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The former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, took notes during the judgement hearing at The Hague on Thursday.
THE HAGUE ? Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and once a powerful warlord, was convicted on Thursday on 11 counts of aiding and abetting war crimes committed in Sierra Leone during that country?s civil war during the 1990s.
The ruling, announced by Presiding Judge Richard Lussick, said Mr. Taylor was guilty of involvement in crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder, rape, slavery and the use of child soldiers. The court, however, said the prosecution failed to prove that Mr. Taylor had direct command responsibility for the atrocities in the indictment.
Mr. Taylor, who has maintained that he is innocent, will hear his sentence in the coming weeks. There is no death penalty in international criminal law and any jail term would be served in a British prison. No African president has been convicted by an international tribunal.
The conflict in Sierra Leone became notorious because of its gruesome tactics, including the calculated mutilation of thousands of civilians, the widespread use of drugged child soldiers and the mining of diamonds to pay for guns and ammunition. A new, sinister rebel vocabulary pointed to the horrors: applying ?a smile? meant cutting off the upper and lower lips of a victim, giving ?long sleeves? meant hacking off the hands, and giving ?short sleeves? meant cutting the arm above the elbow.
The trial has brought ?a sense of relief, said Ibrahim Tommy, who heads the Centre for Accountability and Rule of Law, a rights group in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, ?but I?m not sure it will bring closure to the victims.? Even so, he said, the trial was ?a genuine effort to ensure accountability for the crimes in Sierra Leone.?
In Liberia, Taylor supporters have maintained he is the victim of an American witch hunt, but others lament that his former associates have prospered and play a role in the new government.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone, which has its main seat in Freetown, has already sentenced eight other leading members from different forces and rebel groups for crimes in Sierra Leone.
Largely an initiative of the United States and Britain, the court was established in 2002 in partnership between the United Nations and Sierra Leone to prosecute those responsible for atrocities in a conflict that led almost half the population to flee and left an estimated 50,000 dead.
The fighting for control over one of the world?s poorest regions also involved Liberia, where many more died, and threatened to spill over into neighboring Guinea and Ivory Coast. But only crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002 are within the court?s mandate.
Mr. Taylor is the special court?s last defendant. His trial was moved to The Hague for fear of causing unrest in the region where he still has followers.
During the lengthy trial, which began in 2006, judges from Ireland, Samoa and Uganda heard testimony from 115 witnesses, many of them from the region who had never traveled before.
Before the formally robed court officers, they spoke of slave labor in captured diamond mines, incidents of cannibalism, rape, severed heads displayed on stakes to terrorize people and captured villagers lining up, waiting to have their limbs hacked off.
There were many chilling moments, as witnesses described the barbarism of the rebels, gesticulating with the stumps of amputated limbs swaddled in bandages.
Mustapha Mansary, a villager, was twice asked by the defense lawyer if he could read and write English, until he held up his two bandaged stumps.
?I have no hands to write anything,? he replied.
But prosecutors struggled with a legal puzzle of how to link them to Mr. Taylor. There was no paper trail showing orders. There was no record of Mr. Taylor ever going to Sierra Leone. He was not at the scene of the crimes and they were not committed by the army of Liberia, which was under his command.
To build their case, they used radio and telephone intercepts and brought in radio operators who had connected Mr. Taylor?s mansion in Monrovia to the rebels in the bush in Sierra Leone.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=923cb13694b50402a687002d0a94e675
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