The United States owes democracy to Liberia. If that means sending in troops, as President Bush has hinted at, then let’s roll.

The American Colonization Society, supported by leading slaveowners such as Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, founded Monrovia, named for President James Monroe, in what we now know as Liberia. In 1847, Liberia became “the first republic in Africa with a government modeled on that of the United States,” according to the New York City Library’s African-American Desk Reference.

Today, however, few Americans can even find Liberia on a map.

Back when President Abraham Lincoln wanted to send enslaved blacks “back” to Africa – many of them, by the way, were born in the U.S. to parents and grandparents who also had been born here -Liberia was the place to head for.

Yes, the U.S. owes Liberia. America is quick to jump into Mideast conflicts and those in parts of Europe that many white folk call their ancestral home, but Africa -whether the issue is democracy or AIDS or trade, is often a forgotten territory. We don’t have military interests or we don’t have economic interests or we don’t have interest, period.

“We should have been in Liberia a long, long time ago, and not with military intervention but with intervention that seeks to organize the people, provide work, strengthen the schools and find other ways to resolve the conflict,” says my pastor, the Rev. Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, which has allowed various Liberian factions to plead their cause over the years. Butts does not want to see soldiers, many of whom we know will be black and brown, in harm’s way in Liberia; he wants the diplomatic channels to remain open.

It is a big deal that President Bush is going to Africa this week – the same Bush whose geographic knowledge was an embarrassment during his run for office in 2000. Now, his cabinet members talk of Liberia as one of many “failed states” that display “so much instability” that they are havens for terrorists. Yet, as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, the U.S. has “a historic relationship” with Liberia.

Liberia’s settlers essentially were plopped down in the midst of native Africans and for years lorded their Americanism over them. Those descendants of enslaved Americans counted themselves as the elite. The real natives tired of that years ago and have been engaged in civil war, largely over that, for much of Liberia’s recent history.

As a black person of African ancestry, I am thoroughly disgusted with the way that continent is faring. Some of it is due to Mother Nature – famines and all that. Most of it is due to humans – starting with the colonialism. But since that has been so long ago, its problems are mainly due to the avarice of those who came into power as freedom fighters. People black like me.

Like Butts, I don’t want to see our men and women dying, as they are in Iraq, for some hard-to-fathom political dispute in a land they cannot locate on a map. But I still believe that Liberia is worth fighting for.

E.R. Shipp is a columnist for the New York Daily News. She won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1996. Readers may write to her at the New York Daily News, 450 West 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10001; e-mail: ershipp2003hotmail.com.

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