I must say I’m very pleased to learn that Charles Taylor’s cushy exile in Nigeria is coming to an end and he will soon be tried on war crimes in Sierra Leone.
I’m not the biggest fan of United Nations special tribunals, but in the case of Sierra Leone it is high time for Charles Taylor to face the consequences of his actions.
Taylor was the president of Liberia from 1997 to 2003, when through a special deal, he was granted exile in Nigeria in exchange for immunity from all charges. It sounded like something akin to a slap on the wrist but at the time it prevented a lot of bloodshed, something Liberia has seen far too much of.
Although he was just president for 6 years, he had earlier commanded the NPLF milita during the civil war period of the 1990’s. Taylor’s number one ally was the bestial Foday Sankoh, whom an early death prevented his being similarly charged in Sierra Leone. Taylor financed and supported Sankoh’s militia, the RUF, who were the second grisliest African armed group in modern history (after Uganda’s LRA).
I distinctly remember seeing footage of RUF soldiers on television (in Europe of course, since Americans are too delicate for such honest reporting) with impaled heads on their cars as hood ornaments. The RUF regularly cut off hands, ears, legs and even breasts of civilians whom they accused of supporting their enemies. The RUF also relied heavily on child soldiers, abducting children and forcing them to fight in their ranks, some of them as young as 5 and 6. As many as 200,000 people died in Sierra Leone’s civil war, most of them civilians.
Taylor’s NPLF was only slightly less vicious, which is like saying Joseph Mengele was less vicious than Adolf Hitler. The NPLF committed less amputations but regularly engated in wholesale massacre of civilians as well as torturing anyone they considered enemies.
Taylor’s income, which supported both the NPLF, his presidency and his financing of the RUF came from wholesale looting of his country’s resources, which include timber, gold and alluvial diamonds. There are two kinds of diamonds in the world, ones which must be mined from deep underground (requiring significant equipment and investment) and those which lie loose on the surface, often brought up by the movement of rivers and streams (hence the term alluvial).
To the misfortune of millions of western Africans, Liberia and Sierra Leone are where a large percentage of the world’s alluvial diamonds can be found. These were easily harvested by Taylor and Sankoh’s forces and smuggled abroad to be sold on the open market, earning them the name “blood diamonds” or sometimes “conflict diamonds”. In recent years, the international diamond trading community has put in place measures to curb the sale of blood diamonds but sadly during the 1990’s this was not so.
Taylor also received weapons, military advisors and funding from Libya, Cote D’Ivoire (then under Felix Houphouet-Boigny) and especially Burkina Faso’s long-time strongman Blase Compaore, who still remains in power. During Taylor’s exile in Nigeria since 2003, there are many reports he has traveled to Burkina Faso to raise funds and gather support for his followers back in Liberia, who even today are promising to wreak havoc when he is transferred to the court prosecuting war crimes in Sierra Leone.
Two westerners also played a part in propping up Taylor’s bloody destruction of Liberia and Sierra Leone. One is the “Reverend” Pat Robertson of 700 Club fame, whose involvement in Liberia I have written about before here.
In 1999, Robertson and Liberian President Charles Taylor created a company called “Freedom Gold Limited”. Robertson put a minimum of 15 million dollars into the company, which allowed him gold mining rights. The agreement specified that Taylor would receive a 3% royalty as well as some 500,000 dollars every year in fees.
Freedom Gold was registered in the Cayman Islands, technically making it an “offshore” company (as is Halliburton’s Iran division), but the headquarters was actually Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Fast forward to 2003, when Robertson blasted George Bush on his policies towards Taylor:
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson accused President Bush of “undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels” by asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, recently indicted for war crimes, to step down.
“How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, ‘You’ve got to step down,'” Robertson said Monday on “The 700 Club,” broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.
Robertson, a Bush supporter who has financial interests in Liberia, said he believes the State Department has “mismanaged the situation in nation after nation after nation” in Africa.
“So we’re undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country,” he said in the broadcast.
Robertson told The Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that he has “written off in my own mind” an $8 million investment in a Liberian gold mining venture he made four years ago, under an agreement with Taylor’s government.
Robertson’s hypocrisy and greed is well known and quite well documented elsewhere.
What is less well known is Jesse Jackson’s role in the Liberian and Sierra Leonian civil wars.
In 1999, Jesse Jackson was President Clinton’s “envoy” to the region and negotiated a “peace” treaty between the RUF and thoroughly corrupt president of Sierra Leone, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. This peace treaty was an utter sham, and a year later the civil war broke out again and only came to a standstill when British troops (along with some UN peacekeepers) took over the capital. Sankoh was seized and handed over to the British and died a short while later due to illness.
