Liberia, 1985 — military coup attempt
Event Summary
On 12 November 1985 General Thomas Quiwonkpa launched a bold armed coup attempt against Master Sergeant Samuel Doe of Liberia, one month after Doe had claimed victory in rigged elections. Quiwonkpa had been a leader of the 1980 coup that brought Doe to power but had fallen out with him and gone into exile; a member of the Gio ethnic group from Nimba County, he was popular in the army and beyond. Entering Liberia covertly through Sierra Leone with about two dozen heavily armed men, Quiwonkpa seized the radio station and announced Doe's overthrow, and for a few hours, as jubilant crowds poured into the streets of Monrovia, the coup appeared to have succeeded.
But it swiftly unraveled: Doe's Krahn dominated forces of the Armed Forces of Liberia rallied and defeated the attempt. Quiwonkpa was captured, killed, and mutilated, his body paraded through Monrovia. Doe then unleashed a ferocious campaign of reprisals against the Gio and Mano peoples of Nimba County, atrocities that fueled the resentment Charles Taylor would exploit to launch the civil war in 1989.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
45011121985- Albrecht/Koehler/Schutz (CAM) id
CAM-450-1985-11-12-2
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: Master Sergeant Samuel Doe crushed Quiwonkpa's November 1985 coup, killed him, and launched deadly ethnic reprisals.
Baseline coding: Coup attempt failed to remove the incumbent. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
CSP
Wikipedia
New York Times
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →