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ACCRA, Ghana - Gyude Bryant, who was chosen Thursday to lead postwar Liberia, is seen as a consensus-builder who was a longtime campaigner against the warlords, including former president Charles Taylor, who tore apart the West African nation.
Bryant, a 54-year-old businessman, led a 1997 effort to unite political parties behind a civilian candidate in Liberia's first elections after a ruinous 1989-96 civil war. The six-party alliance's effort failed, and Taylor - the Libyan-trained guerrilla fighter who launched the war - won the presidency, boosted by his charisma, illicit profits from trafficking and fears he would restart the war if he lost.
Now, with Taylor in exile and Liberia again emerging from bloodletting, the gentle-mannered Bryant is in charge.
"I see myself as bringing about a balance across the board," he told the Associated Press, hours after his selection to lead Liberia's two-year interim government under a peace deal brokered Monday.
"I don't see myself as being a contentious person. I have taken this job because I think my country needs a cooling-off period," he said.
Bryant is a member of Liberia's Grebo ethnic group, unlike many prominent Liberians, including Taylor himself, who come from an elite of descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the country.
He is president of a mining- and port equipment company and chairman of the Liberian Action Party.
Bryant graduated from Liberia's Cuttington University with a bachelor's degree in economics. He served in the 1970s as the head of the national port authority's planning and development department.
Bryant's wife and three children rode out the bloody final stages of Liberia's latest war in exile. Bryant stayed.
He urged the United Nations to lift sanctions against Liberia, imposed over Taylor's gun-trafficking, diamond-dealing and other illicit transactions with West Africa's insurgent groups.
His first concern, he said, was getting AK-47s out of the hands of Liberia's fighters - a generation of young men and boys who grew up knowing nothing but terrorizing civilians, using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine, and killing.
"We need to change the psychology," Bryant said, adding that he wanted to set up "an effective program for them that will ensure their future as good citizens."