Liberian Boycotts War Crimes Trial
Ex-President Taylor Accused of Role in Sierra Leone Force

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

THE HAGUE, June 4 -- The trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, the highest-ranking African leader to face an international war crimes court, began Monday with the defendant refusing to leave his cell and prosecutors alleging that his fighters hacked off civilians' hands and legs, forced women into sexual slavery and made soldiers of children.

"I choose not to be a fig leaf of legitimacy for this court," Taylor wrote in a letter to the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone here, explaining his boycott of the opening session.

The letter was read aloud in the courtroom by his defense attorney, Karim Asad Ahmad Khan. After collecting his papers and apologizing to the judicial panel, Khan announced his intention to leave the room, saying Taylor had fired him and wanted to conduct his own defense. Presiding Judge Julia Sebutinde, looking stunned and frustrated, protested: "You don't just get up and go. Sanity will return to this court."

But Khan left anyway. He told reporters outside the courtroom that Taylor believes he is being "railroaded" by the court and cannot receive a fair trial. Taylor has denied all the charges against him.

Prosecutors proceeded with their opening statement against Taylor. "As he ignored victims' suffering, he also chooses to ignore the presentation of these crimes," said prosecutor Stephen Rapp. "He has thumbed his nose at this court."

The case against Taylor, 59, is being scrutinized across the African continent, where a dozen countries are attempting to investigate or prosecute former leaders and senior officials for war crimes committed in civil and cross-border conflicts in the final decades of the last century. Taylor orchestrated and financed one of the most brutal wars in modern African history, if the allegations in the 11 charges against him are borne out.

His courtroom maneuvers Monday mimicked tactics used by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who dragged out his own war crimes trial in The Hague for nearly four years by refusing counsel and repeatedly defying the judicial panel. Milosevic died in his prison cell last year, a few months before his case was scheduled to end.

Prosecutors said the case against Taylor will be legally challenging because Taylor is not on trial for atrocities committed in his own country, Liberia, but for his alleged role in directing a rebel movement that was trying to overthrow the government in neighboring Sierra Leone. Taylor reportedly never set foot inside Sierra Leone, a small West African country that the United Nations described at the time as one of the poorest nations on Earth.

In 1989, Taylor created a small guerrilla force to try to overthrow the brutal dictatorship of Samuel K. Doe in Liberia. In search of financing for his army, Taylor turned to the diamond mines in Sierra Leone and in 1991 joined forces with a rebel group there, the Revolutionary United Front.

Prosecutors say they will show that in ensuing years he provided the leadership and direction for the RUF guerrillas who brutalized Sierra Leone's civilian population as they looted diamonds to fund the parallel war in Liberia and a luxurious lifestyle for Taylor. He was elected president of Liberia in 1997.

"He's directly responsible, not for pulling the trigger, not for chopping off arms because he did it himself, but because he ordered others to do it," prosecutor Rapp, who served as chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, said in an interview.

According to the indictment, Taylor sold the diamonds on behalf of the Sierra Leone rebels and gave them military supplies and equipment in return. Civilians were used as slaves in the mines, guarded by child soldiers high on cocaine and alcohol. The miners often went unfed, were routinely stripped and beaten, and in some instances "killed for being too tired to work," the indictment says.

As the war progressed, Sierra Leone's guerrillas, sometimes assisted by soldiers from Taylor's Liberian army, waged ominously titled campaigns such as "Operation No Living Thing" and "Operation Pay Yourself."

"Entire villages were burned down," according to the indictment. "It was common practice to burn the houses with civilians inside them, with armed guards on standby ready to shoot anyone trying escape from the burning buildings."

In numerous cases, "Victims were forced to strip naked and were sexually violated in public areas," the indictment said. "Family members were often forced to watch or participate." Hundreds of women and girls were forced into sexual slavery as the "bush wives" of soldiers and commanders in the field.

A trademark of the Sierra Leone guerrilla forces was amputations -- soldiers hacked off arms, fingers, hands, legs, feet, lips and ears by the thousands, according to prosecutors. After some operations, scores of victims streamed into overcrowded hospitals with bleeding stumps, the prosecution said.

Children, some 14 and younger, were organized into Small Boy Units and Small Girl Units and sent to training camps, which were brutally run. Prosecutors described exercises in which children were taught to crawl to avoid bullets during firefights, with instructors using live ammunition. Children who raised their heads were shot dead as examples to the others, prosecutors said at Monday's hearing.

Taylor's written defense in response to the indictment denies that he oversaw any of the atrocities or could have stopped Sierra Leone's rebels from engaging in them.

Taylor's trial is being conducted in The Hague rather than in Sierra Leone because the Freetown government was worried that Taylor's supporters could use the proceeding as an excuse to launch another insurgency or create other chaos.

Before walking out Monday, Taylor's court-appointed attorney reiterated that the defense team is outnumbered and outgunned by the prosecution. The presiding judge Monday agreed with Taylor's team that he had been denied access to one of his key defense attorneys in Sierra Leone and ordered the court to pay to fly that lawyer to The Hague.

Later in the day, the court adjourned until June 25, when it will begin hearing the first of 150 prosecution witnesses in the case. Legal experts predict the trial will last about 18 months, followed by several more months of deliberation by the judges.

Rapp said Monday that a judgment "will not bring back the dead from their graves, nor give back limbs to the thousands of amputees," but would give "some small measure of closure" to the people of Sierra Leone.