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June 16 , 2006 The Trial of Charles Taylor Will Take Place in The Hague By Chris Stephen
The Dutch government has said it will allow the move, as long as another country promised to take Taylor if he is convicted and sentenced to prison. On Thursday June 15, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said her country would do this as a token of its “commitment to international justice”.
Anxieties About The Trial When the United Nations helicopter carrying Taylor appeared over the Sierra Leonean capital of Freetown in late March, thousands took to the streets and rooftops to cheer his arrest. But even as Taylor was taken into custody, court officials said that they would like to conduct the trial not in Freetown but at a special session held in the Netherlands. Britain and the United States backed the plan, concerned about reports that Taylor, despite his confinement, remains in control of a powerful criminal empire that stretches across West Africa.
To their voices was added that of Liberia’s new president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first female president. Johnson-Sirleaf hastened Taylor’s trial by requesting his extradition from Nigeria, where he had taken refuge after fleeing his own country. She wants the trial moved to The Hague fearing that Taylor’s allies, who retain positions of power within Liberia, can cause unrest in a region still fraught after years of war.
Resistance to moving the trial to The Hague has come from the human rights community, and from many people in Sierra Leone itself, concerned that they will lose the chance to see the trial of the man they blame, more than any other, for their suffering. A group of Sierra Leonean organizations has sent an open letter to the United Nations Security Council, which must approve a change of location, asking that the proposal be rejected.
“We want him to be tried here,” said James Matthews of the National Movement for Democracy and Human Rights. “That way the people are satisfied. If the trial is held far away the people are not involved, they do not hear, they do not see.”
The Views of a Victim Many victims feel the same way. One such is Ishmael Daramy, a 48-year-old farmer from the north of the country, who had his hands hacked off by the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group that prosecutors say was controlled and funded from neighbouring Liberia by Charles Taylor.
Hoping to encourage a peace plan, Sierra Leone’s then-president Ahmad Kabbah had called on his countrymen to “join hands” in peace. The rebels’ response was the hack the hands off anyone who might be a government supporter. Kneeling in the house he has been given by a Norwegian aid organisation, Mr Daramy demonstrates how it happened. A log was produced and put behind him, then his arm was dragged back, his wrist placed on the wood, and a machete used to sever his hand. The procedure was repeated for his other hand.
“The soldiers told me, ‘Go to Kabbah, go to the UN, to get your hands back,’” he said. Mr Daramy begged them to execute him, to put him out of his misery. “I asked them to kill me, seeing myself like this.” When the soldiers refused, he staggered away, holding his arm above his head to try and stem the flow of blood.
Many such victims died from loss of blood, but Mr Daramy managed to make it back to his village. “When my wife saw me she started to cry. We had a small baby, we did not know what to do.” Ten years later, he is unable to find work and, in a country without social security, is reduced to begging while his family tends a small vegetable plot he has been given at Waterloo, on the outskirts of Freetown. His original home was destroyed by the RUF.
The arrival of Taylor at the court up the road has brought feelings of bitterness. “Taylor is in jail, yes, but he has good food, he has comfort, he has medical aid,” says Ishmael. “Meanwhile I have to beg.” But Ishmael also says it is important that, having got him here, the court holds the Taylor trial in Sierra Leone. “It will be a good example for anyone who wants to do the war,” he says.
Bringing Justice Back to the People At the end of May, Taylor’s lawyer, the experienced British-based barrister Karim Khan, failed in an attempt to get the appeals court to hear his arguments against the relocation plan. He says there are no compelling reasons to move the case, and that it would be harder to call defense witnesses in The Hague. The appeals judges decided that the location of the trial was a matter for the president only, along with his bosses, the United Nations and the Sierra Leone government.
New-York based Human Rights Watch was among those expressing concern at the move. Now that the transfer seems set to go ahead, the organisation is calling for a special effort from the court and its backers to make the trial accessible to the people of West Africa. “With Taylor headed to The Hague, the Special Court must provide outreach on his trial in Sierra Leone, and donors must provide the funding needed to make this happen,” said Richard Dicker, the group’s international justice director.
The reason for the enthusiasm for a Freetown trial reaches back to the roots of the Sierra Leone war crimes court. It was originally designed to answer criticism leveled at earlier war crimes courts for being too remote from the countries most affected. The Sierra Leone Special Court aims to bring justice back to the people.
A New Approach to War Crimes Trials This court is jointly controlled by the Sierra Leonean government and the United Nations. The government provides the premises and a minority of officials; the UN the cash, expertise, and two of the three trial judges for each of the two chambers.
The court has also seen the whole war crimes process refined. When the first UN war crimes court was set up in The Hague in 1993, prosecutors began work on low grade individuals, rather than commanders. This has led to confusion in former Yugoslavia, with complaints that justice often seems to be random – one detention camp guard gets prosecuted, while dozens more escape justice.
Special Court instructions tell prosecutors to find those “most responsible” for the war crimes. Many think the process has worked well. A total of 13 indictments have been issued covering the three armies most involved in the conflict, in each case picking off the leaders. A total of ten people are on trial, including Taylor; two of those indicted have died and another is still on the run.
Meanwhile, lower grade cases have been dealt with through a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This has produced howls of protests from the most senior suspects, as they watch their subordinates, accused of the same crimes, escape punishment simply by telling the truth.
The commission has produced a surprising bonus for prosecutors as well. At the war crimes tribunals for both former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, subordinates have often been reluctant to give evidence against their bosses, in case they incriminate themselves. This became a real stumbling block with cases such as the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. In Sierra Leone, by contrast, subordinates are only too ready to spill the beans on their former bosses, providing prosecutors with valuable links to prove a chain of command.
