Urey vows to re-bury Doe in Gd. Gedeh

All Liberian Party (ALP) standard bearer, businessman Benoni W. Urey is promising kinsmen of slain President Samuel Kanyon Doe that he wants to lay the late president to rest in Grand Gedeh County.

“We’re going to reconcile Liberia, we’re going to finally, lay President Doe to rest in Grand Gedeh; his remains will be brought to Grand Gedeh and we’re going to have an official funeral for him”, Mr. Urey told Grand Gedeans in an interview while on a campaign trail to the county recently.

President Doe was captured and subsequently butchered to death in 1990 by the disbanded Independent National Patriotic of Liberia (INPFL) rebels commanded by Field Mashall Prince Yormie Johnson, now Senator of Nimba County.

Doe’s body was later placed on a stretcher and put on public display at the Island Clinic on Bushrod Island, outside Monrovia.

Sen. Johnson, currently standard bearer of the Movement for Democracy and Reconstruction (MDR) party told Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission during public hearing years ago that he exhumed Doe’s body from his former base in Caldwell Township, Montserrado County and gave it a proper burial subsequently.

Johnson said he held reconciliatory talks with the Doe family later, and both parties agreed to let bygone be bygone.

But Mr. Urey stresses that reconciliation is the key to national development and prosperity of any nation, something that an ALP-led government would deliver to the people of Liberia.

According to him, among the 20 presidential candidates in the race, he represents the greatest hope for reconciliation in the country, because he lives with the people and understands their culture.

“The message we’re bringing to our people is that it’s time for us to replace the elite group in Monrovia, the corruption group in Monrovia”, he urges.

Mr. Urey continues that an ALP-led government wants to bring governance back to the people, saying, “the message to them is that an ALP government is prepared to put money in their pockets, we’re going to concentrate on stimulating the economy, we’re going to create jobs improve health care and education, all the mess they have made, some of them they have admitted to, we’re going to do better.”

He wants to establish a government that is business-friendly by encouraging foreign investors to come to Liberia and invest their money without fear of being exploited.