Charles Taylor’s antics have so far landed Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow in front of a war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But who is this mysterious diamond flinger?
By Robert Carry
Charles Taylor was born in 1948 in Liberia, a country founded by freed African slaves repatriated from the US after Emancipation. Taylor earned a degree in Bentley College in the US before taking up a position in the Samuel Doe administration ruling Liberia at the time.
Taylor was soon sacked for embezzlement and fled to the US. He was arrested in 1984 and detained as the Liberian regime fought to have him extradited back to Africa. A year later it was reported that Taylor and four other inmates had escaped from the maximum security prison where he was detained. It was widely claimed that the Americans had allowed Taylor to return to Africa so that he could overthrow the Doe regime, which had fallen out of favour. Taylor later confirmed the rumour.
Once back in Africa, Taylor moved to Libya where he trained as a guerilla. He returned to Liberia in 1989 as the head of a Libyan-backed resistance group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, and kicked off the First Liberian Civil War in a bid to overthrow the Doe regime.
By the time the war ended, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, Doe had been executed and Taylor was in control of swathes of the country. When a general election was called in 1997, Taylor topped the poll and became president. Although the elections were overseen by the UN’s peace-keeping mission, Taylor’s victory was widely attributed to a belief that he would re-start the war if he didn’t win.
Personal army
Taylor’s thousands of military personal from the Liberian Armed Forces associated with the Doe administration shortly after taking charge and replaced them with an Anti-Terrorist Unit and the Special Operations Division of the Liberian National Police (LNP) which would later serve as his own personal army.
Numerous human rights abuse allegations surfaced against Taylor during his time as president, most notably that he had supplied the Revolutionary United Front (a rebel group engaged in brutal atrocities in neighbouring Sierra Leone), with weapons in exchange for ‘blood diamonds’ mined in the stricken country. The move contravened a UN embargo against arms sales in Sierra Leone. Taylor was believed to have assisted in the recruitment of child soldiers and even personally directed RUF operations inside Sierra Leone.
Taylor began to face mounting internal opposition in the late 1990s, which culminated in the outbreak of the Second Liberian Civil War in 1999. By 2003, he had lost control of much of the country and was formally indicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Later that year he was forced to resign from his post and he fled into exile in Nigeria.
UN Mission
After November 2003, Irish troops were sent into Liberia as part of a UN mission in what was the largest Irish overseas deployment since Lebanon. The Irish troops were tasked with acting as the UN’s ‘Quick Reaction Force’ in Monrovia. The troops would remain in place until May 2007.
In 2006, with international demands for his extradition mounting, Taylor tried to cross the Nigerian border into Cameroon. His Range Rover was stopped by border guards who discovered cash and heroin in the vehicle.
He was flown to Liberia and transferred into the custody of Irish soldiers acting on behalf of the UN. From there, he was flown to Sierra Leone before being sent to The Hague. Taylor was charged with 11 counts of war crimes in March 2006, to which he pleaded not guilty.
The trial received an unexpected injection of glamour when model Naomi Campbell was called upon to testify. She confirmed accusations that she received a gift of uncut blood diamonds during a social gathering in South Africa from Taylor, although denied that she knew the gift had come from the Liberian.
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