All of this, including the building of a fortified court complex, has been done on a comparative shoestring: the annual budget is just $25 million. The money comes not from the UN, but from donor nations, leaving court officials grappling with shortfalls each year. The current gap is astonishing: only nine million dollars have been pledged, and the court may run out of cash in the summer unless more money arrives. That money, it is assumed, will come from the United States, also expected to pick up the tab for any move to The Hague.
Many officials here argue that moving the trial out of Freetown negates the whole purpose of the Special Court in bringing justice home to Africa. Among those protesting is the court’s Principal Defender, Vincent Nmehielle. “The institutions are all here,” he says. “The witnesses are all here. We want the people to heal, and to confront their aggressors. How many people will go to The Hague?”
A Mastermind of Brutality? Charles Taylor first attracted attention in the 1980s, when he was living in the United States where he had been a student. Accused by the Liberian government of embezzling government money, he reportedly escaped from jail by climbing down sheets knotted together and fled America. He then turned up in Libya, being trained in revolutionary warfare together with a former Sierra Leonean army corporal Foday Sankoh. Both men then returned to West Africa to foment revolution.
Taylor seized power in Liberia in a coup in 1989. Two years later, he is alleged to have helped Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front grab the eastern diamond fields of Sierra Leone. From then on, say prosecutors, Taylor masterminded a war that saw the RUF provide diamonds in return for arms and cash. Peace deals came and went, as did peacekeeping forces from both West Africa and the United Nations. Finally peace came when British troops led a 17,000-strong UN force into Sierra Leone in 2000.
In 2003 rebellion broke out in Liberia, and with battles raging in the streets of Monrovia, Taylor negotiated a deal under which Nigeria would give him asylum, promising not to hand him over to the Sierra Leone Special Court. Hardly had Taylor’s feet touched Nigerian soil then human rights groups began campaigning for this impunity deal to be overturned. But Nigeria’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo, said he would only deliver Taylor to the court if a new government in Liberia requested that he do so.
Much of Taylor’s indictment centres on horrors inflicted in the late 1990s, when Sierra Leone army officers rebelled, forming the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), and entered into an alliance with their former foes, the RUF. Together, the groups entered Freetown, staging battles with the West African peacekeeping force ECOMOG.
Alleged crimes include hundreds of rapes that began on Valentine’s Day 1998, and lasted until the end of June. Women and teenaged girls were abducted, many kept in “Superman Camp” as sex slaves. Mutilations are also catalogued, including the carving of AFRC and RUF on the foreheads and chests of victims. And the indictment reports on wholesale executions and the destruction of towns and villages, part of a campaign to cow the population of occupied provinces.
Prosecutors say the motivation was strictly financial. “RUF and the AFRC shared a common plan, purpose or design: political power and control over the territory of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond mining areas,” says the indictment.
Taylor is accused of being the mastermind behind it. Drawing on experience of other war crimes courts in other parts of the world, the indictment says he is guilty in at least one of two ways: either through directing the war crimes together with RUF commanders, as part of a joint criminal enterprise, or by supplying the weapons and money to allow these horrors to take place.
A Showcase Trial Lawyers may bristle at the idea, but the fact is that Taylor’s arrest has transformed what was a legal backwater into a poster child for the war crimes movement. The trial will be seen by proponents of war crimes justice as a chance to convince the world that the system works.
This has become more urgent with the controversies surrounding two high-profile cases, those of Slobodan Milosevic and that of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Milosevic’s case went on so long – it was into its fifth year – that he died of a heart attack before it could finish. Meanwhile Saddam Hussein’s trial was criticised over the authorities’ to exclude international jurors who could have made the process run more smoothly and given it greater legitimacy. This trial has also been criticised by human rights groups for court rules that lower the burden of proof and crimp the rights of the defence lawyers, compared to international courts.
With Taylor, proponents hope that war crimes justice will get it right in an almost equally high-profile case. This is certainly the hope of the court’s flamboyant chief prosecutor Desmond de Silva, a British QC. When we meet, in the white portacabin that serves as his office in the court complex, he wears a safari suit in the manner of Dr Livingstone. “The world is moving from impunity to accountability,” he says. “I think politicians are feeling nervous. This is the whole point of accountability.”
The prosecutor remains acutely conscious of the need to keep a grip on the timeline, having slimmed-down the original indictment from 17 to the 11 counts. “We have learned from other international criminal tribunals,” he says.
Mr de Silva has announced his resignation from the court, saying he needs to return to London to attend to affairs at his chambers, but he has told the UN that he would be happy to be called back to prosecute Taylor, wherever the case is eventually held. This process – and the costs – will be stretched still further if the whole trial is moved to The Hague, with the attendant logistical complications.
The risk of Taylor organizing a jailbreak in Freetown always seemed small – the court building is fortified with blast walls, razor wire and machine gun nests, manned by Mongolian UN troops. However the Liberian government was concerned about the impact of trying Taylor in a neighbouring country could have on public order and the stability of the government.
There were also concerns that the trial might have a destabilizing effect on the already shaky Kabbah regime in Sierra Leone. Accused of failing to get a grip on either poverty or corruption, the Sierra Leonean president has now been called to give evidence in the trial of his army commander, Hinga Norman, accused of ordering government forces to commit war crimes. Many think Kabbah should himself be questioned about how much he knew of the war crimes allegedly committed by the Civil Defence Force. Such a controversy might put a further strain on a government looking towards presidential elections late next year. Chris Stephen, a journalist who writes regularly about war crimes issues, is the author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Atlantic Books/Atlantic Monthly Press).
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