A scalding indictment of Liberia’s Taylor, as well as a mention of everyone’s favorite, Pat Robertson. Do you get the impression that the world has sort of given up on Africa these days?
Liberia’s Taylor: The Despot We Can Live With
By Douglas Farah
Sunday, August 3, 2003; Page B01
The despotic president, indicted by a U.N. tribunal for crimes against humanity, came to power by forcibly recruiting young boys and turning them into killers. His troops manned checkpoints lined with human skulls, where the roadblocks were made out of human intestines, the disemboweled victims left by the roadside. For a decade the despot has systematically pocketed the wealth of his country, leaving his people in abject poverty. He has done millions of dollars’ worth of business with al Qaeda and Hezbollah. His son is a brutal thug, feared for his executions and proclivity for kidnapping young women and raping them.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein? No, Liberia under Charles Taylor.
Yet as Taylor clings to power, the international community continues to dither over what should be done. Despite Taylor’s history of atrocities, the Bush administration has couched the debate about whether to send troops to Liberia only as a humanitarian crisis, as if the country’s misery was an act of God, like flood or famine. In building the case for even limited action, administration officials have remained strangely silent on Taylor’s terrorist ties, his execution of political rivals, his policies of torture, and the shutting down of the free press.
And while the United States put a price on the heads of Hussein’s notorious sons, it has been mum about Taylor’s son Chuckie.Yet Chuckie runs Liberia’s intelligence services and commands the elite Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU). It is the only group whose loyalty to Taylor is unconditional because its members not only get paid, but they get to keep what they loot. Chuckie is so violent that he was removed from his ATU command two years ago when even his troops couldn’t stomach his antics. Now, with the regime under threat, Chuckie is back and the West African nation is descending into another round of mayhem.
Taylor senior is betting that he will never have to face justice, even if he’s eased from power. Yet the charge sheet against him is long. Besides the U.N. indictment and extensive press reporting, Taylor’s record has been documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the State Department. U.N. investigators found Taylor traded diamonds for weapons with the same gunrunner who supplied the Taliban in Afghanistan. The United Nations has banned Taylor, his family and entire cabinet from traveling outside Liberia because of their criminal conduct.
The administration’s preferred policy on Liberia might have been to just walk away. But with Bush’s trip to Africa last month, it would have looked awkward to ignore the plight of an African nation settled by freed American slaves. By casting the crisis as a humanitarian affair, the administration can justify “peacekeeping lite,” a mission where the United States plays the risk-free role of providing a few million dollars and some communications equipment while demanding ill-trained troops from destitute African nations to step up.
It is not necessarily a bad policy, but it is a dishonest one. It stands in contrast to senior administration officials’ statements that intervention in Iraq would have been justified if only to get rid of Saddam’s murderous regime. Not only are there mass graves in Liberia, but those maimed and crippled by Taylor’s forces still bear eloquent witness to the brutality. In three years covering West Africa, I have witnessed the price the entire region has paid for his rule.
Ivory Coast, Guinea and Burkina Faso have all suffered at Taylor’s hands, but his prime victim outside Liberia has been Sierra Leone – a target because of its rich diamond deposits. Taylor joined up with Foday Sankoh, a Sierra Leonean he’d met while training in one of Moammar Gaddafi’s Libyan revolutionary schools in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Taylor armed and trained Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front, which launched an invasion of Sierra Leone in an attempt to seize the diamond fields. It became one of the most brutal forces on the continent.
Like Taylor’s troops in Liberia, the RUF thugs didn’t just slaughter civilians. They carried out campaigns of rape across the country. They abducted thousands of children, as young as 7 years old, and turned them into killers, fueled by a lethal mixture of cocaine and amphetamines. And just as Taylor formed the children into special, elite combat corps, the Small Boys Units, who acted as his personal bodyguards, the RUF also organized child soldiers.
