The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Liberia’s ‘Jungle Jabbah’ faces justice in U.S. court
PHILADELPHIA — The jury knew her only as Witness 18. The woman, dressed in the colorful traditional garb of rural Liberia from where she had come, said the man on trial was not an entrepreneur living quietly in Southwest Philadelphia, as he claimed. Rather, she told the court, Mohammed Jabbateh was “Jungle Jabbah,” a ruthless militant commander responsible for barbarous war crimes committed decades ago.
In chilling testimony here last fall, the woman, now in her 60s, recounted how Jabbateh had invaded her village in 1991. After killing her brother-in-law by removing his heart, she said, Jabbateh’s fighters did the same to her husband — and then ordered her to cook the organ so they could eat it. “Make yourself strong ma,” she remembered one of them saying as he urged her to build a fire. “If you don’t do it, he’ll kill us both.”
Jabbateh, 51, was convicted in October, not for committing war crimes in Liberia but for lying to investigators in the United States about his violent past and defrauding the U.S. immigration system in the process. He faces up to 30 years in prison, and it is expected that he’ll be deported from the United States eventually. A judge is scheduled to announce Jabbateh’s fate at a hearing Thursday.
Should he receive the maximum sentence, it would represent one of the toughest penalties ever handed down by a U.S. court for a case involving war crimes. The Department of Homeland Security, which enforces the country’s immigration laws, has 1,900 open cases on people thought to be living in the United States with a record of alleged human rights abuses, but fewer than 20 suspects are arrested each year — and only one has been litigated by a U.S. court since laws were put in place to prosecute what the U.S. government deems substantive abuses, including torture, genocide and other atrocities.
The Justice Department says it is committed to prosecuting those suspected of such abuses who seek a haven in the United States “when the evidence and the law support criminal charges.” But there is a growing sense among human rights advocates that more must be done — and that the worst may be yet to come.
“No one should be surprised if, in the future, veterans of ISIS or the Rohingya massacres slip by U.S. immigration with ease and live happily in Florida, immune from any prosecution for crimes against humanity,” said David Scheffer, ambassador at large for war crimes issues during the Clinton administration. ISIS is another name for the Islamic State. The Rohingya Muslims are a minority group whose targeting by the Burmese military has been widely condemned.
Jabbateh fled to the United States in 1998 along with thousands of Liberians seeking refuge from a devastating civil war that spanned 14 years and left 250,000 dead. He married, started a family and launched a shipping business, winning asylum from the U.S. government and, eventually, permanent residence.
Fellow Liberians who settled in Philadelphia recognized Jabbateh — and the handful of other suspected ex-militants who live here — and took umbrage at seeing them benefit from the opportunities — for employment, for education, for health care — that were nonexistent in their homeland after the instability they created.
“People had to be careful,” said Massa Washington, a former commissioner on Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, noting the fear many still harbor and concern about retaliation. “Most of these guys still have structures in place back home even if they’re inactive for now. You never really know. Because of the viciousness of the war. People think if I point out this guy here my mother is back home, my brother is back home, my child is back home.”
There were other considerations, too. Many Liberians living in the United States were granted provisional residency — what the government calls temporary protected status, or TPS — because of threats they faced at home. Those mindful of their vulnerability worried about the possible consequences of reporting Jabbateh and other suspected militants to U.S. authorities. This concern has only grown during the Trump administration, which has mounted an aggressive effort to reduce immigration to the United States and recently ended TPS for the thousands of Liberians living here.
When Homeland Security was notified about Jabbateh in 2013, officials there contacted the Justice Department, which has struggled to prosecute such cases. With most dating back years, credible evidence and witnesses can be hard to find, and American juries often lack much context about foreign wars.