Charles Taylor. Rhode Island and Liberia—An Implausible but Real History, with a Little Conjecture Added
PEOPLE IN RHODE ISLAND SAY THAT CHARLES TAYLOR ONCE LIVED IN PAWTUCKET, A working-class city just north of Providence, the state capitol, in a place then called Crook Manor. Crook Manor was a public housing development on Weeden Street, Pawtucket, and has been renamed Galego Court, although everyone in Pawtucket still calls it by its original name.
There’s no proof that Charles Taylor ever really lived in or even visited Rhode Island. He lived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and attended a now defunct community college, and then Bentley College, now University, in Waltham, Massachusetts (also the home of Brandeis University), and graduated from Bentley with a BA in Economics in 1977. While he lived in Dorchester, Charles Taylor worked as a security guard, a truck driver, and a mechanic. He worked at Sears and Mutual of Omaha. Taylor was in Liberia from 1979 to 1983, as part of the government of two Liberian presidents, and then returned to the U.S. in a hurry once he was accused by then president Samuel Doe of having embezzled one million dollars.
Taylor was arrested in Massachusetts after the U.S. received an extradition order from the Republic of Liberia. He was imprisoned in the Plymouth House of Corrections, a maximum security facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts, until 1985, when he escaped, though he now claims he was released by the CIA. Released or escaped, he is the only prisoner ever to have escaped from the Plymouth House of Corrections and remained at large.
Although there is no evidence that Charles Taylor ever lived in Rhode Island, there is plenty of reason for thinking he spent time there and got to know the place pretty well. Rhode Island has the largest Liberian population per capita in the United States—some fifteen to seventeen thousand people—mostly Krahn, Bassa, and Gao people, some of whom lived in Crook Manor in the 1970s and 1980s and some who still live there now that it is Galego Court. Perhaps the existence of this population led people to speculate that Taylor likely visited Rhode Island now and then. Perhaps Taylor really lived at Crook Manor in the early 1980s when he was in the U.S. as a fugitive, fleeing Samuel Doe. No one—other than the people who lived in Crook Manor then, who either did or did not have Taylor as their neighbor, and Taylor himself—will ever know for sure.
After Charles Taylor disappeared from the Plymouth House of Corrections, he found his way to Libya, where he was trained in guerilla warfare. With support from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, he went to Ivory Coast and founded the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. In 1989, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia fomented an armed rebellion in Liberia, aiming to overthrow then president Samuel Doe. Taylor invaded Nimbi County from Ivory Coast with a hundred armed fighters and quickly attracted the support of the local population, which had been brutally attacked by the Armed Forces of Liberia in 1985.
This armed rebellion marked the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War, which would degenerate into a brutal ethnic conflict among seven different armed camps, first leading to Doe’s overthrow and televised brutal murder, and then to five more years of murder, rape, dismemberments, and chaos. More than three hundred thousand people were killed and more than a million became refugees, as whole populations were raped and savagely murdered, often by child soldiers who were drugged and forced to commit atrocities, and who were ordered to rape and kill their own families and communities. After five years of fighting, Taylor, backed by Gaddafi and other international friends and coconspirators, emerged as the strongest and most brutal of the warlords. The war lasted until 1995, when a peace agreement brokered by the president of Ghana and facilitated by other African states, the UN, the U.S., and the European Union led first to an uneasy cease-fire, and then to elections.
In 1997, in an election most people thought was free and fair, Charles Taylor was elected president by the people of Liberia, with 75 percent of the vote. Many people voted for Taylor because he appeared strong enough to stop the bloodshed that had been ravaging the country and had wrecked its fragile institutions. Many more voted for him because they feared he would continue the war and bloodshed if he lost. His supporters ran through the streets, singing, “He shot my ma, he shot my pa, I will vote for him.”
The Second Liberian Civil War began in 1999, when a group called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, supported by the governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone, invaded Liberia from Guinea. To be fair (if that word is relevant at all here) there is evidence that Taylor was involved with rebel groups or parties in both countries and so the governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone might be thought of as trying to keep the playing field level, although it is not possible to know who did what to whom first and when.
Sierra Leone, Liberia’s neighbor to the west, had its own history of civil strife and bloody, maniacal civil war. Sierra Leona was a British colony until 1961 and was partially populated by a group of imported ex-slaves from Britain and the U.S. who turned themselves into a ruling class, very much like Liberia, though Liberia became independent more than a hundred years earlier. Sierra Leone’s politics are made more complex by the existence of diamond mines near its border with Liberia, which produce over three hundred million dollars worth of diamonds a year.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone where Charles Taylor would be tried and eventually convicted was established in 2002. Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, the president of Sierra Leone, wrote United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in July 2000 asking for UN help prosecute those responsible for war crimes during the ten-year civil war in Sierra Leone. Many of those atrocities had been committed by the Revolutionary United Front, the Sierra Leonean rebels and Charles Taylor’s allies—an organization known for using child soldiers as young as five, ordering children to kill their parents, practicing cannibalism, using rape, and amputating the limbs of people who were going to vote as routine methods of instilling the fear and obedience of the population. The government of Sierra Leone asked for UN help, because it was not strong enough on its own to hold and try Sierra Leoneans in its own court in a region where Charles Taylor, the president of the nation that comprised Sierra Leone’s eastern border, held sway and was thought to control militias and armies inside Sierra Leone. And Sierra Leone was certainly not strong enough on its own to bring Charles Taylor to justice.
