IN AUGUST 2003, CHARLES TAYLOR AND HIS FAMILY WERE WHISKED TO A SEASIDE COMPOUND of villas in Calabar, Nigeria. He brought with him three wives, a flotilla of expensive cars, twenty-three armed security guards, and many, many others, including twenty-seven teenage girls who were said to be the daughters of his fallen comrades-in-arms, orphans he was caring for because of his commitment to justice and mercy, in order to honor their fathers’ memories.
There was, supposedly, a deal.
The deal Taylor says he made with Presidents Obasanjo, Kufour, Mbeki, and Conté was that he would leave Liberia and go into exile in Nigeria. President Obasanjo said the deal depended on Taylor staying out of politics in West Africa and living quietly without causing any further mayhem. The deal also seemed to involve a “gentleman’s agreement” that Nigeria would not extradite Taylor, despite the indictment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Interpol warrant that was out for Taylor’s arrest.
In any case, nothing was ever written down, so no one will ever know who said what to whom to get Charles Taylor out of Liberia and bring fourteen years of civil war to an end.
But Charles Taylor did not keep his hands off West Africa.
By October 2003, Taylor had figured out how to move money around. He got himself a secure private telephone line and a satellite phone, the tools he had used to wreak havoc on West Africa for many years, and he worked those phones the way a carnival barker works a crowd. Taylor left Liberia with something like two hundred million dollars, money he kept in twenty or thirty shell companies in Liberia, other West African countries, Europe, and the U.S. This was money that could be used to buy and trade companies, money that could be used to keep supporters loyal, money that could be used to buy guns and favors and to position Taylor for an eventual return to Liberia.
Taylor did everything he could to influence the October 2005 presidential election in Liberia, channeling money to nine of the eighteen parties, fielding candidates, and spreading yet more money around, but he apparently failed to be a major player in the face of huge international and UN supervision of that election. Taylor’s ex-wife, Jewel Taylor, who had divorced him earlier that year (leaving him with just two remaining wives, to say nothing of the twenty-seven female teenage orphans he was looking after out of the kindness of his heart) was elected a senator from Bong County—and many other associates were carefully being moved into positions of power and influence.
At the same time Taylor sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to two loyal but small-time warlords, who used the money to train and equip small armies of several hundred combatants each; armies that would be in place and at Taylor’s beck and call to be used when the time was right. Taylor was involved in and likely funded a January 2005 failed assassination attempt on President Lansana Conté in Guinea. (Conté was one of the African presidents who had pressured him into leaving Liberia in 2003.) One can only wonder just how much more havoc Taylor would have created if President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf hadn’t requested Taylor’s extradition to Liberia in March of 2006, just three months after she was installed as Liberia’s new president.
President Obasanjo of Nigeria declared he would allow Charles Taylor to be arrested only if Taylor’s arrest was requested by the new government of Liberia—a clever test of Taylor’s remaining power and influence in Liberia—and that he would extradite Taylor to Liberia in the event Liberia requested Taylor’s extradition, but he would not respond to the indictment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
After her election and installation in January 2006, President Johnson Sirleaf, who had once been a supporter of Taylor’s (but later disavowed that support), declared that the extradition of Charles Taylor was “low priority”—that other national rebuilding work was much more urgent. There was then protest and an outcry from people in the international human rights community, and that outcry was heard in the U.S. Congress, where there were members who advocated cutting off aid to Liberia if Taylor was not brought before the Special Court in Sierra Leone.
Lord only knows what strings were pulled behind the scenes in March 2006, how much telephone and satellite phone traffic the Liberian request to extradite Taylor generated, or how many private armies were moved from one place, one diamond field, and one border, to the next. Both Presidents Sirleaf Johnson of Liberia and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa visited President Olusẹgun Obasanjo in Nigeria in the two weeks leading up to the request for Taylor’s extradition.
Reluctantly, but at last, the new government of Liberia requested Taylor’s extradition on March 17, 2006, two days after President Johnson Sirleaf addressed a joint session of Congress (and likely consulted with members of the Bush State Department and others in the U.S. government); two days before President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf visited Providence, Rhode Island, and four days before she addressed the UN Security Council.
Nigeria announced it was “releasing” Taylor—but not arresting him—on Saturday, March 25, 2006, because the government of Nigeria had suddenly discovered that there was no extradition treaty between Liberia and Nigeria.
On March 27, 2006, Taylor disappeared from the compound in Calabar.
President Obasanjo left for Washington, DC, on March 28, 2006, on his way to see President George Bush in order to build support for a permanent seat for Nigeria on the UN Security Council and for his own attempt to rewrite the Nigerian constitution to allow him to run for a third term as president. By the time Obasanjo took off from Abuja, Taylor had disappeared from his compound and suddenly was nowhere to be found. Obasanjo’s plane landed at 9:30 p.m., March 28, 2006, U.S. time, which is 3:30 a.m., March 29 local time in Nigeria. The president of Nigeria was met in DC by representatives of the U.S. State Department, just as his foreign minister was meeting with Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley in what must have been a very interesting meeting indeed.
Taylor and his retinue of three Land Rovers with diplomatic plates was cleared through Nigerian immigration at 7:30 a.m., March 29, 2006, at Gamboru-Ngala, on the Nigerian border with Cameroon. Taylor was traveling in a flowing white robe but on a fake passport. His retinue was held up at Nigerian customs, however, when a customs official noticed that there were several million dollars and euros in cash, all in two 110-pound sacks, as well as bricks of heroin and packets of diamonds and gold.
On March 29, 2006, at 7:30 a.m. local time in Nigeria, 1:30 a.m. U.S. time, or about four hours after President Obasanjo’s plane landed in Washington, Charles Taylor was arrested by Nigerian police.
It is very unusual for customs officials to inspect the luggage of vehicles bearing diplomatic plates, because such inspections represent a violation of international law.
One never knows exactly what transpired in meetings like the one between Obasanjo and Bush. They met at about 10:00 a.m. on March 29, 2006, about seven hours after Taylor’s arrest. According to press releases and news reports they talked about West African politics, about Taylor and Liberia, about the discovery of oil in Guinea, about the situation in Darfur, and about political instability in the oil rich provinces of Nigeria, where U.S. and other foreign oil companies have major investments.
U.S. aid to Nigeria in 2006 included $45 million in humanitarian and development aid from USAID, about $170 million in military aid, and some $19.2 billion of “exceptional debt relief” from the World Bank, which is technically not U.S. aid at all. Technically.
A year later, U.S. military aid had grown to $330 million, almost doubling.
President Obasanjo failed in his attempt to change Nigeria’s constitution and left office in 2008. Nigeria was unsuccessful in obtaining a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. No African country has ever held a permanent seat on the Security Council. The population of Africa is close to one billion people, or about one-seventh of the world’s population. The land mass of Africa is one-fifth of the total land mass of the earth.
Charles Taylor was sent home to Liberia in chains, and then was shipped to Sierra Leone, and from Sierra Leone was shipped to The Hague to stand trial—the first head of state to be indicted while in office; the first former head of state to stand trial in an international court for his crimes but very likely far from the last head of state to have murdered and tortured his own people, driven by his own lust for money and power, and egged on by the lust and greed of people who lack the capacity for remorse.