Charles Taylor’s War
Crimes Sentence Hearing Set for May 16
(Apr 26, 2012) By: Moses D. Sandy. mdogbasandy@aol.com
Charles Taylor
International Judges in The Hague, Netherlands, have scheduled
May 16 as the sentencing trial date for former President Charles
G. Taylor. Making the pronouncement Thursday, April 26, at the
UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, Judge Richard Lussick
said the defense and the prosecution lawyers would be given one
hour each to make closing statements.
Judge Lussick explained defendant Taylor would also be given 30
minutes for remarks. He said prior to the hearing the legal
teams would be granted a seven-day grace period for the filing
of appeals. The one week time frame for appeal starts today,
April 26, and ends on May 3.
Judge Lussick’s pronouncement follows an earlier unanimous
decision by the judges, which held the former Liberian President
liable for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against
humanity in the West African nation of Sierra Leone. He was
accused of providing material, monetary and military assistances
to rebels of the disbanded Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in
ex-change for blood diamond.
Rag-tag Revolutionary United Front soldiers were reported to
have killed tens of thousands of people during Sierra Leone’s
war, which ran from 1991 to 2002. Mr. Taylor, 64, was convicted
on 11 counts including terror, murder and rape. However, the
international judges collectively agreed that he was not
directly responsible for ordering the crimes. The former
President’s guilty verdict comes after almost five years of
trial in The Hague.
He is the first ex-head of state sent-down by an International
Court since the Nuremburg military Tribunal of Nazis after World
War II. In a statement issued today, the US government through
its State Department hailed the outcome of the trial. “The
ruling sent a strong message to all perpetrators of atrocities,
including those in the highest positions of powers that they
will be held accountable.”
Human rights groups including Amnesty International described
the judgment as historic. The BBC quoted Elise Keppler from the
campaign group, Human Rights Watch as saying “This is an
incredibly significant decision.”
Mr. Taylor came to world prominence on December 24, 1989 when
he, at the head of rebel soldiers of the one- time dreaded
National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), invaded Liberia from
the border town of Butuo in Nimba County. The NPFL initiated
civil war is reported to have claimed more than 250, 000 human
lives and millions of dollars worth of properties. In 1997, he
was elected President of Liberia in a UN backed special
election. In 2003, he resigned the presidency and soughed refuge
in Nigeria, due to military pressure from rebels of the
erstwhile Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy,
LURD.
In March 2006, the UN arrested Mr. Taylor and took him to Sierra
Leone to face prosecution for aiding and abetting the RUF in
raining terror on Sierra Leoneans during the country’s civil
war. He was held briefly in Sierra Leone and later transferred
to the International Court in The Hague due to security threat.
When sentenced, the former NPFL leader would serve his sentence
in Britain, the United Kingdom.
According to the former Chief Prosecutor of the UN War Crimes
Tribunal for Sierra Leone, Mr. Taylor risked being sentenced to
jail for 40-50 years. Mr. Crane made the prediction today when
he spoke to the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, minutes
following the Special Court guilty verdict.
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Charles Taylor Guilty of All 11 Charges
In Sierra Leone Atrocities
(Apr 26, 2012) By: Abdullah Kiatamba
Charles Taylor at his trial
The former Liberian president Charles Taylor is found guilty on
all 11 charges for “aiding and abetting” crimes against
humanity, after five years of a trial that included testimonies
of macabre tales of atrocities committed against the people of
Sierra Leone.
After 13 months of deliberation, presiding Judge Richard Lussick,
of Samoa, announcing the long-awaited verdict Thursday at The
Hague, declared Taylor guilty of war crimes and crimes against
humanity, which included rape, mass murder, sexual slavery, the
use of child soldiers, and chopping off of limbs, among others.
In a rather poignant moment, the Judge also exposed how the
prosecution failed to prove that Taylor directly commanded or
personally instructed the RUF rebels in the commission of their
atrocities, in a decade-long war that began in the early 90s.
In response, Peter Andersen, the spokesman for the Special
Court, who spoke to ABC news shortly after the reading of the
conviction, said although the verdict represents a triumph for
the people of Sierra Leone, he still felt the outcome was not a
full victory for the prosecution, who had hoped that Taylor
would have been found guilty of being a part of “joint criminal
enterprise”, and having had a direct role in the “atrocities” as
a “superior leader.
