Joshua Milton Blahyi (born September 30, 1971), better known by his nom de guerre General Butt Naked, is a former leader for the Liberian warlord Roosevelt Johnson in the First Liberian Civil War known for his fierce, violent, and eccentric measures in the first years of the 1990s. He was originally a tribal priest, and since the war he has converted to Christianity and become a preacher.
Blahyi’s rampage ended in 1996, when the civil war in Liberia was coming to a close. He credits his conversion was bolstered by a church in Liberia where a Bishop Kun Kun is pastor. They claimed to have heard from God to fast 54 days for his deliverance. After the fast they claim God gave them spiritual powers to infiltrate his coven in the city of Liberia and preach to him. Shortly after, he had a theophany in which Jesus Christ appeared to him as a blinding light, spoke to him as a son, and told him that he would die unless he repented his sins. In 1997 Blahyi traveled to the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana. It was at the camp, he recounts, that he made confession for his sins at a church and “had his life saved”. When he goes out to preach now, he says he sometimes encounters relatives of his victims. “I feel very bad, so bad”, he said, but he insists it was satanic powers that possessed him in the past and he cannot be held responsible. He has since expressed willingness to be tried for war crimes at the Hague.
Blahyi is now the President of the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries Inc., with headquarters in Liberia. He is married to Pastor Mrs. Josie and has four children: Michaela, Joshua Milton Jr., Janice Marva and Jackie MaryBeth. For a few years he was estranged from his family and hiding in Ghana, due to his fear of reprisals from his victims and/or their relatives. In 2004 Liberian-American director Gerald Barclay traveled to Buduburam to shoot a documentary which included interviews with Blahyi. In January 2008 Blahyi returned to Liberia from Ghana and claimed before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia that between approximately 1980 and 1996 he and his men were responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people. Although the TRC accepted that figure, Norris Tweah, the Information Minister of Liberia, has since disputed that Blahyi was responsible for that many deaths. Blahyi was the subject of a 2010 documentary film: True Stories: The Redemption of General Butt Naked by the Sundance Institute, produced and directed by Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion.
