The real test of a leader is not when to make a decision on turning north or south, but choosing which road will lead to one’s destination. For Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the new Liberian President, the dilemma is walking the road to reconciliation and economic recovery that may be barricaded by the indictment of Charles Taylor.
The former president still wields influence in the Parliament in the potholed streets of Monrovia and remains immensely popular in the rubber plantations of the countryside. This perhaps explains Johnson-Sirleaf’s initial apprehension about formally requesting his extradition. She reasoned that Taylor’s indictment now would polarise a country savouring a tentative peace.
However, the Iron Lady’s recent visit to the United States changed all that.
Johnson-Sirleaf has been fending off human rights groups understandably outraged at Taylor’s abuses, but bowed to pressure from the US that made action against the former warlord a condition for aid.
Rumours are swirling around Liberia that Taylor’s former commanders are threatening to topple Johnson-Sirleaf’s government while, in neighbouring Sierra Leone, a Taylor scion, the Revolutionary United Front, has warned that his indictment will destabilise their country.
Abdul Lamin, a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand, is of the view that Taylor’s influence and reach are overestimated. He argues that when he was forced out of office in 2003 he controlled nothing but his mansion and his neighbourhood. “There is bound to be disturbance here and there, but I don’t think there will be an all-out war.”
In such a volatile region, a disturbance alone is a veritable danger.
There is no denying that Taylor waged one of the most brutal wars in Africa. His commanders oversaw the amputation of the limbs of opponents, the rape of women and the pillaging of the sub-region.
But his extradition will do nothing meaningful to help Johnson-Sirleaf’s bid to reclaim state resources in the hands of warlords and Taylor’s corrupt friends. If anything, it threatens her plans to rebuild the country. The indictment will do nothing to make the dividends of peace real for the thousands of child soldiers, some of whom are currently engaged in fighting in Côte d’Ivoire. They would turn up at a moment’s notice to fight for the man they called “Tatay”.
Guardian columnist Max Hastings recently wrote that despite Slobodan Milosevic presiding over the genocide in the former Yugoslavia, “proving Milosevic’s direct involvement, finding his fingerprints on a smoking gun, turned out to be harder than prosecutors at The Hague anticipated”.
No one should be beyond retribution, especially not leaders who have terrorised their people. But the timing of meting out justice should take a more practicable route. In the case of Liberia, the successful integration of former soldiers into society should have preceded action on Taylor.
The threat that former combatants pose should not be underestimated. In Zimbabwe, 17 years after the war for independence, war veterans flexed their muscles to force a reluctant President Robert Mugabe to award them unbudgeted payouts that set the ball rolling for the present economic meltdown.
On a continent trying to move away from the dark shadows cast by Africa’s tyrants, Taylor’s extradition will, in future, make it difficult to broker exit deals for many of Africa’s presidents-for-life club who would rather die in office than be hauled before any court. Sometimes it is not weakness to forgive and move on to build a new society.