Jackson gave a speech in which he compared the hideous RUF to South Africa’s ANC, even going so far as to compare Sankoh to Nelson Mandela. I’m not saying the ANC was a group of saints or anything, but the RUF literally amputated limbs from tens of thousands of civilians amongst other atrocities. When Jackson had helped negotiate a cease-fire between the RUF and Tejan Kabbah, the thoroughly corrupt but somewhat decent president of Sierra Leone. At the time, Jackson also praised Charles Taylor for his “help” in bringing peace to Sierra Leone.
Jackson’s disastrous peace treaty of 1999 (signed in the capital of Togo and therefore called the Lome Peace Accord) gave complete amnesty for Sankoh and all members of the RUF. Even worse, Fankoh had been captured in 1998 and sentenced to death but Jackson intervened, saying his participation in negotiation was necessary. It could be argued that Kabbah had little choice, as the RUF had seriously weakened his forces, but the fact that Jesse Jackson spent so much time praising the killers Sankoh and Taylor is unpardonable. Not to mention the peace accord didn’t even last a year and without the intervention of British and Nigerian troops, the country would still likely be engulfed in a civil war today.
For Taylor’s part, he outlasted both the disarming of the RUF (now a political party) as well as many armed factions in Liberia who failed to wrest power away from him until 2003.
One oddity from Taylor’s past is that he was in jail in the United States in 1980 for threatening to take over Liberia’s consulate in New York. He then escaped from prison and made his way to Liberia, and many people feel he was allowed to leave the country because of the United States’ dissatisfaction with then-strongman Samuel Doe, who had come to power in a bloody coup that toppled William Tolbert, Junior. And indeed Taylor deposed Doe, with the help of then ally Prince Johnson, who later fought (and lost to) Taylor’s forces.
Regrettably, the Bush administration had been heavily pressuring Nigeria to extradite Taylor for at least the last year. I say “regrettably” because Taylor was given exile in Nigeria under a carefully crafted agreement to end further bloodshed in Liberia. The main condition of Taylor’s exile was that he would remain unprosecuted and not extradited until such time as Liberia had a democratically-elected government.
Thankfully, Nigeria kept their side of the agreement and waited. Liberia, I am happy to say, now has a democratically-elected government, headed by president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. And she has now formally requested Taylor’s extradition. And just yesterday, the Nigerian government agreed to hand him over:
On March 5th, 2006, a formal request was sent to President Olusegun Obasanjo by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia requesting that former President Charles Taylor be turned over to the custody of the Government of Liberia.
Considering the involvement of the African Union and ECOWAS in the arrangement which resulted in the voluntary relinquishing of office by President Charles Taylor and his abode in Nigerian in 2003, President Obasanjo consulted the current and past Chairmen of the AU and ECOWAS.
It should be recalled that at the time, the understanding among those involved in the arrangement was that the departure of Charles Taylor was a pre-requisite for the implementation of the just concluded Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement on Liberia, but that both the AU and ECOWAS could not hand over President Charles Taylor to the Sierra Leone Special Court as rather precipitately demanded by the Court’s prosecutor.
Since 2003, the Federal Government of Nigeria has resisted persistent pressures to violate the understanding of 2003 and to deliver Charles Taylor to the Sierra Leone Special Court. Rather, the Federal Government has insisted that Charles Taylor can only be turned over, on request, to a democratically-elected government of Liberia at a time that such a Government considers appropriate.
The request of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in her letter of 5th March constituted her determination that the time was opportune. With no substantive objection other than timing and continued peace in Liberia raised by those other Heads of State involved in the 2003 arrangement, President Olusegun Obasanjo has today March 25th informed President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf that the Government of Liberia is free to take former President Charles Taylor into its custody.
Many thanks and admiration go to Nigeria, both for honoring Taylor’s exile agreement (which may serve to prevent future bloodshed in future wars) and resisting pressure from the Bush administration. I also have to commend Nigeria for heading the ECOWAG/ECOWAS peacekeeping forces, which intervened both in Liberia and Sierra Leone and played a major role in stabilizing both of those countries.
Regrettably, the United States has done very little, refusing to send peacekeeping troops to Liberia (despite the fact that they would have been greeted as liberators) and mainly doing nothing aside from making some relatively minor financial contributions.
The good news is of course that Taylor will now face the charges against him at the special tribunal for war crimes in Sierra Leone, and for that both I and the peoples of western Africa can be thankful.
Cross-posted from the doubleplusungood crimethink website Flogging the Simian
Peace
