Charles Taylor wants to ‘set the record straight’

FORMER Liberian president Charles Taylor, on trial for war crimes, wants to set the record straight about his role in a savage civil war that tore apart Sierra Leone and left hundreds of thousands dead or mutilated, his lawyer said yesterday.

Opening Taylor’s defence, British lawyer Courtenay Griffiths said Taylor would take the stand today at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) for what is expected to be several weeks of testimony.

He urged the judges to give Taylor a fair hearing, and not to be overwhelmed by the parade of misery presented by the prosecution since the trial opened 18 months ago.

“No one, who has seen the procession through this courtroom of hurt human beings reliving the most grotesque trauma, would have been unmoved,” Griffiths told the three-judge panel. “We are human too, even while we declare this accused man to be not guilty of the charges he faces.”

Taylor, 61, the first African head of state to be tried by an international court, is charged with 11 counts of murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, using child soldiers and spreading terror.

His trial has been hailed as a groundbreaking example of denying impunity to autocrats who have always evaded responsibility for mass murders and human rights outrages that occurred under their regimes.

SCSL prosecutors say he backed Sierra Leone rebels to help gain control of the neighbouring country and strip it of its vast mineral wealth.

Some of the 91 witnesses they called claimed he shipped weapons to rebels in rice sacks in contravention of an arms embargo and in return got so-called “blood diamonds” mined by slave labour.

One prosecution witness took the stand with stumps where his hands had been hacked off. A woman testified that she was forced to carry a sack full of severed heads including those of her children. One of Taylor’s former aides told judges he was with Taylor when the president ate a human liver.

Griffiths cast Taylor as a peacemaker who was too busy defending democracy in Liberia to “micromanage” atrocities committed by rebels during the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone.

About 500,000 people are estimated to be victims of killings, systematic mutilation and other atrocities in Sierra Leone’s civil war. Some of the worst crimes were carried out by gangs of child soldiers, who were fed drugs to desensitise them to the horror of their actions.

But Griffiths said Taylor was not behind the use of children in conflict. “Child soldiers were not a Charles Taylor invention,” he said.

The defence team has a list of more than 200 witnesses, though not all are expected to testify.