List of Charles Taylor's Crimes below
Charles Taylor is expected to be sentenced in May.
The Sierra Leonean conflict arguably cost the lives of more than
50,000 people, mostly innocent women and children. Taylor
supported the Revolutionary United Front, also known as RUF,
with weapons and technical support, in exchange for blood
diamonds, as well as to sustain his expansionist regional
ambition, even before winning the Liberian presidential election
in 1997.
Established in 2003, the Special Court, a legal hybrid system,
enjoys the distinction of being the first international court to
indict an African head of state for war crimes and crimes
against humanity. After the UN Security Council voiced concerns
about regional security implication for the trials being held in
Sierra Leone, a consensus emerged about the need to move the
process to The Hague, where the final verdict was issued.
During the course of the trial, the prosecution called 94
witnesses who testified in person, while six other witnesses
submitted evidences in the form of transcripts and experts
reports. The defense team, which featured Taylor as its first
witness, also brought in 21 witnesses to testify in support of
the former Liberian leader.
At last, each judge, reportedly read through more than “50,000
pages” of witness testimony transcripts, including 1,520
exhibits, before contributing to the final verdict against
Taylor.
Before long, reactions from Liberians across the Diaspora began
to emerge.
“We are just glad to see the criminal [Taylor] off the streets.
He belongs behind the bars of justice life,” Mohamed Sheriff, an
unapologetic Taylor critic based in Pennsylvania, said in a note
posted on the various Liberian listservs. “I predicted the
tyrant will go down on all eleven (11) counts. He has.”
“God”, he added, “is great”, in an apparent expression of
relief.
Wynfred Russell, a Minnesota Liberian community activist,
brought a somewhat unique perspective to the verdict.
“I view this verdict with a mixed feeling, because Taylor was
never alone in this whole enterprise of human rights
violations”, he told The Liberian Journal (TLJ). “There are
still those who still walk with impunity in our country
[Liberia], especially some of those who committed heinous crimes
against our people.”
He said while this verdict marks an important moment in the
dispensation of justice, there is still an urgent need for the
people of Liberia to “gather the courage” and political will to
serve justice to other major human rights violators.
Taylor’s conviction was on accounts of “aiding and abetting”
crimes committed in Sierra Leone, not Liberia.
Editor's Note: Abdullah Kiatamba is the publisher and editor of
The Liberian Journal (TLJ).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Taylor
I have been asked by many people about my views on the
conviction, on 26 April, of Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former
president, for aiding and abetting Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary
United Front (RUF). He is the first head of state – after
Admiral Doenitz, who very briefly led Germany after Hitler
committed suicide, and was convicted by the Nuremburg court
after WWII – to be convicted by an international court for war
crimes and crimes against humanity. The RUF that Taylor
supported waged a nasty bush war against successive Sierra
Leonean governments from 1991 to its defeat by a combination of
forces, mainly foreign, in 2001. Throughout that war, Taylor
mentored the RUF and provided it with weapons and fighters; in
turn, the RUF gave him diamonds looted from Sierra Leone’s
mines. This is the sum of the judgment against Taylor, and it
narrowly reflects the argument that I have been making for over
a decade now.
Sierra Leone’s war started in March 1991 when Foday Saybanah
Sankoh, a self-adoring former army corporal, led a petty army
from territory controlled by Taylor, then an insurgent leader in
Liberia, into southern and eastern Sierra Leone. Like Taylor,
Sankoh had trained in Libya and, according to the trial
judgment, met Taylor there. The judges, however, rejected the
prosecution’s overdrawn argument that Taylor and Sankoh “made
common cause” in Libya to wage wars in West Africa. The judgment
accepted the prosecution’s submission that Taylor facilitated
the training of RUF recruits in Liberia and helped launched the
RUF’s war, noting that Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of
Liberia (NPFL) forces “actively participated” in the RUF’s
initial invasion in March 1991. (Witness to Truth, Sierra
Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation report of 2004, estimated that
as many as 1,600 NPFL fighters were involved in the early phase
of the Sierra Leonean war, or about 80% of the RUF forces. This
grew to 2000 within a few months of the invasion.)
