Wild trophies

The ex-president of a neighboring state is being tried for the tragedy in Sierra Leone

The Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone began yesterday in The Hague the hearing of the case of ex-President of Liberia, 59-year-old Charles Taylor . He is charged with 11 counts, including violating the laws or customs of war and crimes against humanity in neighboring Sierra Leone. The trial began scandalously - the defendant's lawyer Karim Khan read out a statement from Taylor, in which he, in the most polite terms, refused to attend the court hearings due to the inequality of opportunities for the prosecution and defense.

In 2001, the civil war in Sierra Leone, which began in 1991 and claimed the lives of more than 120 thousand people, ended. The fighting was accompanied by brutal reprisals against civilians. Robbery, sexual slavery, and torture were widely practiced. Teenagers under 15, sometimes as young as eight, were drugged and forced to fight. They were also forced to use axes or machetes to cut off the limbs of prisoners and fill jute bags with them. If a teenager brought an incomplete bag of such “trophies” to the camp, he was punished. Charles Taylor was involved in organizing and maintaining the decades-long conflict. First as a well-known field commander, and since 1997 as President of Liberia, he supplied the rebels in Sierra Leone with money and weapons, for which he regularly received diamonds from the rebel leader Fodaya Sankoh, whom Taylor met in the 1970s in the training camp of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone was created in January 2002 on the basis of an agreement between the government of this country with the UN and UN Security Council Resolution 1315 of August 14, 2000. The tribunal was needed to bring to justice those who committed serious crimes during the civil war in this African country. This tribunal was created by analogy with the International Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, which prosecute war criminals.

The legal basis for the formation of the Special Tribunal is Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War and Additional Protocol 2 of 1977, which contains an extensive list of crimes against civilians during hostilities, ranging from murder, torture and violence to the involvement of persons in hostilities under 15 years old.

In June 2003, the Special Tribunal, which consists of half the seats from Sierra Leone and about a quarter from other African countries, issued arrest warrants for 11 of the main organizers of the genocide in that country, including Taylor. He, having renounced power in August 2003, fled to Nigeria, where in March 2006 he was arrested and deported to Sierra Leone. After Foday Sankoh died in prison in July 2003, Charles Taylor became the main accused of the Special Tribunal. He was transferred to the Netherlands from Sierra Leone with the permission of the UN Security Council in June 2006 in order to avoid destabilization in West Africa. The prosecutor at the trial, former American attorney at law from Iowa Stephen Rapp, said the trial would last at least 18 months.

Victor VOLODIN