Interviews with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

President Bush is very well remembered because, in those very difficult days of conflict, when the war was on and waging there were attempts to ask – you know, Mr. Taylor was then the president, Charles Taylor. And President Bush then took a decision in which he said, you know, Taylor would have to leave the country.

And that´s the first time that someone of the stature and number one nation had called for this. And that turned the whole tide. Because, once that statement was made then, of course all the western countries stood by that and the African countries began to find a means to bring that era of terror to an end. So we all owe President Bush a lot of gratitude for that very strong open decision which was taken.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the president of Liberia. She was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Sirleaf served as minister of finance in Liberia until the 1980 coup d’état by Samuel Doe. She left the country and served in senior positions with the World Bank and later Citibank.

Sirleaf returned to Liberia in 1985 and was arrested and imprisoned by the Doe government. After her release, she went into exile in the United States where she remained throughout a brutal Liberian civil war between the Doe government and a rebel group headed by warlord Charles Taylor. Following a peace agreement ending the war, Sirleaf returned home to run unsuccessfully against Taylor for the presidency. Taylor’s election has been attributed in part to a fear by the Liberian public that he would restart the war if he lost.

Following a second Liberian civil war, Taylor was exiled in 2003. Sirleaf again sought the presidency and was elected in 2005, the first woman democratically elected to serve as a head of state in Africa.

In 2008, Sirleaf published her memoir, “This Child Will Be Great.”