LONDON – No one is whiter than white in Liberia. Certainly not the new president-elect, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who at one time lent her support to Charles Taylor, Africa’s most bloodthirsty and notorious warlord. But, as one Liberian I talked to in Monrovia’s market said, “we have more than paid for our sins”. Finally after mass murder, mass rape and mass economic destruction the human spirit has shown its amazing ability to somersault and become non-violent. Not a shot has been fired during this election; barely a bad word word uttered, at least until the results came in.
Somewhere the good words of the Christian book that the liberated slaves brought back with them from the United States are being recalled and remembered. It is a time for forgiveness, repentance and rebuilding. The churches, at least those still standing, are packed.
But this begs the question what to do about Charles Taylor, whose evil deeds probably bare comparison with Pol Pot? He lives on a comfortable estate in the seaside city of Calabar in Nigeria, a gift of Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo. Until now the international community has given this arrangement the benefit of the doubt. Indeed the Bush Administration from time to time has extended its protecting arm when Congress wanted to push for an opening of the can of worms.
After all it was a deal that at the time met with widespread approval. In return for agreeing to exit his hand-made killing machine and turn his personal rule over to an interim government that would welcome West African peacekeepers supported by U.S. troops, Obasanjo, the deal’s negotiator, agreed to give Taylor refuge.
But the deal had its elements of ambiguity. The War Crimes Court established by the UN in Sierra Leone in 2000, continued to demand his presence for trial on charges incurred during the parallel civil war in Sierra Leone, which the diamond-hungry Taylor funded and supported. The court argued that Taylor was using his exile to stir up further mayhem in neighbouring Guinea and the Cote d’Ivoire and must be sent for trial immediately.
President Obasanjo himself opened a window of uncertainty when, two years ago, he told me in an interview that if a future freely elected government of Liberia requested Taylor’s return to the country it had the right to try him at home or send him to Sierra Leone.
A month ago I asked the president-elect if she was going to request Nigeria to extradite Taylor. She replied, “It is better he be sent straight to Sierra Leone. That’s where the trial will be. There is no need for him to come here first”. But Obasanjo sticks to his original position, arguing to me that he gave Taylor his word, that word ended the carnage in Liberia and only a request of Taylor’s home government can override that.
This seems fair enough. It is a nettle that Johnson-Sirleaf will have to grasp in the next few months. Better to get it over quickly than to allow it to linger and become a festering sore. Obasanjo, with his immense leverage in Liberia as the peacemaker-in-chief and the provider of the largest contingent of peacekeepers which will remain in the country, can persuade the president-elect to act. Certainly Bush will have no further reason to quieten Congress on the issue, which has threatened to cut off all aid to Nigeria and will be reticent to approve the funds to help rebuild Liberia if the deed is not done.
Assuming this happens then a watershed for Africa will have been crossed. After a decade and a half of rampant civil war and economic decline a new Africa is finding its feet. And the extension of international law is playing a large part in it. Now that governments (the Sudan), rebel leaders (Uganda, Sudan and the Congo) and presidents-cum-war lords (Liberia) are being or about to be indicted by either the International Criminal Court based in the Hague or the Special Court in Sierra Leone, the initial legal effort begun with the war crimes court set up a decade ago in Arusha, Tanzania to deal with the genocide in Rwanda, is now gathering an immense head of steam.
In present day Africa with a large number of democratically elected governments and its increasingly free press the word is getting around that one can no longer expect to get away with this kind of brutal savagery. Even in “retirement”, as with Taylor, you can’t expect to live peacefully on your looted wealth for ever, your crimes lost and forgotten in the political haze.
The worm has turned in Africa.
