Dahkpannah Charles Ghankay Taylor, the brutal warlord turned president of Liberia who now stands accused of horrendous war crimes, was on Friday under renewed pressure to go into exile to boost peace efforts in his impoverished west African state.
Liberians call him ”superglue” because of the way money sticks to him. But he was also sticking on Friday to the dwindling part of the country his forces still control.
Taylor, the head of an army that includes many child warriors who call him ”Pappy,” continued to wrangle on Friday as West African envoys tried to get him to commit to a definite date to leave.
His spokesperson said a lot of talking still lies ahead before Taylor accepts a Nigerian offer of exile. Some of his partisans, fighting a last-ditch stand against rebel forces, were pressing him not to leave.
Not only has Taylor helped bring his own country to the brink of ruin, but he has masterminded regional conflicts in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Côte’d Ivoire.
He faces an indictment before a United Nations-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone, where he is said to have armed and trained rebels in exchange for diamonds.
The war there was characterised by apalling violence, including deliberate amputation of limbs and the recruitment of thousands of drug-induced children into a rabble army.
For the past three years, Taylor has fended off attacks by rebel forces in Liberia that have seized about 80% of the territory.
Born in 1948 to a US father and a Liberian mother, Taylor is a child of both America and Africa, just like the country he nominally heads, which was founded in the 19th century as a haven for freed black slaves from the United States.
Like many American-Liberians, he was educated in the United States — at Bentley College in Massachusetts, a business-oriented school.
Taylor joined Liberia’s civil service as head of an agency responsible for controlling the budget.
Then President Samuel Doe later accused him of embezzling $900 000 in government funds and Taylor fled to the United States, where he was jailed on an extradition warrant.
A flamboyant dresser and thrice-married lay preacher, Taylor returned in December 1989, crossing the border from Côte’d Ivoire as the leader of a rebel force, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL).
The force reportedly had backing from both Libya and Burkina Faso and was soon to gain a reputation for extreme violence. The ensuing civil war saw the rise of other factions. But Taylor climbed to the top during the violent seven-year war which made Liberia a byword for anarchy and horror and during which Doe was tortured to death in the capital Monrovia.
By the time elections took place under international supervision in July 1997, Taylor had managed to craft the image of a warlord-turned-statesman. As the country’s most powerful figure, he simply appeared as the only man capable of stopping the violence, and he was elected president.
But his rise to power brought little relief to Liberia.
The almost non-stop war in Liberia is believed to have left some 200 000 people dead, many killed in circumstances of unimaginable cruelty.
Taylor’s group formed an offshoot in Sierra Leone, where his ally was the infamous Foday Sankoh, who died on Wednesday. Sankoh headed a mob of barefoot conscripts, child soldiers and army deserters, notorious for hacking off limbs, razing villages and murdering and raping anyone in their path.
Taylor’s support of Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front rebels was the basis of his war crimes indictment in early June. – Sapa-AFP