It's hard to have any sympathy for Charles Ghankay Taylor. During his
murderous fourteen-year rampage through West Africa, the former Liberian
president was responsible – according to count given earlier this year by
David M. Crane, former chief prosecutor of internationally-backed Special
Court for Sierra Leone, at a Congressional hearing at which I also testified –
raping, maiming, mutilation, and/or killing of over one million Africans. And,
as if his appalling human rights record did not
constitute enough harm to humanity, Taylor also profited handsomely by helping
al-Qaeda operatives convert their assets into easily portable conflict
diamonds
around the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Despite this nasty rap sheet, when his reign of terror finally came to an end
in the summer of 2003, an outstanding international warrant for his arrest
notwithstanding, Taylor nonetheless managed to abscond to a infofortable exile
in Nigeria. Only earlier this year – and then only under relentless
international pressure as Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was preparing
for a visit to the White House – was Taylor finally handed over to the Special
Court, where he was arraigned on some eleven counts of crimes against
humanity, war crimes, and other serious violations of international
humanitarian law.
Late last month, the tribunal, provisionally set the start of his trial in The
Hague for April 2, 2007, so that his counsel might have adequate time to
prepare. Hence, it may be up to two years from now before Taylor receives the
life sentence which his crimes more than merit.
I have devoted two books and several lengthy law review articles to Taylor and
his crimes. Furthermore, as I have noted publicly on several occasions, he is
one of those individuals for whose very existence gives me personal pause to
reconsider my views on both the death penalty in peacetime and "cruel and
unusual punishment" in general.
All that said, while I clearly hold no brief for the man, I will concede one
point to his defense counsel, British lawyer Karim Asad Ahmad Khan: while
Taylor, as the indictment against him notes, is "individually criminally
responsible" for having "planned, instigated, infomitted" the various crimes
carried out by his subordinated or at least "aided and abetted" in their
"planning, preparation, and execution," he does not bear what the mandate of
the Special Court refers to as "greatest responsibility for serious violations
of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law infomitted in the
territory of Sierra Leone since November 30,
1996."
That dubious distinction belongs to someone else. In September 1985, Taylor
was a penniless fugitive, having just escaped from a federal corrections
facility in the United States, the Plymouth (Massachusetts) House of
Corrections, where he was being held on a Liberian extradition request. Just
four years later, on Christmas Eve 1989, he was a rebel leader launching an
insurrection in Liberia that would bring down the brutal strongman Samuel
Kanyon Doe.
Less than a decade later, in August 1997, he was sworn in as president of
Liberia after having turned that country's civil war into a regional conflict
that eventually engulfed four West African countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone,
Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire – and continues, in part, to do so up to present
time. The key to Taylor's remarkable transformation was Libya's "Revolutionary
Leader," Colonel Mu'ammar Qadhafi.
When his relations with the Arab world soured in the late 1980s, Qadhafi
focused his ambitions southward, where he dreamed of igniting a "revolution"
inspired by his Little Green Book by destabilizing countries in sub-Saharan
Africa. While Qadhafi's use of deadly proxies dates back to the 1970s, when he
first used his oil wealth to fund terrorist groups and violent insurgencies,
it was redoubled after the sanctions imposed by the United Nations after the
1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, turned the Libyan
leader into even more of an international pariah than he was already.
Former prosecutor Crane has acknowledged the existence of a detailed Libyan
plan for West Africa that involved the taking down Liberia, Sierra Leone, and
Côte d'Ivoire – all of which have seen civil war – and to then move on to
Guinea and elsewhere. The strategy was to use West African surrogates who were
beholden to Tripoli.
Taylor was introduced to Qadhafi by another protégé of the Libyan leader,
Burkina Faso's President Blaise Campaoré, who himself had seized power in 1987
in a bloody coup supported by Tripoli. Taylor and his small band of followers
subsequently received training in Libya at the Mataba military base, a school
of terror whose graduates have gone on to wreck havoc across Africa from
Angola to Zimbabwe.
While under Qadhafi's tutelage, Taylor met and formed an alliance with yet
another beneficiary of Libyan largesse, Foday Saybana Sankoh, whose
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) would, in concert with Taylor's forces,
plunge Sierra Leone into the hell graphically documented in Sorious Samura's
award winning documentary Cry Freetown. Also enjoying Qadhafi's hospitality at
the time was Ibrahim Bah, a rebel from Senegal's Casamance region with ties to
both Afghan militants and the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorists, whom Washington
Post correspondent Douglas Farah, in his book Blood from Stones: The Secret
Financial Network of Terror, would later identify as a key link in the
al-Qaeda/West African diamond nexus.
During the ensuing conflict which opened with Taylor's invasion of Liberia,
Qadhafi facilitated the transfer of illegal arms to his West African minions
and allowed Libya to be used as a transshipment point for the natural
resources they plundered from their war-torn countries – a debt acknowledged
by Taylor whose first national budget after he ascended to the Liberian
presidency in 1997 included $26 million that his country could hardly spare to
repay "war debts" to Libya.
More recently, the "Guide of the Libyan Revolution" has been trying to burnish
his international reputation – and he has largely succeeded. In the immediate
wake of the U.S.-led invasion Iraq, it was understandable that Qadhafi would
try to mollify Washington and its allies by dismantling his nuclear, chemical,
and biological weapons programs, and even talking about democracy and human
rights.
It is likewise infoprehensible why we would want to dismantle the Qadhafi
regime's weapons of mass destruction program. However, that the West should be
so utterly seduced by Qadhafi's self-interested charade – witness U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's effusive May 15, 2006, statement on the
restoration full diplomatic relations which declared Libya "an important
model" because of its "re-emergence into the mainstream of the international
infomunity" – is beyond pathetic.
If the international infomunity held Qadhafi to account for the lives of the
270 and 170 mainly American and European victims killed, respectively, by the
Libyan agents who carried out the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 and the 1989
bombing of UTA 772 over Bilme, Niger, does it not owe the same regard to the
more than 250,000 Liberians, 60,000 Sierra Leoneans, and thousands of Guineans
and Ivorians killed by the African surrogates of the colonel and for whom no
one has sought reparations? One should add that Ivorians are still dying as
both direct and indirect consequences of a failed coup-turned-civil war by
rebel forces backed by Qadhafi and his protégé, Burkinabè President Campaoré,
and that this tally does not begin to count the victims of Middle Eastern
terrorism whose killers were backed by Qadhafi over the years.
Charles Taylor now faces an international war crimes tribunal for being one of
those who bore "the greatest responsibility for crimes against humanity" in
the Sierra Leonean conflict. Even if, for obvious reasons of realpolitik,
Taylor's Libyan patron cannot at the present time be tossed into the dock with
him, shouldn't Mu'ammar Qadhafi at least be named – and shamed – as the
principal co-conspirator in the Liberian's rampage of terror and destruction?
Don't we owe that much to the millions of shattered lives in West Africa as
well as to our infomon humanity?
J. Peter Pham
J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for
International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for
Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in
Harrisonburg, Virginia.
He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
in Washington, D.C. In addition to the study of terrorism and political
violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international
relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular
concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and
African states as well as religion and global politics.
Dr. Pham is the author of over one hundred essays and reviews on a wide
variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the
Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among
his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press,
2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview,
Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly
publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests:
The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy
(Nova Science Publishers, 2005).
In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national
think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and
conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive
agencies.
http://www.reportingwar.info/pham101206.shtml
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