The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Taylor guilty of war crimes
International court convicts former Liberian president.
LEIDSCHENDAM, Netherlands — Former Liberian President Charles Taylor became the first head of state since World War II convicted by an international war crimes court.
After 13 months of deliberation, three judges — from Ireland, Samoa and Uganda — found him guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes for arming Sierra Leone rebels in exchange for “blood diamonds” mined by slave laborers.
Counts included murder, rape, slavery and the use of child soldiers. But the judges said prosecutors did not prove Taylor directly commanded those responsible.
They said he played a crucial role in letting the rebels continue a bloody rampage during an 11year civil war that ended in 2002 with more than 50,000 dead.
The rebels devel- oped gruesome terms for the mutilations that became their trademark: They would offer their victims the choice of “long sleeves” or “short sleeves” — having their hands hacked off or their arms sliced off above the elbow.
Taylor, 64, will be sentenced next month after a separate hearing. The court has no death penalty and no life sentence. Judges have given eight other rebels as much as 52 years in prison.
Prosecutors said Taylor was motivated by a quest for power and money — “pure avarice,” in the words of David Crane, the U.S. prosecutor who indicted him in 2003.
Rebels gave Taylor “a continuous supply” of diamonds, often in exchange for arms and ammunition, the court found, allowing him to accumulate a fortune that prosecutors said amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Investigators never unraveled the web hiding this presumed fortune, however, and Taylor pleaded penury, leaving the court to foot the bill for a defense that cost $100,000 per month in lawyers, staff and rent.
Victims, prosecutors and rights activists hailed the verdict.
It “permanently locks in and solidifies the idea that heads of state are now accountable for what they do to their own people,” said Crane, a professor of international law at Syracuse University. “This is a bell that has been rung and clear- ly rings throughout the world. If you are a head of state and you are killing your own people, you could be next.”
But chief defense lawyer Courtenay Griffiths, a London barrister, said the verdict grew out of “tainted and corrupt” testimony because witnesses were paid to come from Sierra Leone to testify.
Griffiths depicted Taylor as the legitimate president of a sovereign nation who assisted a rebel movement in a neighboring country but should not be held accountable for crimes that the rebels might have committed. If that were the standard, he suggested, U.S. leaders should be tried for abuses committed when they assisted rebels in Nicaragua and Afghanistan and financed a brutal military regime in El Salvador in the 1980s.
The defense will decide whether to appeal only after sentencing, scheduled for May 30, he added.