It was not enough for Charles Taylor to plunder his own West African state of Liberia, encourage rebellion in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire and make Guinea anxious about its own potential for revolution.
Taylor also chose to arm and train the notorious Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, Liberia’s eastern neighbour, in exchange for still-unknown amounts of ”blood diamonds”, fuelling a 10-year conflict that left more than 200 000 dead and thousands more with missing limbs.
Comparing himself to Jesus as he finally yielded to massive international pressure to step down from the presidency he claimed in 1997 after a seven-year rebellion, Taylor, a charismatic showman of 55, has asked Liberia to treat him kindly in the annals of history as he went into ayslum in Nigeria.
But if it was up to the prosecutor of the Special Court in Sierra Leone, he will spend the remaining days of his life in prison, convicted of 17 counts of crimes against humanity that include rape, murder and terrorism.
A thrice-married lay preacher who earned an undergraduate degree at a university in Massachusetts, Taylor rose to power on the backs of thousands who died during the rebellion he launched in 1989 against military ruler Samuel Doe.
Doe was the first Liberian-born leader of the republic settled in the early 19th century by freed American slaves.
After graduation in 1977, Taylor joined the Liberian civil service under Doe, who himself seized power in 1980.
He was sacked in 1983 for embezzling nearly one million dollars in government funds and skipped the country, returning to the United States where he was jailed on an extradition warrant.
He escaped 16 months later and promptly disappeared, surfacing in December 1989 at the head of a rebellion backed by Libya and reportedly by Burkina Faso.
His National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) earned a reputation for extreme violence and was among the first to force children, some as young as age 10, into carrying guns.
Seven years of bloody war wearied the Liberian population, who voted en masse in 1997 to send Taylor to the presidency, but his rise to power brought little relief to the Atlantic coastal state of 3,3-million.
Two years later, a second rebellion took place, this time against Taylor and his rapacious armies. Fighting was finally brought to an end in August last year when Taylor fled to Nigeria, where he remains out of reach by the Sierra Leone court despite an Interpol warrant filed for his arrest in December.
After reluctantly agreeing to host the man considered among the most nefarious leaders of the 20th century, Nigeria has stood firm in denying international demands that Taylor be handed to the Freetown-based court for trial.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has, however, said that should Taylor be seen as interfering in Liberia’s fledgling peace process, all bets are off. He has also said that should Liberia convene its own war crimes court, he will ”persuade” Taylor to return to Monrovia.
The United States, which has been a major contributor to both Sierre Leone’s Special Court and the reconstruction of Liberia, has offered a reward for his capture and on Friday drafted a resolution to ask all United Nations member states to freeze the global assets of the Taylor family and entourage. – Sapa-AFP