A notorious ex-warlord hits the campaign trail in Liberia.

Monrovia, Liberia, September 9, 1990: Many Liberians once thought that President Samuel Doe was invulnerable, protected by powerful black magic. But, in the video, he is slumped on the floor, his hands tied behind his back, naked except for blood-stained underpants. A crowd of young men in fatigues surround him, some carrying machine guns, one holding a microphone in front of Doe’s face. As Doe cries, a fighter strokes his head gently and then grins at the man sitting behind a conference table in a black executive chair, underneath a picture of Jesus.

This man is clearly in charge. He is drinking a can of Budweiser, hand grenades dangling from his military tunic. A woman in blue nurse’s scrubs fans him with a cloth. The sound is poor, but Doe is pleading; at one point, the man with the beer points at Doe and says, “I will spare you, but don’t fuck with me.” Doe appears to offer him money, and the young men laugh and jeer. The woman wipes the leader’s forehead, and he takes a swig from the can. Suddenly, the fighters are encircling Doe, holding him down, slicing off his ear with a knife as he screams. One puts his boot on Doe’s neck and mugs for the camera. By the next morning, Doe was dead.

To Liberians, this footage is one of the most infamous records of their bloody civil war. At the time, the video was hawked on the streets of Monrovia; today, a version of it can still be found on YouTube. The man with the beer is Prince Yormie Johnson, then one of Liberia’s most notorious warlords. (“Prince” is his first name, not an honorific.) At the time, Johnson was the leader of the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, one of three factions fighting for control of the capital. Another faction was led by Doe and his beleaguered government; and the third by Charles Taylor, who eventually went on to become president.

Johnson was infamous for other acts of violence, including summary executions of his own men and ordering the killing of a group of Hare Krishnas who had appealed to him to moderate his behavior. When Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its final report on the war’s horrors, his was the first name on a list of 116 “Most Notorious Perpetrators,” accused of “[k]illing, extortion, massacre, destruction of property, force recruitment, assault, abduction, torture & forced labor, rape.”

Liberia is supposed to have left those tragic days behind. It has been eight years since peace came to the country, and Taylor is facing trial for war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone. Since 2006, Liberia has been led by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a charismatic former World Bank official who won office promising deep reform of Liberia’s corrupt political system.