The signature RUF atrocity was hacking off the hands, legs, lips and ears of civilians who did not support the rebels. Today in Sierra Leone the thousands of amputees still mostly live in makeshift camps strewn with trash and bisected by open sewers. They are unemployable and the world’s attention, focused for a brief time on them in 1999, has shifted elsewhere. Meanwhile, Taylor made millions of dollars from Sierra Leone’s diamonds.
Taylor was indicted for crimes against humanity on March 7 by the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. The indictment alleges Taylor “supported and encouraged all actions of the RUF,” as part of a “joint criminal enterprise” to reap wealth from the diamond fields. The crimes include murder, abduction, slavery, rape, use of child soldiers and looting.
Special Court prosecutor David Crane, who earlier served as senior inspector general in the Pentagon, and his chief investigator Alan White, a former cop and Pentagon investigator, have found compelling evidence that al Qaeda was active in the profitable diamond trade Taylor controlled. In the months before 9/11, al Qaeda sought to protect its financial assets by buying millions of dollars of diamonds from Taylor. Taylor got money in bank accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere, while al Qaeda got its money out of the banking system, where it would have been seized easily in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Diamonds, by contrast, are hard to trace and easy to move.
In 2001 I began writing stories about the al Qaeda ties there – and as a result, U.S. and European intelligence officials warned me that Taylor was plotting to kill me. As a result, my pregnant wife, young child and I left our base in the Ivory Coast. Global Witness, European intelligence sources and the BBC all pursued and verified the terrorist ties I had reported. But it was the court investigations, conducted by professionals with broad access to information and sources on the ground, that carried special weight. The evidence amassed includes numerous eye-witness accounts, telephone records of calls to Afghanistan, bank records and other documents. That is far more than any evidence presented on Saddam’s ties to Osama bin Laden.
But try as they might, Crane and White have been unable to get the CIA or FBI to undertake a serious investigation of the al Qaeda ties. Amazingly, their evidence is largely ignored and dismissed. Only a few members of Congress have picked up the cause and demanded action.
Part of the administration’s unwillingness to confront Taylor may be that the dictator still retains powerful and influential friends. Taylor’s staunchest defender is the Rev. Pat Robertson, the owner of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of “The 700 Club.” Robertson has invested more than $8 million in a gold mine in Liberia under the name of Freedom Gold Limited, registered in the Cayman Islands. In recent weeks Robertson, on his TV show, has been extolling Taylor’s virtues as a “fellow Baptist” and “a fine Christian.” In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Robertson, who has never been to Liberia, said Taylor’s indictment “is nonsense and should be quashed.” And he has portrayed Liberia’s civil war as primarily a fight between Muslims and Taylor’s Christians, an analysis not shared by anyone remotely familiar with the country. Taylor “definitely has Christian sentiments, although you hear all these rumors that he’s done this and that,” Robertson said.
Other ardent Bush supporters have economic interests in Liberia. Richard DeVos, co-founder of the Amway Corp., has invested several million dollars in AmLib United Minerals, a gold exploration company there. DeVos, a billionaire, is one of the Republican Party’s largest individual contributors and a big donor to the Bush campaign. But unlike Freedom Gold and Robertson, AmLib and DeVos have not publicly defended Taylor and are not closely identified with his regime.
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Or maybe the reluctance to talk about Taylor is due to the fact that the mayhem he wreaks is in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa and not enough people really care. To acknowledge the murderous nature of Taylor’s regime and its ties to terrorists might prompt public demands for U.S.-led intervention and peacekeeping. While U.S. troops would likely face little resistance, rebuilding Liberia would make Iraq seem like a picnic. The nation has been mired in conflict since 1989. Monrovia, the bombed-out capital, has had no running water or electricity for seven years. There is only one hospital; there are no public schools. There is no garbage collection or sewage system. The rest of the country is worse. Sorting out the players and engaging long enough to restore a genuine political process could take years and billions of dollars. That is the true cost of intervening in Liberia and the true cost of taking on Taylor. And that is why it might never be done.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11142-2003Aug1.html