Charles Taylor verdict historic – UN chief
GENEVA: UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the war crimes conviction of Liberian ex-president Charles Taylor yesterday means tyrannical rulers can no longer retire on blood money.
“This is undoubtedly a historic moment in the development of international justice,” Pillay said.
“A former president, who once wielded immense influence in a neighbouring country where tens of thousands of people were killed, mutilated, raped, robbed and repeatedly displaced for years on end, has been arrested, tried in a fair and thorough international procedure, and has now been convicted of very serious crimes.”
The Special Court for Sierra Leone convicted Taylor, 64, of helping rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone wage a campaign of terror against the mineralrich country’s people during a decade-long civil war that killed 120 000.
Taylor was paid in so-called blood diamonds, illegally mined by Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, who were known for murdering and raping civilians and chopping off limbs with machetes.
After being overthrown in 2003 Taylor fled to Nigeria, which extradited him three years later under international pressure.
Pillay said the verdict was a “stark warning” to other heads of state.
“The days when tyrants and mass murderers could, even
when they had been deposed, retire to a life of luxury in another land are over,” she said.
“And so they should be. Few things are more repugnant than seeing people with so much blood on their hands, living on stolen money with no prospect of their victims seeing justice carried out.”
The first African leader to stand trial for war crimes, Taylor had been charged with 11 counts of murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, when more than 50 000 people were killed.
The warlord-turnedpresident was accused of directing Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in a campaign of terror to plunder Sierra Leone’s diamond mines for profit and to obtain weapons.
Yesterday, the court ruled that Taylor, 64, was criminally responsible for aiding and abetting the crimes, and found him guilty of providing weapons, food, medical supplies, fuel and equipment to forces in Sierra Leone which committed atrocities.
But it said he was not guilty of either ordering or planning the atrocities – a disappointment for the prosecution and a decision which could eventually result in a lighter sentence.
“The trial chamber, having already found the accused guilty of aiding and abetting, does not find the accused also instigated these crimes,” Presiding Judge Richard Lussick said.
Wearing a dark blue suit and maroon tie, Taylor looked calm and subdued as the presiding judge took more than two hours to read out the charges, evidence and final ruling.
The litany of gruesome crimes covered rapes and enslavement, beheadings and disembowellings, amputations and other mutilations carried out by child soldiers notorious for being high on drugs and dressed in fright wigs.
“A civilian was killed in full public view and then his body was disembowelled and his intestines stretched across the road to make a checkpoint. Women and children were raped in public, people were burned alive in their homes,” the judge said.
A sentencing hearing is scheduled for May 16.