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I Dissent: Unconventional Economic Wisdom by Joseph E. Stiglitz |
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Against the Current by Robert Skidelsky |
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Awakening India by Shashi Tharoor |
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Though exiled two years ago, Liberia’s former President Charles Taylor still looms large in the country’s first elections since the end of its brutal civil war. But, despite the advent of true democratic elections, Liberia and all of West Africa will be trapped in an unending cycle of violence unless Taylor is put in the dock for war crimes.
The presidential poll to be held on October 11 could help Liberia determine a new course. But Taylor has wielded a heavy hand in the campaign, his impunity making a mockery of international justice.
Nigeria, which is giving Taylor sanctuary, is obliged to turn him over to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, created by the United Nations in 2003 to prosecute those responsible for the bloodletting in West Africa’s in the 1990’s. Indeed, Nigeria now holds the key to peace in the region.
But President Olosugun Obasanjo of Nigeria has, so far, turned a deaf ear to calls to surrender Taylor. Instead, Taylor is housed in a villa on the sandy beaches of Calabar on Nigeria’s southeastern coast, as key international players – including France, the United Kingdom, and South Africa – remain silent.
The list of Taylor’s crimes is long, and the evidence against him is overwhelming. As a rebel leader, he waged an eight-year uprising against Samuel Doe in Liberia – a conflict that left 300,000 people dead and displaced more than a million others in a population of just 3.3 million. As president, he launched a rebellion in 1991 against Sierra Leone’s government with the forces of Foday Sankor, using machetes to mutilate women and children.
In 2000, Taylor used those same thugs to attack Guinea, in an assault that left hundreds dead and destroyed the city of Guekedou. In 2003, while Taylor was under rebel attack, he organized and supported an incursion into Côte d’Ivoire. Taylor’s warmongering also paved the way for military coups in Sierra Leone and The Gambia.
The women and children whose limbs Taylor ordered to be hacked off bear testimony to his brutality, and the countries left in turmoil make clear that there can be no durable peace in West Africa unless the man who unleashed these conflicts is stopped. Even if there were instant peace, the region will pay the price for Taylor’s bloodlust for decades to come. So will the world.
Indeed, Taylor continues to incite trouble. His efforts to undermine regional stability range from an assassination attempt against Guinean President Lansana Conte earlier this year, to which he has been linked, to using his fortune to influence Liberia’s elections, setting the stage for his allies to win. His followers, unsurprisingly, cling to his parting promise to return to Liberia.
That would be nothing short of disastrous. Taylor has undermined a string of peacekeeping interventions in the region. In Liberia, for example, he signed 13 agreements and violated them all. He kidnapped 500 troops from the regional peacekeeping force, ECOWAS. Before the hostages were released, Taylor killed six soldiers and stole their weapons and cars.
The best containment strategy is to put Taylor in the custody of the Special Court that indicted him in 2003 for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the war in Sierra Leone. Yet Obasanjo has said that he would release Taylor only to an elected government of Liberia, and many believe that Taylor is waiting it out until his allies are in a position to let him return with no threat of prosecution.
Nigeria’s role in providing a safe haven for Taylor is peculiar. Given the country’s considerable efforts to mediate and quell regional conflicts, providing a haven for shielding West Africa’s chief destabilizer runs counter to its national interest, and popular opposition to shielding him is growing in Nigeria. Hundreds of human rights and international justice groups from Africa and beyond have joined together in protest.
Intense American and European pressure ensured that former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and many of his allies were handed over to the UN’s International War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Similar pressure must be brought to bear to compel Nigeria to surrender Taylor to the Special Court in Sierra Leone. It is time for Obasanjo to make good on Nigeria’s record as a leader in maintaining peace and security on the African continent.
Tiawan Saye Gongloe is a former fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2005.
www.project-syndicate.org
