The trial of the toppled Liberian president accused of backing a bloody rebellion in his neighbour to the north could take months, according to the chief prosecutor at the special United Nations-backed tribunal that will try Charles Taylor.
In an interview, prosecutor Desmond de Silva also said security concerns had prompted officials a day before to request that the trial be moved to Europe, where it would remain under the auspices of the Special Court established in Sierra Leone to try those believed to bear the greatest responsibility for atrocities committed during this country’s 1991-2002 civil war.
”Charles Taylor has been a regional warlord at the epicentre of the destabilisation of the whole region,” De Silva said, noting that Taylor’s successor as Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, had expressed concern in a speech to her nation about Taylor’s supporters using the trial as a pretext to launch an uprising.
”If the security and peace of Liberia is imperiled, it could well spill over into Sierra Leone and thereupon all trials would come to an end,” De Silva said.
Even if the trial is held in The Hague, as Special Court officials have requested, Taylor’s first appearance before judges would be in Sierra Leone’s capital. De Silva said he expected that to be on Monday or Tuesday. Taylor would be read the charges against him — 11 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes — and be asked to plead.
”If he pleads guilty, the trial will be fairly short,” De Silva said. ”If he pleads not guilty” it could take months.
In Freetown on Friday, 22-year-old Maxwell Fornah said he considered himself one of Taylor’s victims. Towards the end of the war, he said, rebels attacked his school in northern Sierra Leone and he was shot in the leg. His leg had to be amputated.
”Let him stay forever jailed, Charles Taylor, because he amputated me,” Fornah said as he balanced between parallel bars while undergoing physical therapy at the National Rehabilitation Centre. ”How am I going to get my life back?”
Elsewhere, officials were working out the logistics of moving the trial to The Hague.
The Dutch government has said a resolution by the UN Security Council would give a solid legal basis for changing the trial venue. Dutch officials said on Friday that the language of that resolution is being negotiated, and could be passed within days.
Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesperson Dirk-Jan Vermeij said arrangements were still being discussed by all parties involved, including the country that would accept Taylor into its prison system during the trial and if he is convicted.
Taylor will have to be watched closely, given his history. He was accused in 1983 of embezzling nearly $1-million in Liberia and fled to the United States, where he was detained on a Liberian arrest warrant. But he escaped from a Massachusetts jail in 1985 — cutting through bars with a hacksaw and climbing down a knotted sheet — to launch a Liberian civil war.
The Hague-based International Criminal Court was expected to host Taylor’s trial. It has just one defendant in custody, and has empty prison cells and an unused courtroom.
Taylor would likely he held at the same prison as former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who died March 11 before the end of his war crimes trial in The Hague.
The Dutch government was negotiating with several countries to find a prison where Taylor could be jailed if he is convicted. It was unclear which countries are candidates. The UN Yugoslav tribunal, also located in The Hague, has agreements with Britain, Denmark, Germany, Spain, France, Sweden, Austria, Norway, Finland and Italy to take convicts.
Taylor fled to exile in Nigeria in 2003 as part of a deal to end fighting in Liberia. Last week Nigeria, under pressure from the US and others, said it would hand Taylor over to the UN court, but Nigeria made no move to arrest him and he fled.
Nigerian police captured him trying to slip across the southern border into Cameroon. He reportedly had two 50kg sacks filled with US dollars and euros.
While the Sierra Leone tribunal’s charges refer only to the war there, Taylor has also been accused of backing rebel fighters elsewhere in west Africa and of harbouring al-Qaida suicide bombers who attacked the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people. — Sapa-AP