The United States on Monday tried to tamp down controversy over a two-million-dollar bounty for former Liberian president Charles Taylor, suggesting the money might not be used as a reward for his capture.
The State Department said it was discussing what to do with the money, which the US Congress quietly included an $87,5-billion supplemental budget for Iraq and Afghanistan that President George Bush signed into law last week.
”The issue of how to handle this money and what to do with it and how to operationalise it is still being decided,” spokesperson Richard Boucher told reporters. ”We don’t have an answer today to these questions.”
He refused to comment on possible uses for the funds, which have drawn outrage from Taylor’s camp and from officials in Nigeria where the former president is now in exile, but hinted that they might not end up as a reward.
”The issue with most of these rewards is finding out where somebody is,” Boucher said. ”We know where Mr Taylor is and we know he’s wanted.”
He said the money could be used as a reward or placed into ”whatever other appropriate mechanism there is to handle this.”
Taylor, who has been indicted by a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, agreed to step down as Liberia’s president in August to quell his country’s worsening civil war and accepted a Nigerian offer of exile.
Although the United States has said repeatedly that Taylor should face the tribunal’s charges, it has stopped short of demanding that Nigeria, which offered him safe haven, turn him over to the court.
Hence, news of the cryptically worded reward in apparently unrelated US legislation on Iraq and Afghanistan caught Taylor and Nigeria by surprise.
The brief, one-sentence line in the bill allocates two million dollars for ”rewards for an indictee of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.”
Although it does not name Taylor, Boucher acknowleged that it was understood the money was for him.
”How we move to make it effective as a reward, to achieve an end that we all share, which is for criminals to be brought to justice, those are the issues being looked at right now,” he said.
Over the weekend, Nigeria angrily said it would not give in to intimidation from anyone over Taylor with one presidential aide telling the BBC that the reward came close to ”state-sponsored terrorism.”
Taylor is wanted by the court to answer charges of arming and training rebels from Sierra Leone’s notorious Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which is accused of raping and dismembering thousands of people during a 10-year civil war that claimed some 200 000 lives.
Before he went into exile a British-based ”private military company”, Northbridge Services, was reported to have offered to kidnap Taylor for two million dollars.
After word of the reward became public, security was stepped up around Taylor’s luxury villa in the southeastern Nigerian port city of Calaba. – Sapa-AFP