The Uncle Of Blood Diamonds

By TONY MOCHAMA

The life story of Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia and as of this week, convicted war criminal accused of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity like violence to life, outrages on personal dignity, sexual slavery, pillage and a plethora of other dastardly deeds, reads like a Hollywood action movie (no pun on Ruto who described his own charges in the ICC in similar cinematic vein).

Like a good Hollywood script, Charles Taylor’s story has a beginning, a middle and an end – but let’s allow ourselves artistic licence and start at the end; or very near the end. What screenwriters call the ‘penultimate arch’ of the plot.

Doe executed

A man in his early sixties sits pensively in a gray courtroom in Amsterdam. The day is April 26, 2012. He looks more UN diplomat than former warlord in his silver-rimmed spectacles on a smooth face that gives way to a prim red necktie, expensive shiny black suit and pure leather shoes, and remains unruffled as he is found guilty of crimes as countable as a full football squad.

Time rolls back. It is the Christmas Eve of 1989. Charles Taylor is a ‘young man’, 41 years of age, and at the head of a mercenary force of 168 men, most of them Ivorians.

He has crossed from the jungles of Cote d’Ivoire into his native country of Liberia, and like Father Christmas, he comes bearing the gift of liberation in his arms – pardon the pun – from the mad man called Sergeant Samuel Doe who has lorded it over Liberia since a bloody coup in which Doe executed the legally elected president of the nation, William Tolbert, in 1980.

Escapes US jail

Taylor and his rebels are repelled from Nimba County in Sierra Leone, but Doe’s diabolical soldiers go on an orgy of rapes, lootings and killings that leave hundreds dead and thousands displaced.

The local Gio and Mano populations rise up to the man and join Taylor’s rebellion, and like in every good ‘come back’ movie tale, Taylor is within a kilometre of capturing the seaside mansion in which Mad Doe is holed up by mid-1990.

He hesitates!

The tides of time roll back to the beginning (not when Taylor was born, movies’ beginnings are the interesting bits of life, not birth certificates).

The beginning is a decade before, when Taylor is just 33 and has to flee to the USA to escape the wrath of Sergeant Doe from whose coffers (as Chief Purchasing Officer) he has embezzled $1,000,000 (Sh84 million).

By April, 1983, Charlie Taylor has been apprehended by the US authorities, but like in every good blockbuster, after 15 months in Plymouth County prison awaiting extradition to Liberia to face charges of embezzlement, Taylor escapes by use of a sheet, and over a wall, where a vehicle is awaiting him and he disappears into New York in the strange September of 1984.

In this movie, the next time we see Charles Taylor is when the date on the screen reads Christmas Eve, 1989. We don’t know much about his life in the intervening five years and two months – but we later find out he underwent guerrilla training in Libya under the sponsorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Now in the July of 1989, Taylor hesitates in dealing the fatal blow to Doe. And a militia commander under him, Prince Johnson, pulls the rug from under his feet by getting to Doe first.

Multi-million diamonds

They cut the bloody sergeant to pieces over a long sanguinary night on a beach in Monrovia, while Prince Johnson drinks Heineken beer – just like the movies.

Taylor’s rebellion splits at the seams into seven raging militias that battle for seven years for the control of Liberia – and its lucrative multi-million dollar-a-year diamond trade that will bring many a tear to many a family.

In 1997, Taylor wins the Liberian presidency under the slogan ‘I killed your ma, I killed your pa, that’s why you’ll vote for me!’ 75 per cent of the Liberian population do, fearing that if Taylor falls at the polls, he will not fail to re-engineer the Liberian civil war.

" … and if you don’t vote for me, I’ll kill you!" That is the unspoken underbelly of his ominous campaign slogan.

The rest is history.

He becomes the generous ‘Uncle’ of the civil war next door where a psychopath called Foday Sankoh leads the RUF militias who offer citizens ‘short sleeves’ (hands) or ‘long sleeves’ (arms) amputations. In return, Taylor gets diamonds!

Indicted by an international criminal court in 2003, Taylor steps down from power in return for safe refuge in neighbouring Nigeria in a seaside villa.

Beautiful woman

But like the ‘godfather’ movies, he is betrayed by Olusegun Obasanjo who ‘sells him down the river’ (sic) when the US President George W Bush calls for his head. The climax of the movie has Taylor caught as he tries to cross the border into the Cameroon with a bag full of cocaine, $50,000 in cash, and in a car with false plates.

The end of the movie is coming soon, on May 30, 2012, when the line ‘Charles Taylor was sentenced to life behind bars in a UK prison’ will run on the screen. Before the credits. The end.

Oh – and who was the beautiful woman in this film? Naomi Campbell, supermodel, whom Taylor gave a big blood diamond in 1997 – after flirting with her in a State dinner. If anything else happened, this was an action, not adults’ only, movie.