done its best. They trust George." 

They know: No one has given more of himself to Liberia over the last decade. Weah, who earned more than $15 million during his prime years with AC Milan, paid close to $2 million out of his own pocket to keep the Lone Star alive after the civil war began in 1990. He moved the Lone Star's training camp to nearby Ivory Coast and became a one-man football association, supplying jerseys, cleats and equipment and paying the players' salaries. After Taylor's men burned his house in 1996, Weah only intensified his efforts on the team's behalf. That May he sent someone through rebel lines with money to charter a bus for the Lone Star to travel from Ivory Coast to a game in Accra, Ghana. That October, Weah bought tickets to fly in 10 Liberian players from Europe, chartered a plane for $47,000 to fly the team to a game in Zaire and paid everyone in the 27-man delegation a per diem of anywhere from $400 to $1,000. Of the 25 players on the current Lone Star, 10 landed overseas contracts because Weah recommended them, paid for their flights to tryouts, put his name on the line for them. A half dozen other Liberian players owe their overseas careers to Weah. 

Then there are the stories about how Weah sent one Liberian he had never met to the U.S. for medical treatment; how he kept handing money to patients in the hospital in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast ($1,000 here, $1,000 there); and how, whenever Weah returned to Liberia for Christmas, he would withdraw $20,000 from the bank in $20s and $50s. Then he would stand at the front door of his house, and, Clar says, "people would come, and George would give them Christmas." 

"He's been designated by God," says Liberian striker Frank Seator. "George has assisted millions of people, indirectly and directly. We have ministers here who have money, and they don't give anybody one cent. But he takes his time, his money, to go out to the people. It's not 'Come to my house on Monday, I'll give you money.' He goes to them and gives money. I'm telling you: He's designated. You can't get over how he lives his life." 

Asked about this, Weah says only that the Liberian people paid the taxes that paid for him to improve as a player, especially when an earlier government sent him to Brazil to polish his skills. He currently supports more than 150 people in Liberia but figures that's the least he can do. "Everything I have, I owe to the Liberian people," Weah says. "I give back what they gave me." 

Hoover Amos, one of Weah's security men, says many Liberians have a different explanation. "My father says George has the spirit of Jesus Christ," Amos says. "He calls George 'Wonderful.' Anytime George is about to come to the country, my father says, 'Oh, Lord, Jesus Christ is coming. Wonderful is coming.'" 

Everyone agrees that Weah could be elected president in a landslide. He insists he has no interest in politics--Weah's associates say the letter Jack the Rebel brandished was a fabrication--but he is well aware of his power. A few years ago Weah told a U.S. newspaper, "I could take out the warlords ... My followers could take over the country," but he said that would only create more bloodshed. Besides, Clar has forbidden him even to think about running for office. "I think he would be assassinated," she says. 

In 1997 Taylor ran for president--serenaded by his infamous campaign song, "You kill my ma, you kill my pa, [but] I will vote for you!"--and received 75% of the vote in an election that international observers, including Jimmy Carter, declared clean. Today, with most of his wartime rivals exiled, bought off or killed, Taylor is unchallenged. So it is that Africa's oldest republic, a country founded by former U.S. slaves seeking freedom, has only two poles of power left: a king and a dictator, one prompting love and the other fear, each uneasily feeding the other's dream. Taylor needs a winning Lone Star to divert people's attention from his regime's misdeeds. Weah needs Taylor's support, or at least benign neglect, to get to the World Cup. 

Proceed to Part II