Blood diamonds, the sequel

Liberia’s former President Charles Taylor’s guilty verdict in The Hague for abetting war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone will bring a measure of closure for the victims of a decade of madness fueled by blood-diamond dealing.

I should know.

During my visit to Liberia in November of 2001, as part of a group of West African youth campaigning for peace, I met Taylor. We arrived at his executive mansion in Monrovia and soon had our own taste of the charisma of a smooth-talking guy who has televangelist Pat Robinson and the Rev. Jesse Jackson among his pals. The radio and television stations started and ended with broadcasts of his good deeds—doling out wads of cash to his supporters.

The diamond mines in my native Sierra Leone were annexed to provide such largess. As I listened to Taylor spew forth rhetoric about the future of the youth of West Africa more than a decade ago, all I could think about were the child soldiers being recruited that day, their innocence and future robbed forever. Taylor kept ostriches as pets—my mind kept roaring with laughter in the irony that he was, matter-of-factly, the ultimate ostrich.

News of The Hague verdict was greeted with much relief by amputees—more than 10,000, including children—and victims who still bare indelible scars of war. Millions of lives were uprooted forever, and of some 50,000 perished. In Liberia, the same can’t be said. The man was its president for years. Some of his followers were out on the streets calling for the release of their “Papay” (big man). I don’t blame them. The man ran a country that had sanctions and embargoes from his pocket.

Way before the first band of Revolutionary United Front rebels crossed over the border from Liberia into Sierra Leone in March of 1991 to launch what would be a decade-long campaign of senseless brutality, it was clear that Charles Taylor was going to help with “seed” fighters and arms. I distinctly remember the threat he made via BBC’s Focus on Africa, that if Sierra Leone provided a staging base for the West African peacekeeping troops set to intervene and thwart the goal of his rebel group National Patriotic Front of Liberia overrunning the whole country, then he—Taylor—would ensure Sierra Leoneans taste the “bitterness of war.” He bloody well did!

Ultimately, Taylor, an operative of the Liberian government, fled his country with state funds and went into exile here in the United States. The circumstances under which he escaped minimum-security prison in Plymouth, Massachusetts, still invoke a cloud of mystery and varied explanations. What is not lost on observers is the fact that since the Nuremberg Trials, this is the first head of state to be convicted of war crimes—a strong legal precedent for those in authority.

In my brief stint with the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, it was evident that the United States and Britain were picking up the tab for this court. But even as I write, it is not apparent that the International Criminal Court s will deter governments or heads of state from committing war crimes with impunity. Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and Laurent Gbagbo are next on the “menu.”

The million-dollar question is: Will Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, or any big fish from the West, ever get fried as Taylor?