What Kill John Yormie and Isaac Vaye?

. . . Widow Tells TRC In Monrovia
By: Bill K. Jarkloh
It’s being long since John Yormie and Isaac Vaye, two officials of the Charles Taylor regime vanished in the thin air after President Charles Taylor had allegedly sent for them, but the protest of their wives as to the whereabouts of the two Nimbaians has now became an issue at the TRC yesterday with Susannah G. Vaye, wife of Isaac Vaye and mother of the Vayes’ three living children demanding justice at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.


TRC Panel of Commissioners listing to testimonies at the Centennial Pavilion
Isaac Vaye was a deputy minister at the Ministry of Public Works while John Yormie was also a Deputy Minister at the Ministry of National Security. Besides, accounts of Yormie, a former police officer in the Samuel Doe regime, before his mysterious disappearance have it that he was a former fighter of the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) which captured and killed President Doe on September 9, 1990. In fact Yormie was reported to have been the investigator of Doe when his fingers and toes were been mutilate.

Yormie, after the 1997 elections that brought Charles Taylor to the Liberian Presidency, was appointed by Taylor to serve as deputy Minister at the Ministry of National security, he was reported called by President Taylor through this aides along with another kinsman
who too was serving as deputy Minister at the Ministry of national Security, Isaac Vaye, but booth had never returned. They were accused Minister Yormie was accused along with former Vice President Moses Blah that both Yormie and Blah were plotting to over throw President Taylor and the were both arrested. As for Yormie, he was arrested with his childhood fried IsaacVaye who too was serving in the Government.

At the TRC yesterday at the Centennial Pavilion on Ashmun Street, Susannah told the public hearing that former President Taylor called for the execution of her engineer husband and along with his boyhood friend John Yormie. According to Madam Vaye, the execution was carried out by another Nimbaian, Benjamin Yaten who was then serving as Taylor’s John Chief of Security and Yaten’s deputy Joe Tuah. Interestingly, however, both executors and the executed are all sons of Nimba County, a county in the northeastern region of Liberia bordering with Guinea and Ivory Coast.

Madam Vaye, who was accompanied to the hearing by her two children, testified that the circumstances surrounding the killing of deputy Public Works Minister Vaye’s killing was because Isaac Vaye was with Deputy Security Minister Yormie (his friend) when Yormie was arrested by Yaten and ordered carried to Congo Tow, where the “White Flower” Residence of Taylor was located.

Liberians at the TRC hearing in Monrovia
The 47-year-old wife of the slain deputy Public Works Minister former recalled that Yormie and her husband Vaye were driven to Nimba thereafter before their gruesome killing, quoting a relief worker that she, the relief worker had convinced Isaac Vaye to return to his wife, but Vaye he could not come with the execution of his friend Yormie by Taylor who had just escaped from Ghana on the same Day after an attempt to indict him.

“I called my husband, Mr. Vaye by 12: PM - midnight – but he seemed to be trembling, telling me ‘I don’t understand what these gentlemen are going to me,’” Susannah Vaye explained. She pointed out that when she and Yormie’s wife Cynthia went to ascertain the whereabouts of Deputy Ministers Vaye and Yormie, they could not be told of the whereabouts of the two men. “When I ask Joe Tuah, he told me I should wait for
Fifty [that was the code name of Yaten] to come from the battlefront,” Susannah Vaye recalled further. She said when Yaten, Taylor’s right hand man, arrived and was contacted, “he deceived me by calling Police Director paul Mulbah and Defense Minister Daniel Chea, even though Cynthia had already noticed Yormi’s cell phone in the hands of Yaten’s deputy Joe Tuah.

Susannah told the TRC that the whereabouts of Vaye and Yormie remained controversial until the released of Vice President Moses Blah from further detention by the Taylor Government, noting that it was then that Taylor himself divulged the news that Deputy Ministers Isaac Vaye and John Yormie were killed.

Meanwhile, she frowned on the Nimba legislative Caucus, which she said had neglected the two widows of the victims of Taylor’s despotism.