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