When former Liberian president Charles Taylor armed Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and supported their rebel war, he had powerful regional connections, a star prosecution witness told a United Nations-backed war-crimes tribunal.
In two days of testimony, Brigadier John Tarnue, a key military aide of the warlord-president, told the court of a series of meetings beginning in 1991 that laid the groundwork for Taylor’s engagement in the war in Liberia’s western neighbor.
”Taylor called a meeting in Gbarnga (northern Liberia) in February 1991 at which Foday Sankoh and Augustin Gbao were present,” said Tarnue, the first witness to eschew privacy concerns and appear in open court instead of behind a screen set up to hide witnesses from the public gallery.
”Taylor said that the time had come to help his friend Sankoh.”
Tarnue is the 13th witness called by prosecutors who have brought an 18-count indictment against three leaders of the RUF who bear the ”greatest responsibility” for the decade of brutal civil war in the west African state.
Indictments were also brought against RUF founder Sankoh and his top lieutenant Sam ”Mosquito” Bockarie, but the two have since died.
By 1995, according to Tarnue, Taylor had established a corridor from Burkina Faso through Ivory Coast into his own war-wracked country, along which an untold number of weapons were funneled to the rebels.
”Taylor and his protocol officer Musa Sesay arranged with the governor of (the western Ivory Coast town of) Danane to ensure that the trucks carrying the arms were not checked at the border,” said Tarnue.
”The agreement to transport the arms into Ivory Coast was done under an agreement between former Ivorian leader Felix Houphouet Boigny and (Blaise) Compaore of Burkina Faso,” he said.
”The trucks and arms went to Taylor’s residence, and it was from there that arms were issued. During the period there were a lot of RUF commanders around, including Morris Kallon, Issa Sesay and Augustin Gbao to receive arms,” Tarnue added, naming the three RUF officials under indictment.
”They were coming with a lot of looted goods but Taylor was concerned about this and asked them not to say they were coming from Sierra Leone but instead from Kuwait if other people inquired about them.”
Tarnue said that he saw Sankoh handing Taylor a bottle of what later turned out to be diamonds, among the hundreds of millions of dollars in raw stones smuggled out of Sierra Leone to fund the war that ended in 2001 after the deaths of some 50 000 people.
Tarnue told the three-judge trial chamber that he had been assigned to train captured civilians to fight in Taylor’s overthrow of slain president Samuel Doe. He was then asked to assist in the training of Sierra Leone’s rebels. All told, he said, he prepared some 300 men to invade Sierra Leone.
Taylor, in an increasingly isolated exile in Nigeria after stepping down from the Liberian presidency in August last year to end that country’s second civil war since 1989, has also been indicited by the war crimes court.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has refused to hand Taylor to anyone but Liberia despite mounting international pressure and an Interpol warrant for his arrest.
With a narrow mandate and tight budget, the Sierra Leone war court is a hybrid of national and international justice that aims to be a model for war crimes tribunals, including one to be convened to try deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. – Sapa-AFP