Africans anxiously awaits the Taylor’s verdict

By ralph geeplay

Former Liberian president Charles Ghankay Macarthur Taylor, who was elected president in 1998 after a long ‘bush war’ which began in Liberia’s Nimba County on Christmas Eve in 1989, will face justice this Thursday in the Netherlands. He is the first African president to be tried on a continent where leaders like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and Sudan’s Oman al Bashir plus countless other despots still enjoy state power as they terrorize their own people. Matter of fact, Bashir has been indicted, but he still eludes justice. If Taylor is acquitted jitters could run throughout West Africa, where the former Liberian president is accused of trading arms for minerals, especially diamonds in Sierra Leone. Flushed with cash from Liberia’s timber and its resources, he meddled and also exported his war to Liberia’s neighbors: Guinea and Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone. His war in Liberia saw almost 300 thousand Liberians dead, from a pre war population of 3.5 million and hundreds of West African peace keepers (Ecomog) killed under Nigerian command.

 

Taylor, at the peak of power

Let’s remember April 12, 1980

By ralph geeplay

 

This week, Liberians remember April 12, 1980. It is hard to comment on the events that preceded the day and the aftermath of the military overthrow without raw emotions being in the mix. A day when some Liberians trooped to the streets to dance while a segment of the population was mourning. 

A Mail for Mali

By: ralph geeplay

The March 22, seizure of power in Bamako, the Malian capital, was just one more rude awakening that the men in military uniforms in the world’s least develop continent are still thirsty for political power. And Mali, the Western African landlocked country is its latest poster child. It is hard to understand why the coup took place in the first place?! If the main complaint of the army and reason for aborting a democratic government is that it neglected the army and its needs, to waged an all out war against insurgents from the north, then the army has done virtually nothing since coming to power a fortnight ago to take control and beat back the  revolt. The army since seizing control has done a dismal job. The fact that must be laid bare is that the Malian army lacked the guts and fighting spirit to take on the rebels, weapons aside. Since they came to power almost half of the country has fallen to the Islamic radicals in the north, all of this, in less then three weeks.