Thoughts on the Charles
Taylor verdict
By Lansana Gberie
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.
The writer is author of A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the
Destruction of Sierra Leone (London,
2005)
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