United Nations chief Kofi Annan on Tuesday appealed to West African countries to arrest and deny refuge to Liberia’s former leader and war crimes suspect Charles Taylor, who has disappeared from Nigeria.
Taylor is accused by a UN-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone of masterminding a policy of murder, torture, pillage and rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where prosecutors have lodged a 17-count indictment alleging crimes against humanity.
Annan’s office late on Tuesday issued a statement saying the UN chief ”calls on all countries in the region not to give refuge to Mr Taylor, but to execute the warrant for his arrest”.
The statement also urged those countries to comply with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s request that Taylor be transferred to the Special Court in Sierra Leone.
Earlier on Tuesday Annan told reporters that, if confirmed, Taylor’s disappearance would be ”extremely worrying”.
Taylor had been living in exile in southeastern Nigeria until Monday night, when he was found to have left his luxury villa, only two days after Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said the government of Liberia ”could take him into custody”.
”I have heard the news. We are trying to get more facts about it,” Annan told reporters.
”It would be extremely worrying if indeed he had disappeared.”
Annan said he was trying to talk to Nigerian authorities about the case.
In August 2003, in a bid to bring an end to a brutal civil war, Obasanjo invited Taylor to step down as president, leave his besieged capital, Monrovia, and accept political asylum in Nigeria.
International prosecutors and human rights advocates had warned that if Taylor was able to escape extradition to a the war crimes court in Sierra Leone, he might once again endanger the stability of West Africa.
The White House said that Nigeria must make sure Taylor is handed over to an international court.
”Right now we’re looking for answers from the Nigerian government about the whereabouts of Charles Taylor,” White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said in Washington.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that Washington would take the matter very seriously if Taylor’s disappearance were confirmed.
Obasanjo’s office said a panel has been given two weeks to investigate ”the circumstances of the disappearance … with a view to identifying those responsible” and ”ascertain whether he escaped or was abducted”.
Taylor’s escape was also condemned by the chief prosecutor of the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, who has accused the warlord of overseeing the massacre, torture, rape and enslavement of thousands of civilians.
”For him now to disappear, on the eve of his transfer, is an affront to justice,” Desmond Da Silva said in a statement
”Taylor is a threat to the peace and security of West Africa. His disappearance now from under the eye of a regional superpower only heightens that threat and puts the whole region on the highest alert,” he warned.
Taylor’s ”spiritual adviser” Kilari Anand Paul, an Indian evangelist who claims credit for the then Liberian leader’s 2003 decision to resign, said another country, which he refused to name, had offered to take him.
”Our first priority is to find political asylum for him to stabilise the situation. I made a big mistake to take him to Nigeria,” Paul told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where he met government officials.
Last week, Paul visited Taylor in Calabar in the company of an AFP reporter.
There was no evidence of any Nigerian security on the approach road to his villa and journalists were waved into his compound by a single gateman in civilian clothes without being questioned.
Nigerian police spokesperson Haz Iwendi said 22 officers who had been supposed to be on duty at the villa had been arrested. ”They will be charged with misconduct and dereliction of duty,” he added.
In August 2003, Obasanjo invited Taylor to step down as president of Liberia and accept exile in Nigeria in order to allow a 14-year-old civil war to come to an end and to put in place a UN-backed peace process.
Since then he has come under pressure to send Taylor to face charges of ordering murder, torture, pillage and rape in the 1990s in Sierra Leone, where prosecutors have lodged a 17-count indictment alleging crimes against humanity.
Taylor’s allies have warned in recent weeks that any attempt to prosecute him could lead to renewed chaos in his war-torn homeland, where some of his allies still pose a threat to law and order under Johnson-Sirleaf’s elected rule. – AFP
