Liberian Groups on Staten Island Fight Election Fiasco reported - as reported by the New York Times

By KIRK SEMPLE

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/nyregion/28liberians.html?ex=1217908800&en=5c650b3b2bd0d0b3&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Published: July 28, 2008
George Curtis Sr., the outgoing president of the Staten Island Liberian Community Association, has been accused of rigging the registration process.

By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: July 28, 2008

Most of the thousands of Liberians living in New York fled their homeland during more than two tumultuous decades of coups and civil war. And though their lives were shattered, villages torn apart and relatives killed, they arrived, like other immigrant groups, with their cultural and religious traditions intact.

They also appear to have brought some of their country’s volatile politics.

On July 19, the Staten Island Liberian Community Association, one of the oldest and largest Liberian organizations in the city, unexpectedly canceled its biannual elections amid charges of conspiracy and corruption. The association’s elections commissioner summoned the police because he feared that the voting dispute might spiral out of control.

“It’s embarrassing,” said George Curtis Sr., the outgoing president of the association and a candidate for the board of directors. “It makes Liberians look bad.”

In 2006, the American Community Survey estimated that there were 3,400 Liberian immigrants in New York City. But community leaders say there are at least 9,000 residents of Liberian extraction, with about half of them living on Staten Island.

And though it is relatively small, the community has developed a lively political personality.

The headquarters of the Staten Island Liberian Community Association, which was founded in the 1970s, is a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment with peeling paint in a brick housing project in the Park Hill section.

It is supported by a $10,000 yearly allocation by the borough, Mr. Curtis said, and its slim portfolio of activities includes a once-a-week food bank, a toy distribution program at Christmas, employment workshops and occasional screening sessions for public assistance.

Beyond that, the most important things on the association’s calendar, it seems, are its biannual elections — which have become a focus of political ambitions and a flashpoint of emotions in the community.

After the last election, in 2006, members of a political group whose candidate lost to Mr. Curtis filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court challenging the results and alleging election fraud and misuse of funds. The lawsuit was dismissed.

In the July 19 elections, candidates from two local political parties were vying for seats on the organization’s seven-member board and for its five executive offices, including the presidency. (Mr. Curtis, who works as a coordinator at a group home for mentally disabled children, has served two two-year terms, the limit under the group’s charter.)

The candidates from Mr. Curtis’s Liberians for Actions and Progress group were running uncontested in most of the races until several days before the June 30 registration deadline, when a new party called Community Action for Change submitted a slate of candidates.

“There was a need for someone to come up and change the status quo,” said Tamba Aghailas, the new party’s candidate for president. The association, he said, has essentially been dominated by one party in the past several years, and “there’s not a lot that they can show that they’ve achieved.”

Mr. Aghailas, a recruiting coordinator at Merrill Lynch who has lived on Staten Island for four years, requested that the association postpone the July 19 elections to allow for a wider registration effort and that voters be allowed to register on election day. But the association rejected his requests.

Mr. Aghailas said in a recent interview that Mr. Curtis’s party had instituted a very selective registration process that ensured support of its slate by most voters.

But association officials insist that about 1,200 Liberians from throughout Staten Island were registered, a record for the organization, and say that Mr. Aghailas’s protest was an effort to buy time because his party had submitted its slate of candidates so late.

“Tamba is what we call a JJC, Johnny Just Come,” Mr. Curtis said. “He’s new. He has not paid his services to the community.”

The polls opened as planned on July 19 in a recreation room of the Park Hill housing project, but pandemonium quickly ensued. There was arguing and shouting, witnesses said. Invectives were hurled and doors were locked

According to officials from Liberians for Actions and Progress, Mr. Aghailas’s supporters stole a voter registration book.

Mr. Tamba denied that allegation and accused the association’s elections commissioner, Charles Stevens, of losing the records.

As tempers flared, the association’s leaders called the police, but by the time the officers arrived a semblance of order had been restored, and they left quickly, several association officials said.

The elections were postponed, and it was hoped that a new date would be announced at a general assembly on Sunday night, but that meeting itself was postponed, to Aug. 10.

The failure of the July 19 election process seemed to reaffirm some residents’ desultory view of the association — and of Liberian civic leadership in general. “That’s my people!” said Yvonne Jaja, 38, a home health care worker. “We don’t do nothing right. It’s very sad.”

On a recent morning in Park Hill, Mr. Curtis visited a sidewalk market where Liberian vendors sell such foods as smoked fish and chicken and a special vegetable oil the color of blood. He strode into the group of vendors, all women, with the swagger of a politician on his home turf. But the reception he received was far from adoring.

“When they win the election they don’t do anything,” said one vendor, a woman in traditional Liberian dress. “He should take his money and go home.”

Walters James Weah, vice president of the Union of Liberian Associations in the Americas, a national umbrella group, said the electoral problems in Staten Island’s Liberian community were not unique.

“Almost every chapter has this kind of problem,” said Mr. Weah, a Staten Island resident and the immediate past chairman of the Liberian Community Association’s board. He said that people were “not willing to abide by the rules,” a possible “trickle-down” from , where democracy is still a new concept.

The current dispute on Staten Island, taken with the problems in 2006, will make the association’s obligation to engage the local community and attract financial support much more difficult, Mr. Weah said.

“Liberians themselves are going to have to sit down and say, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” he said. “This is not an easy process.”