Africa's oldest republic had free and fair elections for the first time in its 150-year history last week. Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, the man who eight years ago plunged Liberia into the most bloody and destructive civil war in West Africa since Biafra has won a landslide victory in the presidential contest.
Charles Taylor, megalomaniacal warlord and self-styled freedom fighter, finally gained the legitimacy he craved through the ballot box - and was embraced not only by the majority of Liberian people but also by his erstwhile foes Nigeria and the United States, whose hell-bent push for early elections against daunting odds was seen by many observers as farcical if not dangerous.
Predictably Taylor's rivals are crying foul - not least Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, runner-up in the elections and the only woman among the 12 presidential candidates. Yet clearly Taylor did not need to rig the elections. A powerful demagogue and propagandist, with the ill-gotten wealth to shower voters with food and cash, Taylor is held in a combination of fear and awe by a largely illiterate population.
He holds the key to Liberia's destruction and, ironically, to its possible reconstruction. After nearly eight years of war most Liberians are more interested in stability than in democracy, fully aware that the two are not necessarily synonymous. Neither other former faction leaders nor civilian presidential aspirants were seen to offer any viable alternative to Taylor.
His electoral promises of peace and prosperity thinly veiled the wearying combination of greed, opportunism, arrogance and crass hypocrisy that has accelerated Liberia's socio-economic decline over the past two decades. But for many Taylor was a pragmatic choice - not based on the lesser of evils, but on the reasonable assumption that if Taylor lost the elections he would make Liberia ungovernable.
Yet now, the prospect of lasting peace in Liberia remains a pipe dream. Factional and ethnic tensions remain across the country, the election losers are unlikely to accept Taylor as president, Taylor has tendencies towards brutality and despotism, and only about half of an estimated 60,000 fighters have been disarmed by ECOMOG (a West African peacekeeping force). Many observers predict that it is only a matter of time before the country slides back to war.
So why did the international community - particularly the US and Nigeria - set its blinkered sights on the holding of elections as the panacea to cure Liberia's ills?
Both Nigeria and the US have vested interests in being seen as the champions of democracy in Liberia. Regional superpower Nigeria, which has led ECOMOG in Liberia since 1990, wants stability among its neighbours as well as international kudos for head of state Gen Sani Abacha in the run-up to next year's presidential elections at home.
Sceptics believe that ECOMOG, which has pledged to stay in Liberia for at least six months after the elections, has cut lucrative deals with Taylor for continued access to resources including timber, rubber and diamonds (which have been plundered systematically by all sides to the conflict, including ECOMOG, throughout the war).
America, founder of the colony for freed slaves in 1847, had various geo-political interests in Liberia - including the world's largest rubber plantation (Firestone) and an Africawide communications network. Now it insists its interests are purely humanitarian, based on the altruistic desire to help countries and regions help themselves.
Chalking up the perceived achievement of democracy in Liberia, no matter how superficial, may help to compensate for debacles such as Somalia - while giving the US an acceptable excuse to shed what many see as a moral responsibility to its former "colony". US sources have acknowledged that the State Department's role would diminish as other western donors step in to assist Liberia in the massive task of reconstruction and rehabilitation.
Yet there are enough examples in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Sierra Leone of the potentially disastrous consequences of holding elections without addressing the causes of conflict; of engineering a hollow democracy without ensuring peace or justice.
In Sierra Leone, a brief experiment in democracy was brought to a turbulent end last May when the elected government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was ousted by disgruntled soldiers. Elections in 1996 were - as in Liberia - heavily supported by the international community (most notably Britain) and held in defiance of malignant problems.
While Sierra Leone was lauded as a role model for the transition to democracy, with western donors pledging millions of dollars of aid, malcontents were fermenting the worst violence and anarchy the country has seen.
Although exact parallels cannot be drawn between Liberia and Sierra Leone - the former does have a resident multi-national peacekeeping force that is responsible for disarmament - surely enough mistakes have been made for the international community to now reassess its recipe for success in developing countries? To persist in the blind belief that elections and western-style democracy will lead conflict-torn countries to salvation can be a recipe for disaster.