Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president, became the first head of state found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg after World War II. The conviction should deliver the strong warning that tyrants cannot get away with murder. It puts leaders on notice that they must account for their atrocities and that they’re not immune from universal justice. Indeed, it’s the first time that a hybrid war crimes court had issued in this century a judgment against a former head of state. We’re witnessing a new era for justice and human rights.
Taylor was convicted for aiding the rebels belonging to Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and abetting their acts of murder, rape, mutilation, conscription of child soldiers and sexual slavery. Although he was not declared guilty of ordering and planning the atrocities, he was found by the international court to have provided the rebels weapons, food, medical supplies, fuel and equipment that abetted their campaign of terror against the people. In exchange, the rebels plundered Sierra Leone’s diamond mines and paid Taylor what the Hague-based court called as “blood diamonds.” During the trial, it was proved that Taylor had received at least one 35-carat diamond and two 25-carat diamonds from the rebels.
The blood diamonds abetted the atrocities of the rebels and led to a litany of horrendous crimes covering rape and sexual enslavement, beheadings and disembowelments, forced amputations, some of them carried out by drugged children-soldiers marked like cows with the initials of the RUF on their bodies.
The rebels even developed horrible terms for the mutilations, offering their victims the choice of “long sleeves” or “short sleeves”—having their hands hacked off or their arms sliced off. “The purpose of these atrocities was to instill terror in the civilian population,” the ruling said. During the intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, more than 50,000 were killed, an overwhelming number of them noncombatants.
Taylor denied the charges, calling them part of a neo-colonial conspiracy of the Western nations against him. Indeed, he was the first sitting African head of state to be indicted in and convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Other African leaders are also facing charges in the hybrid court, such as former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo and Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, son of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Meanwhile, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is openly defying attempts to arrest him on international genocide charges. Non-African leaders who have been indicted are from the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, such as former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who died in the Hague in 2006 before the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia could reach its verdict, and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Since Africa has been until more recent history a colonial playground, and considering the West’s complicity in fostering regimes of repression in Africa during the era of nationalism, Taylor’s defense and diatribe should be taken into account. But the RUF’s record of atrocities and glaring proofs that Taylor abetted and even indirectly assisted its commission of crimes cannot be ignored. They were abhorrent crimes against humanity that should be universally condemned—and punished.
For Filipinos, the conviction of Taylor must be a bitter and yet instructive lesson. Could Ferdinand Marcos have run away with murder had the ICC existed in 1986? But the question has become moot and academic. What Filipinos should do is press on with the plunder and human rights case against the Marcoses and remain vigilant against the remotest sign of suppression of human rights.
In short, the work for peace and human rights has just begun. Filipinos and the rest of the world should continue to press on and widen the international climate for peace and justice. A small step has been achieved for humanity and a big warning delivered to despots. “This is a bell that has been rung and clearly rings throughout the world,” said David Crane, the former prosecutor who indicted Taylor in 2003 and is now a professor of international law at Syracuse University. “If you are a head of state and you are killing your own people, you could be next.”