Liberia’s former president tried with murder, rape and using child soldiers

The former president of Liberia, was set to appear at The Hague court today charged with war crimes including signing up and drugging child soldiers. Charles Taylor’s defence against charges that occurred during the savage 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone, opened this morning at the United Nations backed special court for Sierra Leone in The Netherlands. The 61-year-old denies 11 charges that include enlisting and drugging child soldiers, enforcing sexual slavery, and commanding and arming rebels from his presidential palace.

Witnesses for the prosecution, multiple rape victims and amputees have already testified in The Hague — picked because it is thought to be safer than Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. The prosecution says that he set up the ‘Small Boys’ Unit’ — made up of children under 11. The defence of Taylor, the first African head of state to be tried by an international court, is being led by the British lawyer, Courtenay Griffiths. When he takes to the stand today, Mr Taylor will try to show that things were sometimes bad, but that they were not done with his approval. "No one who has seen the procession through this courtroom of hurt human beings reliving the most grotesque trauma would have been unmoved," Griffiths told the three-judge panel. "We are human too, even while we declare this accused man to be not guilty of the charges he faces."

The defence team will be calling about 240 witnesses — in an attempt to discredit those Liberians and Sierra Leoneans who have claimed to link Mr Taylor with the bloodshed. “We have never questioned the fact that atrocities took place,” said Mr Griffiths. The key point, he said, was how much credibility could be attached to the low-level rebels who allegedly reported back to Mr Taylor and transmitted his orders. “What Mr Taylor says is: how could I have been micromanaging the crisis in Sierra Leone when I was running a country besieged on many sides?”

Some 500,000 people are estimated to have been killed, s mutilated, or to have suffered other atrocities, in the country’s civil war, which ended in 2002. Some of the worst crimes were carried out by gangs of child soldiers given drugs to desensitise them to the horror of their actions. Taylor is accused of arming them in exchange for diamonds. Taylor was forced into exile after being indicted in 2003, and was finally arrested in Nigeria in 2006. He was sent for trial in The Hague because officials feared that staging the case in Sierra Leone could spark further violence. He boycotted the start of his trial, in June 2007, and fired his attorney, holding up proceedings until January 2008, when prosecutors called their first witness.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children