NAIROBI, Kenya — As rebel soldiers advanced on Liberia’s steamy capital Monrovia in 2003 warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor fled. Just as his escape into exile marked the end of 14 years of plunder and murder so his arrest in 2006 for crimes committed in neighboring Sierra Leone signalled an end to impunity for murderous dictators the world over.
On July 13 in a European court Taylor, 61, began his defence against 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Sierra Leone during an 11-year civil war that plumbed new depths of brutality.
Taylor denies supporting the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, a group notorious for hacking off limbs, filling its ranks with drugged-up kids and using rape and murder to terrorize civilians.
He is being tried before the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in a courtroom in The Hague. All the other suspects have been tried in a specially constructed complex in the Sierra Leone capital, Freetown, that bristles with floodlights, surveillance cameras and razor wire.
So powerful was Taylor’s influence that Liberia’s president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf asked that he be transferred to a court in The Hague, far from the countries in which he had wreaked so much havoc for so many years.
She feared his presence alone could destabilize the fragile region and her country.
When Taylor’s trial began last year he became the first African leader to face war crimes charges. Since then Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes committed in Darfur while Chad’s former dictator Hissène Habré is wanted for war crimes by the International Court of Justice, and investigations loom for the Kenyan leaders responsible for the bloodshed that followed disputed elections in late 2007.
These positive moves were undermined earlier this month when African Union members voted to ignore their obligations under international law to arrest Bashir. So he is free to roam the continent largely without fear despite an outstanding warrant for his arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Although Taylor is locked up thousands of miles away his presence can still be felt in Liberia. This month his legacy came back to haunt Sirleaf when Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) recommended she and 49 others be barred from public office for 30-years for their role in supporting Taylor during his rebellion.
Sirleaf says their relationship was fleeting and that Taylor misled her. Others disagree saying their falling out was over political power not ideology and that her support helped cement Taylor’s position.
In 2007 during a visit to Monrovia I met Jerome Verdier, the dynamic young American-trained lawyer who chaired the TRC.
“We have a society traumatised by conflict,” he told me. “We need to transcend the memories and traumas of the past to move forward.”
Some wonder whether calling for Sirleaf’s removal will help foster reconciliation or throw the county into fresh turmoil. In post-war Liberia the splits remain and it is not hard to find those who still support Taylor.
I met J.T. Richardson outside a Monrovia bar last year. He had been one of Taylor’s closest friends serving as national security adviser during the civil war and now running a campaign to clear Taylor’s name since his arrest.
Driving down Tubman Boulevard, Monrovia’s potholed main thoroughfare, you couldn’t miss the billboard that Richardson had put up declaring, “Charles Taylor is innocent.” In 1999 Richardson and a bunch of other Taylor confidantes had been slapped with a United Nations travel ban accused of profiting from the war.
With close-cropped grey hair, bright eyes shining behind rimless spectacles and a thin gold chain round his neck the 57-year old looked like the retired architect he is. Lounging in a plastic chair sipping imported beer and smoking a succession of imported cigarettes, Richardson argued that Taylor was on trial because he had stood up to racist Western governments and claimed that, were he to return, Taylor would find a groundswell of support.
Richardson called the trial in The Hague a continuation of “the demonisation of Charles Taylor.” Speaking of Liberia’s own civil war he said: “This was an ugly war and a wrenching war. No party can claim that they went by any Geneva Convention.
“People refuse to understand the nature of civil wars in Africa. Fighters are not salaried, they're not paid, so discipline is a very difficult thing. And the larger your volunteer force the harder it is,” he added with a shrug.
The odds against Taylor are stacking up. In April three defendants — all commanders of the RUF rebel group that Taylor is said to have supported — were sentenced by the Freetown court to between 25 and 52 years each.
Last year Taylor's son Chucky was sentenced in a Miami court to 97 years for torturing Liberians while running his dad’s feared Anti-Terrorist Unit which he took command of when he was 25.
Amongst all the talk of international justice it is easy to lose sight of the victims. Days before Taylor’s trial began in The Hague two years ago I met a former Sierra Leone government soldier who lost his eyes in a blast while fighting rebels backed by the Liberian leader.
Inside a sweltering clapboard house on a hill above Freetown he told me he couldn’t care less about what happens in a courtroom on another continent.
“You can free Charles Taylor today and we will not feel it much. You can kill Charles Taylor today and we will not feel it much,” said Farma Jalloh, who asked: “The international community wants to try Charles Taylor but what will it achieve for the victims?”
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http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/africa/090712/charles-taylor-goes-trial