However, striking a balance between the prosecution’s claim that
Taylor “effective controlled” and led the RUF at this point, and
Taylor’s claim that only former NPFL members joined Sankoh and
that he had nothing to do with the RUF after the Sierra Leone
invasion, the judgment delicately noted that the prosecution did
not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Sankoh took orders from
Taylor – or that Taylor participated in the planning of the
invasion.
This point was always a difficult legal one, not least because
the trial was not about the crime of aggression (which had not
even been defined by the time Taylor faced the court). The
indictment period did not even cover the origins of the war –
the temporal jurisdiction of the court is from November 1996 to
the official end of the war in 2002. Compounding this problem
was the fact that the most credible person that would have
definitively testified to this would have been Sankoh, but he
died long before Taylor faced the court. In fact, it is a
testimony to the tenacity and industry of the prosecution that
it was able to sufficiently prove even the crime of aiding and
abetting, since Taylor had effectively eliminated key witnesses
to that crime. He had Sam Bockarie, his key link to Sankoh and
the RUF during the period of the indictment, murdered in Liberia
shortly after Bockarie was indicted. Johnny Paul Koroma, a
notorious Sierra Leonean coup maker who also dealt intimately
with Taylor, simply disappeared: he was also allegedly murdered
either in Liberia or Ivory Coast on Taylor’s orders after his
indictment. These events must count as the most comprehensive
and effective evidence-tampering in an international war crimes
trial ever.
I have always thought that the prosecution’s invocation of the
notion of ‘joint criminal enterprise’ (JCE) was ill-advised, and
successive judgments by the court rubbished the concept. This
concept was first used by the International Criminal Tribunal
for former Yugoslavia (1991-1999). It considers each member of
an organized group individually responsible for crimes committed
by that group within the “common plan or purpose”. The Appeals
Chamber of the ICTY decided on 21 May 2003 that “insofar as a
participant shares the purpose of the joint criminal enterprise
(as he or she must do) as opposed to merely knowing about it, he
or she cannot be regarded as a mere aider and abettor to the
crime which is contemplated.”
The concept was roundly rejected by the court in the trial of
the leaders of the admirable Civil Defence Forces (CDF), since
“the evidence led by the Prosecution in this case to show a
joint criminal enterprise [is] insufficient to prove its
existence against those named persons beyond reasonable doubt.”
Conviction around the concept was entered only in the case of
the leaders of the RUF, and even here the judgment involving the
pathetic and roguish Augustine Gbao was problematic, looking
very much like guilt by association. Though the prosecution did
not establish Gbao’s direct involvement in crimes during the
war, the judges concluded that because he was the RUF’s
‘ideological trainer’, Gbao “significantly contributed to the
[Joint Criminal Enterprise], as the leadership of the RUF relied
on the RUF ideology to ensure and to enforce the discipline and
obedience of its forces to the RUF hierarchy and its orders,
this being a factor which contributed to the furtherance of the
Joint Criminal Enterprise.” Justice Shireen Fisher dissented,
noting that Gbao’s conviction “abandons the keystone of JCE
liability as it exists in customary international law.” Gbao was
nevertheless given a global sentence of 20 years and flown to
jail in Rwanda. Many observers feared that the same approach
would be used to convict Taylor.
The prosecution had argued that Taylor had made a “common cause”
with Sankoh to invade Sierra Leone and loot is diamond reserves,
and that the RUF’s terror campaign was a direct result of this
blood pact. Taylor’s Defence made no effort to deny Taylor’s
support for the RUF, but it stated that “diamonds only financed
the procurement of arms and ammunition” for the RUF between 1998
and 2001. The Defence denied that diamonds were the reasons why
Taylor supported the RUF, stating in the Final Brief what no one
has challenged: that the RUF diamond mining began “post the
invasion” which happened in March 1991. It stated: “There is no
evidence of any discussions relating to diamonds pre the Sierra
Leonean invasion to suggest that the invasion might have been
motivated by a desire to pillage Sierra Leone’s diamonds.” The
point was that the Defence’s key argument was not that Taylor
did not support the RUF, but that he did not do so either as
part of JCE or with “an underlying intention to cause terror.”
