The war crimes trial for former Liberian President Charles Taylor resumed its second day of testimony Tuesday. The hybrid Special Court for Sierra Leone seated at The Hague, Netherlands, heard testimony from a pastor who witnessed some of the atrocities that occurred during Taylor's tenure as president during the 1991-2002 civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone. Taylor allied with the leader of the Revolutionary United Front, Foday Sankoh, operating in Sierra Leone to hijack the regions lucrative diamond fields.
RUF rebels conscripted child soldiers, often employing harsh narcotics to condition adolescents into service, to wage gruesome war on its villages and communities. The pastor, Alex Tamba Teh, told the court Tuesday he witnessed one RUF commander named “Rocky” fire on 100 civilians and only spared his life because he was a clergy member.
“After he killed the civilians… he gave the instruction that they should be decapitated. Rocky gave the order to the small boy units,” Tamba Teh said.
Tamba Teh recounted horrific details of how rebels carved RUF initials into its kidnapped victims. He said the “boy units” rounded up another boy, chopped his hands off, then chopped off his arms and feet before tossing him, screaming, into a sewage pit.
Now here's the twist. Taylor's defense team do not deny these horrific events took place, but they do dispute the level of his involvement. They said bringing Taylor to The Hague smacks of a show trial to add a certain level of horror to the charges. I tend to agree (just hold on before you start flaming me). I’m no legal expert by any means, but it seems that conspiracy seems to be the charges that pertain to Taylor at this point of the trial. It will be interesting to see how the testimony moves beyond these horrible accounts of child soldiers and so on. I want to see if Taylor ordered these atrocities. He certainly knew about it and obviously did nothing to stop it, but I would wonder what the relative level of acceptability is present on the ground in Africa. It reminds me of a story Tom Friedman relays in his book on Beirut. He tells the story of a guy whose chickens are stolen. He complains to his sons that they need to find the perpetrators and his sons blow him off. The next day, thieves steal the guys bike or something like that. He tells his sons they need to find who stole the chickens and his sons blow him off again. The next day, his daughter is raped. The father says if they would have exacted revenge against those who stole the chickens, the daughter would not have been raped. Friedman calls it “Hama rules” and I wonder if that's the face of justice on the ground in Africa.
Let's hope the Taylor trial moves beyond these horrific accounts and toward a strong case implicating Taylor's oversight of this gruesome tale. If the prosecution hopes to get this wrapped up by 2009 by blowing through nearly 150 witnesses, presumably with the majority of those witnesses like Tamba Teh, it needs to vet out the gory details and get to the heart of the matter; a national leader reigned over an 11-year civil war that resulted in the deaths of a quarter million people. The world has gone to war for much much less.
