Why Charles Taylor’s War Crimes Judgment Seems Like A Travesty Of Justice To Liberians
By Moco McCaulay
On April 26, 2012, the former leader of a small African nation and a feared ex-rebel leader who spread terror in his country and across West Africa—but seemed above-the-law—was finally cut to size by the swashbuckling sword of Lady Justice. It was a day that international news media heralded as: “the end of impunity!”
A fairy tale-like ending you could say, especially for the people of Sierra Leone, to the atrocious story of death and destruction that had plagued West Africa during the 1990s. And the concluding narrative of the verdict that was told to the world paralleled a Mosaic redemption: a people, long subjugated to the appalling brutalities of war, had finally found respite at the Oasis of Justice after a brutal trek through the Wilderness of Injustice.
Who could therefore be sacrilegious enough as to want to sour such a narrative?
Well, one man is trying to ruin that happy ending. And, if you were Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, who was found guilty on that day for “aiding and abetting” the commission of war crimes in Sierra Leone and later sentenced to 50 years in prison, you too would probably be doing everything within your power to ruin the fairy tale-like ending of this narrative.
So Taylor and his team of lawyers, headed by Morris Anyah, have appealed the verdict, calling it “a miscarriage of justice.” The appeal judges are now deliberating the case and are expected to make a decision whether to uphold the verdict or overturn it at some point before the year’s end.
Could A Former Brutal Liberian War General Become A Champion Of Reconciliation In His War-torn Nation?
By Moco McCaulay
Joshua Milton Blahyi, a former Liberian warlord known as “General Butt Naked,” has been called many names – a mass murderer, an occult priest, a cannibal and the list goes on – but could his new life as an evangelist and the director of a program helping to rebuild the lives of former child soldiers and outcast street youth make him a champion of reconciliation in his war-ravaged nation?
The Liberian Civil War, which lasted for 14 years and resulted in the deaths of over 250,000 people, was described by Stephen Ellis in his book, The Mask of Anarchy, as a war which “…topped and surpassed [all other wars] in form and character, in intensity, in depravity, in savagery, in barbarism and in horror.” And if all the superlatives of the grotesque brutality that was on display during Liberia’s Civil War could be personified in one person, that person would have been General Butt Naked.
An Abominable Infamy: Desecrating the Memory of Over 250,000 Victims of Liberia’s Brutal Civil War
By Moco McCaulay
“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday, December 7th, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…” President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s voice bellowed with a somber drawl as he addressed a joint session of the US Congress on December 8th, a day after Japan’s devastating surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Those were the beginning words of President Roosevelt’s so-called “Infamy Speech” declaring war on the Empire of Japan. And within hours of his speech, the US Congress passed an official declaration of war against Japan, overturning the nation’s policy of non-interventionism, and setting the stage for the US to enter World War II and ultimately, play a crucial role in ending the specter a world under the submission of Hitler’s genocidal Nazi Germany.
Today, in my poverty-beleaguer West African country of Liberia, an act of abominable infamy persists, but sadly, there is no Liberian version of Franklin D. Roosevelt to give a bellowing speech calling the nation to action to overturn a most contemptible transgression upon my country, which not only cast aspersions upon the living, but it runs so deep that it even vilifies the memories of the dead.
My Encounter With The World’s First Twin Child Soldiers and General Butt-Naked, the Notorious Liberian Warlord
By Moco McCaulay
Liberia is a nation of many firsts, some admirable and some anything but. The first independent country in Africa, the first democratically-elected female president in Africa, and most recently, the first country in Africa to have its former head of state convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Another first that Liberia may have recorded during its bloody civil war, which was marked by the use of children as combatants, may be the case of Emmett and Eugene Gray, identical twins who were conscripted into a murderous rebel army at the age of 11, violently snatching away the sanctity of their childhood and casting them into the middle of the turbulent wave of ferocious violence that swept over their country.
