Taylor-made but the suit doesn’t fit

Charles Ghankay Taylor awaits the dubious honour of becoming the first former head of state to be judged before an international criminal tribunal. The former Liberian president is the jewel in the crown of international justice, but his criminal case on eleven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity is in no way clear cut.
by *Thijs Bouwknegt, The Hague

[related-articles]Critics claim his prosecution was straitjacketed by the trial’s limited time frame, leaving many stones unturned. Whether or not he is found guilty of a campaign of terror in neighbouring Sierra Leone, Thursday’s verdict will leave a trail of questions about atrocities and his relations with Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels during Sierra Leone’s civil war in the nineties.
The plea
“Most definitely, Your Honour, I did not and could not have committed these acts against the sister Republic of Sierra Leone, […] so most definitely I am not guilty”, Taylor told the judges during his first appearance on April 3rd 2006 in Freetown. Three years earlier he had taken refuge in a luxurious villa at the invitation of former Nigerian president Olegun Obasanjo.
But following his arrest and transfer to the custody of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) he has remained the most senior figure in the dock of an international tribunal. He outlived former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and his trial precedes that of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo.
Taylor fired his first lawyer Karim Kahn but did not try to frustrate proceedings further, unlike his Yugoslav cellmates at their UN prison in The Hague suburb of Scheveningen. The court even allowed him to take the stand himself, for an unprecedented seven month period, to meticulously detail West African history.
Refuse collection
“Throw it in the bin. That is what we submit the court should do with this body of evidence: get rid of it”, said Taylor’s lead lawyer Courtenay Griffiths during closing arguments in March 2011. He argued that the conflict in Sierra Leone was not a Taylor-made catastrophe. On the contrary, he says, Taylor’s “role in Sierra Leone was entirely peaceful.”
Taylor is accused of “acts of terrorism”, an American flavoured concept that burdened the prosecution with a complex challenge: proving that Taylor forged an illicit conspiracy with RUF leader Foday Sankoh in Libya in the late eighties to conquer West Africa. Their motive: to enrich themselves with rough diamonds from Sierra Leone. Their modus operandi: a campaign of terror.
Taylor does not deny an orgy of atrocities took place. He simply refutes the charge that he was at the centre of them. But American prosecutor Brenda Hollis has consistently maintained that “the RUF was a terrorist army created and supported and directed by Charles Taylor ... All this suffering, all these atrocities to feed the greed and lust for power of Charles Taylor,” she said.
Former aides and enemies
In an effort to tie Taylor to the Sierra Leonean crimes, the prosecution flew 94 witnesses to the Netherlands. The only direct evidence connecting the massacres in Sierra Leone to Taylor comes from his own former aides and enemies. Some had strong reasons to testify against their (former) political rival.
Others were criminals, like Joseph Marzah, known as ‘zigzag’. The former secret service agent confessed to displaying “heads on sticks and car bumpers,” killing babies, cutting open pregnant women and eating “Nigerians and white people,” during a chaotic three-day testimony in March 2008.
Counterpoint
Producing almost 50,000 pages of transcript and over a thousand exhibits, the Taylor trial offers a unique insight into Liberian and Sierra Leonean history. And indeed two competing diametrically-opposed narratives about Taylor’s role in West Africa. In Taylor’s version, he is a peacemaker left carrying the can for the international community. In the prosecution’s version, he represents the dark corner of that world.
But the prosecution may only succeed in proving that Taylor - because of his position - “should have known” about the crimes and that he “did nothing to prevent them”. They claim he did everything to destroy evidence of links with RUF rebels, accusing Taylor of killing his ‘favourite’ general Sam Bockarie and AFRC junta leader Johnny Paul Koroma after they were also charged by the SCSL.
Not the whole truth
For many observers, the SCSL’s main shortcoming in this trial is that it could not deal with Taylor’s full role in West Africa’s history. His role in Liberia's back-to-back civil wars has been well documented. But even though the SCSL has delved deeply into this history, it can only make findings on established crimes in Sierra Leone committed after November 1996 - leaving the era of alleged atrocities in Liberia before then, untouched.
Click here for the longer version of this article in IJT 150
* PhD researcher at the Netherlands Institute of War Crimes Documentation (NIOD)