The president of Sierra Leone’s letter was quite specific, proposing clearly delineated powers, many of which are contained in the final agreement creating the court, suggesting that much of the text of that letter was prenegotiated. UN Security Council Resolution 1315 of August 14, 2000, directed the Secretary General of the UN to negotiate with the government of Sierra Leone to create the requested Special Court. The Special Court came into being two long years later, in late 2002, after countless more atrocities were committed by all parties involved. The Special Court was a judicial body established by the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations to “prosecute persons who bear the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law” committed after November 30, 1996, during the Sierra Leone Civil War, with which Taylor was deeply involved (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Court_for_Sierra_Leone-cite_note-2).
The Special Court for Sierra Leone had no real precedent in international law. It was not a Sierra Leone court. It was not a United Nations court or part of the International Criminal Court, the usual tribunal for acts committed in violation of international law. The Special Court for Sierra Leone had both international and Sierra Leonean judges but did not have the power to oblige the extradition of accused persons from another nation. It was a compromise, made in a dangerous, difficult time, and was the best the international community could scrape together in a difficult and dangerous part of the world without committing much in terms of resources or political capital. But it was a pathway to end the war and bloodshed in that region, and, however incomplete, and however hypocritical (because it did not hold the U.S or Britain to the same standards of accountability for atrocities and war crimes), it was a pathway that worked.
Security Council resolution 1315 was a complete reversal of resolution 1260, from August 20, 1999, which was strongly supported by the U.S. and Britain and committed the involved nations to amnesty for all military combatants. Now, no more amnesty.
Something had changed between 2000 and 2002, and that something was 9/11.
For a decade, the U.S., Britain, and the world had responded slowly to the war and atrocity that reigned in West Africa, to the extent it responded at all, and as it responded slowly to genocide in Rwanda.
But after al-Qaeda attacked us in 1998 and 2001, and after we realized how al-Qaeda and others were using diamonds to fund terrorism in a way that could evade detection, we acted. Finally, greed and mayhem are like infectious diseases. They spread. We acted when the greed and mayhem that have been destroying West Africa was infecting us as well. And only then.
Charles Taylor was deeply involved with al-Qaeda, and his deepening interest in Sierra Leone most likely had to do with obtaining control over its diamond mines in order better serve his customers. Diamonds can move across international borders easily without detection, since they are small and easily concealed on the bodies and in the body cavities of human beings, are easily converted into cash, can’t be traced, and don’t trigger metal detectors. Taylor’s control over the Sierra Leonean diamond mines meant he could trade diamonds for weapons and use those weapons to control West Africa. Al-Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations wanted those diamonds because they were an untraceable way to move money around the world and fund its war against the West.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone was financed by voluntary contributions from individual countries, mainly the U.S. and Britain.
On March 3, 2003, Charles Taylor was indicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, sitting in Freetown. The indictment was unsealed on June 4, 2003, when Taylor was in Ghana for peace negotiations with LURD and MODEL. John Kufuor, president of Ghana, declined to extradite Taylor to Sierra Leone, and Taylor fled home to Liberia.
On August 11, 2003, Charles Taylor, his troops surrounded and his international support gone, resigned and was immediately placed on the personal jet of Olusẹgun Obasanjo, president of Nigeria, with his family and President John Kufuor of Ghana. He had been granted asylum by Obasanjo and would live in luxury in Nigeria for three years.
On the same day, on August 11, 2003, three U.S. warships showed themselves off the coast of Liberia, where they had had been lurking out of sight for over a month, and the Liberian people lined the shores and cheered. “Feed us!! Save us!!” people cried, for those warships were the first hope people had that the long nightmare of Charles Taylor’s reign might finally be over.
The U.S. landed an expeditionary force of 150 marines at Robertsfield Airport, and about 30 marines at the port at Monrovia. Nigeria brought in 6,000 men under the UN flag as peacekeepers. That was all it took to end 14 years of devastation, which followed on 8 years of dictatorship, which followed on 140 of oligarchy and rule of one people over another—an oligarchy that itself started as a way to end slavery in the U.S.
The story of Charles Taylor in Liberia appears to be the story of the havoc, murder, and mayhem one man can wreak on a people, a nation, and a region. Taylor was associated with at least three civil wars (two in Liberia and one in Sierra Leone), political instability in at least three countries (Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea), the deaths of at least 350 thousand people (in Liberia and Sierra Leone) and the displacement of more than one million.
But Taylor did not act alone. Many people profited from Taylor’s reign of terror. Many people helped or supported him. Too few resisted. Taylor inserted himself into a culture that was already lawless and divided, into a place where people had already let big men, big money, and big countries have their way. Liberia already had a culture of obeisance to power before Taylor built himself an army, instead of a culture that valued each person and each community and encouraged each person and community to stand up for themselves and work together in mutual defense.
There is no science that tells us how to balance the needs of the individual, the ability of people to collaborate and cooperate under the rule of law, and the importance of domestic tranquility against the desires of a few greedy men or the actions of a few greedy people, acting together. But there can never be enough vigilance, never enough engagement, and never enough emphasis on what we have built together. Never enough mutual defense. Never enough democracy. Never enough peace. Never enough justice. And never enough resolve to protect the bounty that our ability to be and work together has created for us.
An injury to one is an injury to all. We can only survive as individuals if we stand together and act together as a people. Democracy works but only if we make it work to create justice, and by creating justice, create and sustain peace.