Charles Taylor thought himself to be above the law. But times change, as the Liberian dictator found after his conviction for war crimes
It all seems such a long time ago that our television screens were filled every night with the latest atrocities committed in Sierra Leone's brutal civil war. Even by the standards of Africa's recent violent history, the conflict in Sierra Leone generated some of the most barbaric images of cruelty we have seen in modern times.
The signature atrocity of the rebel forces that first overran Sierra Leone in the 1990s was to chop off the limbs of their opponents with a machete or an axe. There were stories of truckloads of victims who had recently been maimed being taken to a UN compound still bearing their severed limbs in the forlorn hope that they might be saved. Other survivors, who had already lost one limb, told how they begged the rebels to cut off another rather than have the same gruesome punishment inflicted on their children.
On other occasions, human intestines were strung across roads, foetuses removed from women's wombs and cannibalism openly practised. And when the rebels needed new recruits, they forced thousands of children under 15 to fight for their cause. The child soldiers were press-ganged into the Small Boys Unit and fed a diet of drugs to give them the courage to keep their positions on the front line. But, as so often happens with so many of the world's minor conflicts, the horrors of Sierra Leone soon passed from our consciousness, particularly after Britain's short military intervention in 2000 — commanded in swashbuckling style by Brigadier David Richards, the future head of Britain's Armed Forces — succeeded in routing the rebel forces.
According to the verdict passed on Thursday by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor, the former president of neighbouring Liberia, was the person responsible for helping to ‘design' the strategy of vicious repression that was implemented against innocent civilians in Sierra Leone. Like Adolf Eichmann and the Holocaust, Taylor did not soil his own hands with the disagreeable business of committing atrocities: he left that to the henchmen of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front, the main rebel body.
Grisly trade
The only dirty business Taylor himself undertook was to receive hundreds of millions of pounds worth of ‘blood diamonds' as payment for the arms he helped to ship across the Liberian border to the Sierra Leonean rebels. One of the more intriguing aspects of the trial — one that has lasted for nearly five years — was the appearance of the British supermodel Naomi Campbell, whose evidence was critical in proving the prosecution's case. Campbell, who is not unaccustomed to receiving gifts from her many admirers, was surprised to be given three ‘small, dirty-looking stones' as a present by a member of Taylor's staff while visiting Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1997. Prosecutors were eventually able to use the gift as proof that Taylor traded illegally mined diamonds to arm the rebels in a war that ultimately caused the deaths of an estimated 120,000 people, and earned Taylor £950 million (Dh5.64 billion) in blood diamonds. Given his status as Liberia's former president, Taylor probably believed he was immune from prosecution for his involvement in this grisly trade.
He now contemplates the prospect of spending the rest of his life locked up in a high-security British prison cell. And hopefully Taylor's conviction will set a precedent for the world's other leading tyrants, who deserve to be brought to justice. He is the first head of state convicted by an international court since the post-Second World War Nuremberg tribunals. For much of the past decade, Robert Mugabe has committed similar atrocities against opponents of his dictatorial regime in Zimbabwe, but attempts to hold him to account have foundered because many countries feel awkward about interfering.
More recently, Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has been caught red-handed, thanks to the release of a cache of his private emails, orchestrating the brutal repression of anti-government protesters, which has so far resulted in the deaths of more than 7,000 Syrian civilians. No doubt the likes of Al Assad and Mugabe still believe, as Taylor once did, that they will always be immune from prosecution because of their elevated status. But times change, as Taylor found to his cost. After Thursday's conviction, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they, too, may one day be forced to pay for their crimes.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2012
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