TAYLOR TAKES THE STAND AT THE HAGUE

By MARLISE SIMONS
Published: July 14, 2009
THE HAGUE

For months, Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, has watched in silence as witnesses have passed through the courtroom, telling stories of mind-boggling violence, even cannibalism. His face remained blank, eyes hidden behind tinted glasses, as women spoke of rape and villagers told how their hands or their arms had been severed with axes.

But on Tuesday, when he took the stand in his own defense at the Special Court for Sierra Leone sitting here, he offered a robust denial of the charges and said: “This whole case against me is a case of deceit, deception and lies.”

Mr. Taylor is the first African leader to be tried for war crimes. Thus far in the hearings, he has seemed agitated only when longtime allies appeared, passing messages to his defense team, demanding to challenge the accounts.

His lawyers say that his testimony may go on for weeks, given the wide range of the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The prosecution, which has rested its case, has charged that he armed and commanded rebel groups to bolster his influence in West Africa and to seize a swath of neighboring Sierra Leone, in particular its diamond-mining areas.

His indictment holds him accountable for the rebels’ barbaric methods as they pillaged, killed, raped, used drug-crazed children as soldiers and hacked off limbs, ears or noses to subdue civilians.

Opening the defense case on Monday, Courtenay Griffiths, the lead lawyer, said that Mr. Taylor was not “an African Napoleon” bent on taking over a region, but a broker of peace who would exonerate himself when he gave his account.

As many as 200,000 people died in the decade of fighting, and Mr. Taylor’s war strategies are said to have affected many more in Liberia, his home country, but only crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002 are within the mandate of the court.

For Mr. Taylor’s trial, the international judges of the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone are sitting in The Hague to avoid potential unrest in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, where the court is based. The prosecution has brought 91 witnesses, many of whom made a 7,000-mile round trip to The Netherlands.

“We didn’t have documents and orders signed by Taylor, so we needed much circumstantial evidence,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the court’s chief prosecutor. “But key players close to Taylor have testified and painted the complex picture. Taylor was in another country, it was not his country’s army, he was not at the scene of the crimes. But we have direct evidence of his orders and communications.”

Mr. Rapp said that about a dozen “insiders” — witnesses once close to Mr. Taylor, whose testimony had been crucial — had been moved to other countries and given new identities. Several important witnesses had declined to testify because they had been threatened, he said.

The horrors of the Sierra Leone war have frequently perturbed the solemn setting of The Hague courtroom, with its officers in black robes with neatly starched white bibs and its crimson-robed judges high on the dais. At times, witnesses on the stand gesticulated with amputated limbs, swaddled in bandages. Or take the small but awkward incident on the day when Mustapha Mansary, a villager, came to testify. Rebel gangs had hacked off both of his hands.

The defense lawyer began: “Mr. Witness, can I ask you, can you read and write English?” Mr. Mansary listened to the translation, and then he held up his two stumps. “I have no hands to write anything,” he said.

“I appreciate that; my apologies,” the lawyer said.

At other times, witnesses described scenes of incomprehensible cruelty.

A rape victim who testified under the name “064” described the day a gang of rebels mutilated and killed many adults and children in the village of Foendor, among them members of her family, including her two children. After nine children and the adults had been decapitated, Tamba Joe, the gang leader, ordered her to look for her people. Their severed heads were put in a sack.

“They gave me the heads to carry,” the woman said. “But at first I couldn’t.”

A man was told to help her carry the sack, dripping with blood. When they got to Tombudu, the next village, the rebels ordered all the heads thrown into a pond. The heads of her two children were among them, she said.
No one knows exactly how many people were killed or maimed in the civil war of the 1990s. Human rights groups have said that close to 4,000 amputees have not survived. Up to 3,500 amputees are believed to be still alive. Numerous former child soldiers are still in rehabilitation homes.

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Times Topics: Charles G. Taylor | Liberia

During the trial, the magnitude of the atrocities has not been in dispute. But the prosecution and the defense have described the case as legally complicated. The defense lawyer, Mr. Griffiths, said that the prosecution must prove Mr. Taylor’s effective control over the rebel groups and that demonstrating influence or assistance was insufficient. “The case is all about linking the crimes to Mr. Taylor, but the evidence has been riddled with inconsistencies,” Mr. Griffiths said.

Mr. Rapp, the chief prosecutor, insists that Mr. Taylor’s criminal responsibility has been more than demonstrated with the insider witnesses. These included radio operators, describing orders given from the secret communications center in Mr. Taylor’s mansion, and members of the president’s security force who said they witnessed the movement of arms and ammunition to the rebels and attended high-level strategy sessions.

One of the most dramatic accounts came from Joseph Marzah, a longtime associate of Mr. Taylor’s. He described himself as Mr. Taylor’s onetime chief of operations and head of a death squad, now an affluent businessman. He said that African peacekeepers were killed and eaten by Mr. Taylor’s militiamen and that weapons were easily smuggled. Four other witnesses also referred to the ritualistic eating of enemy flesh by Liberian combatants.

Mr. Marzah, known as Zigzag, spoke of the ease with which weapons were moved to Sierra Leone from Liberia during the Taylor government, despite an arms embargo. He said that Nigerian peacekeepers at the airport in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, were bribed and the weapons were transported in the peacekeepers’ vehicles.

He became angry as the defense lawyer repeatedly insisted that he had no close contact with Mr. Taylor. Stung, Mr. Marzah blurted out that he and Mr. Taylor belonged to the same secret society and had together eaten human hearts. With that he nervously crossed himself.

When the lawyer asked if he crossed himself because he had just lied under oath, Mr. Marzah said he had just broken the secrecy laws of his society.