Charles Taylor Testifies This Week as Hundreds of His Victims are Buried

Charles Taylor took the stand again this week at the Special Court for Sierra Leone and decried a vast conspiracy against him calling witness testimony against him “lies” and accusing the prosecution of racism.  Taylor made these impassioned assertions even as hundreds of civilian victims of Liberia’s civil war were buried just this week, fifteen years after their slaughter.  In successive days, Taylor denied commanding the invasion of Guinea, denied commanding the invasion Sierra Leone, denied dealing in diamonds for arms, and denied ordering an attack on Freetown.  He also dismissed the most heinous charges against him; cannibalism and burying pregnant women alive, as racism:

“All the murderous regimes of Europe throughout World War II coming on, nobody is eating human beings  and burying pregnant women and being sadistic as this as an African. You go to Liberia and bring four uneducated people that never even went to the ninth grade, Moses Blah never went to the ninth grade, Vamunyan Sherif  hardly went to school, Abu Keita hardly, and this other one that never entered a class room, never, cannot read, cannot write and you bring him here, and you have a president eating people and burying pregnant women, this is beyond racism, it shows bigotry, and that’s what this case is all about.”

As for ‘Zigzag’ Marzah, the witness who testified to having engaged in cannibalism at Taylor’s orders and to have seen pregnant women buried alive at Charles Taylor’s residence (and also participating in eviscerating their stomachs), Taylor unleashed a slew of insults in a vain attempt to discredit what has been thought to have been the most damning testimony against Taylor yet:

“I swear to God… This man is sick. It is not true… This boy is just one of the liars they brought for this case and he has really messed it up,” Taylor said.

Yet the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission which released its final report this summer found ample evidence of dozens of mass slaughters and cannibalism and found Taylor to be central to the majority of war crimes committed in Liberia during the 1990s.  The more tenuous link, which is what the prosecution is trying to establish, is Taylor’s control over forces in Sierra Leone.  Though there are several witnesses that have testified to Taylor’s role and horrific amounts of evidence of violence, including tens of thousands of Sierra Leone’s infamous forced amuptees, the prosecution has brought a dearth of  hard evidence in establishing this connection.  This, in addition to the aforementioned Truth and Reconciliation Commision’s finding that current President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf had played a major role in supporting Taylor, has led to a swelling of Liberian Taylor support and increased denunciation of his trial before the Special Court at The Hague as naked imperialism.  These supporters however seem to lack an alternative theory of explanation for the decade of horror that occurred in Liberia and Sierra Leone.  Some even question these Taylor supporters’ motives.  As one commenter put it:

“Yes, in the opinion of those who see looting as a livelihood, Taylor should be released.  Such would enable these criminals to again plauge sweet mama Liberia in… anarchy.”

Taylor’s trial went into recess this week until October 26th.