Liberian ex-dictator and accused mass murderer Charles G. Taylor
Source: AFP, via Yahoo!
One of the continent’s grisliest mass murderers, Liberia’s ex-dictator Charles G. Taylor, was apprehended in northeastern Nigeria yesterday and shipped back to face justice in a Sierra Leone court run by United Nations prosecutors. He’s charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity.
The UN had made a resolution that Liberia put the thug on trial a couple years ago, and President Bush, meeting with his Nigerian counterpart this week, put a lot of diplomatic muscle into making sure that happened. That’s to his credit because this guy was about to get away again.
Not that it has been easy. Liberia’s new democratically elected president, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, said earlier this year that she had higher priorities than putting the mass murderer on trial. She changed her position in a move that puzzled even experienced Africa watchers, and then asked for his extradition on March 5. My guess is that this was possibly at President Bush’s insistence. The U.S. is trying to be friendly to her, and President Bush sent first lady Laura Bush to her inauguration. Africa is just as critical as Latin America as an important supplier of petroleum, but I think Bush did this to help foster democracy in this long-deprived region. If so, it was to his credit, because finally accountability will come to the leaders of Africa.
And potential despots are going to look at Taylor in the dock and start to think twice about whether they intend to be democrats or dictators. It will have an effect.
The significance of his apprehension is that he will be the first African despot, ever, to face any kind of justice for his depredations. Taylor brought 14 years of civil war to Liberia, killing tens of thousands, and turning it from one of the more liveable and agreeable countries in Africa, to one of the worst hellholes on earth.
A friend was a foreign correspondent in Africa, and had seen plenty of awful places while he was there. I asked him which one was the worst. He told me Liberia.
It was turned into a cauldron of murder, oppression and war by Charles G. Taylor, a place where freakishly angry young men with guns wearing blonde wigs and bras and ballgowns as their war regalia popped drugs and massacred tens of thousands. The war then spread from Liberia to neighboring Sierra Leone, which became the most terrifying area in Africa – where children were tortured, their hands and feet and ears cut off in a bid to terrify.
Taylor was the architect of the “diamond wars” which employed murder in a bid to smuggle diamonds, prompting lots of new legislation in the West about the source-origin of diamonds. He’s also one reason why Canada’s diamond industry took off – for many buyers, Canadian diamonds are the only ones you can be really sure are not connected to these Taylor massacres. He also harbored al-Qaida, in particular, the binladenite thugs who blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 innocent Africans in the pre-9/11 era.
Words fail me on this inhuman creature. Can any trial really take care of this monster? But given the stakes of democracy and its attending accountability, can Liberia and Sierra Leone afford not to? Imperfect as it all may be, this is an important new step, a new factor, in the forging of Africa’s democracies.
Here is a small roundup:
SUDAN: THE PASSION OF THE PRESENT reports a roundup of all the news coverage in a long post with some light analysis of events.
GLOBAL VOICES has a superb, thorough roundup of commentators on Liberia, with a concisely written summary of each blog’s thinking in narrative form. Definitely a must-click.
NEW YORK TIMES, which can still afford to pay foreign correspondents, has two very good original stories in these links here and here.
UPDATE: Glenn at Instapundit has found a truly damning piece of information on Taylor’s support for the mutilating massacrers of Sierra Leone. A consultant in Africa was handed a letter written to Taylor’s warlord pal Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone, thanking him for all the weapons and ammo he’d helpfully sent him. The consultant was aghast but the Liberian who gave it to him explained that he wanted the world to know. The text of the actual creepy letter is published in full here.