The Defence contends that there was a “purely political motive”
for Taylor’s support of the RUF war, which may be immoral but
certainly not illegal in international law (since the law of
aggression was not at issue).
The judgment on 26 April broadly agrees with this, dismissing
the notion of JCE as it involved Taylor’s role. But while the
judgment agreed with Taylor that he and Sankoh had “a common
interest in fighting common enemies” – the Liberian anti-Taylor
insurgent group ULIMO and the Sierra Leonean government
supporting ULIMO – this is actually tangential to the case,
since the period (1991-1992) falls outside the temporal
jurisdiction of the court.
Of profound importance to many people in Sierra Leone and
elsewhere is the finding involving Taylor’s role in the events
surrounding the Johnny Paul Koroma coup in 1997, and in
particular the resurgence of rebel forces leading to the
devastating attacks on Freetown in January 1999. Close to 6,000
people were killed, including hundreds of Nigerian
peace-enforcement troops, and the hands of dozens of people were
crudely amputated by the rebel forces during those attacks. The
judges established Taylor’s direct role in instigating the
attacks on diamond areas of Kono as well as the subsequent
attack on Freetown. Here the judgment uses the word “instructed”
to describe Taylor’s orders to Johnny Paul Koroma and Sam
Bockarie. 'With his eyes ever on diamonds, Taylor “emphasised”
to Bockarie that taking over Kono in late December 2008 was more
important than attacking Freetown at that point.' I meant to
write "late 2008". As a result, the demented Bockarie, who
called himself Maskita, announced ‘Operation No Living Thing’,
with predictable results. More crucially, the judgment
establishes that Taylor arranged “a large shipment of arms and
ammunition from Burkina Faso” to the rebels in Makeni; these
arms were instrumental in the attacks on Kono and later
Freetown. It is important to note that the UN Panel of Experts
on Liberia had established in 2000 that the arms were supplied
by Victor Bout, recently convicted on unrelated charges in the
US, and that they were presumably paid for by diamonds from the
RUF in Sierra Leone.
It is of interest that a number of names appearing in the
judgment as playing a facilitating role in this sordid and
murderous business were neither indicted by the court nor even
invited as witnesses: Gaddafi, Ibrahim Bah, and, of course,
Blaise Campaore (who as president Burkina Faso surely knew and
supported it all).
Also of interest has been the unenthusiastic – sometimes even
hostile – reaction of a good number of Liberians to the
conviction of their former president. This is partly because
Taylor was not charged with his many crimes in Liberia but for
his role in supporting a foreign war. But there are quite a few
Liberians who actually do not think that Taylor should have been
held accountable for his crimes at all, local or international.
This reflects a deep-rooted culture of impunity in the country.
I lived in Liberia for nearly two years during its truth and
reconciliation process, and attended dozens of testimonies
there. Many of these, by former commanders in Taylor’s NPFL,
proudly narrated how they participated in attacks inside Sierra
Leone, and how they were fully supported by Taylor to do so.
None of them to my knowledge expressed remorse about what they
did – but then none of them, with the quirky exception of
General Butt Naked, apologised to Liberians for the atrocities
they committed in Liberia itself.
Was it all necessary, this expensive and long trial? I think
that the proceedings were unnecessarily prolonged by overpaid
judges and lawyers, and I think that the court erred very badly
in indicting and convicting the leaders of the CDF. The Taylor
trial alone reportedly cost $250 million, nearly six times more
than the total revenue officially generated by Liberia in 2003
($44.2 million), the year that Taylor was forced to relinquish
power. Still, I think that the conviction of Taylor – as nasty a
gangster as ever become president in Africa – is a signal event,
something we should all celebrate in our region. As I write
this, I remember the day that Taylor was helicoptered into the
Special Court compound in Freetown. I stood among the small
crowd of people there that evening. A woman in the crowd turned
to me after Taylor was sent to his cell and said, apropos of a
statement made by Taylor in 1990, “Well, he told us that we in
Sierra Leone will taste the bitterness of war. We did. But now
he will taste the sourness of justice.” The sourness of justice:
that indeed is a lovely phrase there.
Editor’s Note: The writer is author of A Dirty War in West
Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone (London,
2005)
