Speaking at the ongoing public hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at the Centennial Pavilion in Monrovia, Mr. Kromah, who is erstwhile leader of the United Liberation Movement for Democracy in Liberia (ULIMO), an armed group, also regretted that the early victory did not translate into the preservation of African values in Liberia.
Such victory, he continued, did not also see the unrestricted application of the tenets of democracy that “we should have experienced in the United States of America”.
Mr. Kromah, who currently teaches mass communication at the University of Liberia, told the hearings attended by thousands of citizens and foreign residents that the freed Black people who organized Liberia, the first African Republic, in the midst of the European scramble for Africa, ironically elected to pursue an attitude of skin color, cultural and religious discrimination.
“We should have followed the vision of reconciliation and population integration propounded by founding fathers like King Sao Boso, Chief Zangar, erroneously called Chief Bob Gray, Edward Wilmot Blyden and Benjamin J.K. Anderson,” he declared.
Giving a classic example, the witness posited that Firestone in Liberia could have been a robust base for transforming the country's vast indigenous manpower into skilled participants of manufacturing, only if “we had followed the patriotic stance” of men like Edwin Barclay and Louis Arthur Grimes, who legally questioned the leasing of one million acres of Liberian land for the exploitation of cheap raw materials and labor without a caveat for production of rubber products.
“When the settler government attempted to focus on the usefulness of the interior population, it had already taken some 80 years since independence in 1847, and yet that recognition had nothing to do with citizenship or democracy,” he further told the hearing.
Commenting on the role of his erstwhile armed faction, ULIMO, in the decade-long Liberian conflict, Professor Kromah said it was a resistance movement committed to fighting Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), a rebel group, which overran the country and weakened the then constitutional and legitimate Government of President Samuel Kanyon Doe, leading to the assassination of the President.
The witness contended that ULIMO sought to bring much needed relief and hope to thousands of Liberians who were forced into exile in the West African sub-region and beyond by Taylor's NPFL war and to prevent “total rebel takeover” of the country.
He indicated that ULIMO's struggle was also aimed at paving the way for the multitude of Liberian refugees in foreign parts at the time to return home.
Giving another reason for ULIMO's formation, Kromah said the killing of Mandingo and Muslim people were a “source of bewilderment” for him. “In less than two months, hundreds of Mandingoes were killed in Nimba County,” he pointed out as he broke down in tears at the hearings while wiping his tears with a white handkerchief.
Mr. Kromah asserted that Mandingoes and Muslims who could not run from the NPFL onslaught were “killed like chickens”. He said the formation of his group was “to engage Mr. Taylor in order for him to have given account of our people or be made to face justice.”