adminbe 144-years-old to come out of prison alive.
I will not dwell on the merits or demerits of his conviction, for that is a foregone conclusion, as I have no respect for the ICC which to me is a latter day version of the racist Western lynch mobs that used to target people of colour as late as the 1960s.
The overly constrained proceedings in The Hague were really more like a show trial, a demonstration of Western judicial power rather than a real exploration of the facts and figures surrounding the series of events that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives across the region. For most of the world the narrative is simple: Charles Taylor = blood diamonds + child soldiers + limb chopping = war criminal. Fair enough. That case was made.
What was missing from the dock in The Hague, as opposed to say the Nuremberg Trials, are the countless other personalities and political entrepreneurs that animated many of the events that to the West seemed more like antics in a Hobbesian charnel house than acts of sovereign states.
Whether or not one believes that it was the CIA that engineered Taylor’s escape from prison in Massachusetts (which many in Monrovia firmly swear to) it is certainly the case that the Reagan-era US state department was displeased with Samuel Doe. After showering Doe with money in the first years of his reign, American diplomats looked on aghast as Doe drifted from them, turning into an embarrassing kleptocrat. It was also after Doe’s rigged elections in 1985 that
Washington began plotting to get rid of Doe by any means necessary.
At that point the young idealist Taylor no doubt viewed himself as a liberator. He would launch a counter-revolution against Doe. In order to do so he would first have to get arms, money and rear echelon support. Taylor and his partner Prince Johnson — who sits in the Liberian Senate to this day — travelled to Burkina Faso and assisted the coup that assassinated the popular Burkinabe president Thomas Sankara- touted the Che Guevara of Africa — in exchange for support of their own coup plans against Doe.
Taylor was also invited to Libya to meet with Gaddafi and was given financial and tactical support in the context of Gaddafi’s own pan-African aspirations.
When Taylor finally launched his incursion from friendly Cote d’Ivoire in 1989 all the stars were aligned in his favour, including the support of current Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Unfortunately, he had the resources to launch his campaign but neither a disciplined revolutionary party nor a competent officer corps to carry it forward.
By the time he became the elected president of an exhausted and terrorised Liberia in 1997, Taylor had succumbed to all the ills that befall a Western stooge. He had ruled his personal catchment called “Greater Liberia” with a toxic combination of terror and patronage. His frustration in not being able to capture Monrovia — due to blocking manoeuvres from other West African nations — only fuelled his megalomania and greed.
This led him to start selling off large swatches of precious hardwood forests to greedy European buyers. He also began supporting reactionaries like Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone whose access to diamonds provided Taylor with a virtual bloody ATM machine. There is no doubt that the insanity he unleashed had begun to affect him.
However, he always put on a good face for foreign visitors. One was the Reverend Jesse Jackson who came as Clinton’s special envoy and supposedly tried to make the dubious case that both Taylor and Sankoh were worthy of American support. Another was the Reverend Pat Robertson of 700 Club fame who allegedly came to Taylor’s Liberia looking for diamonds in exchange for lobbying George HW Bush on Taylor’s behalf. It was at this point that Islam also emerged in the conflict.
One of Taylor’s most serious miscalculations was his oppression of the Mandingos, an Islamic ethnic group spread out across several West African countries including
neighbouring Guinea. It was Guinea, with help from Nigeria, that supplied Liberian-Mandingo leaders like Alhaji Kromah — now a Professor of Mass Communications at the University of Liberia — with money, weapons and logistical support in his quest to topple Taylor from his presidential perch. It was a mirror scenario to the one which aided Taylor a decade before.
Ironically, it has been suggested that Taylor’s conflict diamonds helped finance several Al Queda operations, one of which may have been 9/11. Taylor should be happy he’s imprisoned in The Netherlands. The US would probably like to see him in Guantanamo.
So what are we left with in the Taylor judgment?
The lesson to be learnt from Taylor’s predicament is the same lesson that should be drawn from Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s predicaments. The West does not have permanent friends but permanent interests. They can raise you and use you, even against your own people, but when they are done with you, they waste you. Taylor will die in prison. I have no tears for any politician raised, and sponsored by the West. True African leaders come from the people, and I hope
Morgan Tsvangirai is watching the fate that befalls other acolytes at the hands of their masters.
Online Reporter