Charles Taylor and His Demand for My Head
On May 30, 2012 former rebel leader, war lord, and President of Liberia Charles Taylor Charles Taylor (in photo) was sentenced to 50 years in prison. This followed his conviction on April 26, 2012 by the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Civil War that engulfed Sierra Leone for over ten years (1991-2002). Taylor was found guilty for having aided and abetted crimes including rape, murder, the use of child soldiers, acts of terrorism, sexual slavery, enslavement and pillage, inhumane treatments including mutilations and amputations in that conflict. However, it should not be forgotten that Taylor also started and oversaw a fratricidal Civil War that killed thousands in his own country, Liberia. His sentence represents for many in West Africa the end of an era that promoted the violent and un-redeeming ideology that terrorizing, dehumanizing and murdering innocent citizens on a large scale, an ideology Taylor basked in when he started his internecine war against then Liberian President Samuel K. Doe in December 1989, was the ultimate source and maintenance of power. In Sierra Leone in particular, his sentence is cold comfort for the thousands of people wantonly slaughtered, and countless living others who had their hands, arms, legs, or other body parts hacked, because of Taylor’s support of Sierra Leone’s rebel leader and bloody-minded war lord Corporal Foday Sankoh (who died in 2003) and his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels who committed some of the most atrocious brutalities in any civil war in recent memory.
I would have been among those murdered by Taylor and his Sankoh-backed rebels. In fact, Taylor declared me a legitimate target, “public enemy number one” as he called me then, to be eliminated because I had dared to publish a letter in 1993 that linked him directly to the civil war in Sierra Leone. In the hey-days of Taylor as the indisputable purveyor of violence in that region, linking him to any strand in the brutal conflict in Sierra Leone amounted to committing a treasonable offence. That exactly happened when I published the letter: Taylor publicly offered a ransom to anyone who would take my head to him in Gbarnga, his rebel headquarters in Liberia, for what he also called my “anti-revolutionary” activities. In Taylor’s West Africa of the early ‘90s, such a proclamation was, obviously, a death sentence.
More to that letter anon. First, the background.
In 1992, I was a journalist editing a newspaper in Sierra Leone called Liberty Voice. By the time I became editor, Taylor had overran Liberia and taken over the country (with the exception of the capital Monrovia) then led by Samuel Doe. Doe was later captured and brutally murdered by the rebel faction led by Prince Johnson who had fought alongside Taylor. Taylor’s pronouncements as he fought the war in Liberia did not hide his territorial ambitions; nor did they hide his intentions of spreading his brand of rebel warfare to other parts of West Africa to achieve those ambitions. No sooner had Taylor gained ascendancy in Liberia than the major regional players in West Africa realize the destabilizing danger he posed to the region and to their own entrenched authority. They decided that Taylor’s influence in the region had to be nipped in the bud or contained to Liberia. To pursue this objective several West African countries, spearheaded by Nigeria and Ghana, started a strategy to contain Taylor by forming in 1990 the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, ECOMOG for short, a multilateral armed force empowered to intervene in Liberia. ECOMOG chose Sierra Leone as its operational headquarters.
Sierra Leone shares a lengthy land border with Liberia. After ECOMOG’s intervention in Liberia in 1990, the Civil War in Sierra Leone started along the Sierra Leone-Liberia border in 1991. Taylor had previously threatened to declare war on Sierra Leone before the intervention, so when ECOMOG was deployed in the country he unambiguously stated: “Sierra Leone will taste the bitterness of war.” But once the Sierra Leone civil conflict began, Taylor religiously denied that he had anything to do with it. And there was no direct evidence to counter his denials.
Meanwhile, a coup d’état occurred in Sierra Leone in April 29, 1992 led by young military officers some of whom had been deployed in ECOMOG in Liberia and later returned to join the fight against Sankoh’s rebels along the border. They overthrew the country’s President Joseph Momoh who they said, among other reasons, was inept in fighting the war against Sankoh. (The military leaders were later to be ineffective in pursuing the war as well.) With the change, the new military government vowed to fight the war and crush Sankoh’s rebels; in fact, the new government’s first proclamation promised unequivocally to forestall the gains Sankoh had made in the country. By now Sankoh had partial control of Kailahun District which bordered Liberia, and was advancing to take the District’s Daru Barracks, the largest military base outside of Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. Sankoh’s rebels also had infiltrated the diamond-rich Kono District and seized some territories where they were already mining diamonds which they sent to Taylor in exchange of arms and other military materiel. (Thus started what later became known as “blood diamonds.” Revenues from blood diamonds supported the war in Sierra Leone as well as Taylor’s unapologetic splendor and flamboyant life-style in Gbarnga.) To pursue their war policies, the new military leaders launched counter offensives against the rebels, and in one such attack they overran Pendembu, a strategic town in Kailahun District which Sankoh had made his headquarters for his RUF rebels. The soldiers drove Sankoh and his rebels out of Pendembu and seized weapons, vehicles, maps, and rebel paraphernalia.
Among the latter were letters from Taylor and Sankoh. At my newspaper we laid hands on the letters of Sankoh to Taylor, and without hesitation published the one that unequivocally showed that both were in touch about the war in Sierra Leone. We published the letter under the caption “Dear Charles Taylor” in the June 16, 1993 edition of the newspaper (PDF file attached). By doing so, we became the first media outlet to show with documentary evidence that Taylor and Sankoh had direct contacts, and that the former supported the latter in the war in Sierra Leone.
Here is the letter:
Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone
5th May 1992 His Excellency, CIC Charles Gbankay Taylor President, P.P.R.A.G. Gbarnga, LiberiaDear Brother,
I am thanking you very much for the brotherly help you are rendering me in my struggle. This struggle itself has reached a crucial and sensitive stage wherein I cannot afford to give up. However, there is an urgent need to sit and discuss issues on the current development in Sierra Leone and also on the deployment of ECOMOG at the borders. These events are crucial and we need to address ourselves to them. I am therefore requesting an audience with you before I leave.
I appreciate the five boxes of A.K. 47 raffle [sic] ammunition and ten boxes of R.P.G. gun rackets [sic] which I should receive from you today. But I have just received a radio message from General Depoe that our men have encircled Daru Barracks and they are waiting to do the final assault.
I believe what you have offered is not enough to carry out “Operation Capture Daru.” So I am asking you in the name of Almighty God to kindly increase the number of boxes of A.K. 47 ammunition to (20) twenty and that of the RPG rackets [sic] to (12) plus some baretta [sic] rounds. This will sustain me for some time while awaiting the long term supply that you have promised me. Moreover, it will boost the moral of my fighters who are in top form to advance on the enemies.
Lastly, today I am a common laughter because of lack of vehicle for my mobility. My only jeep is in the garage beyond repairs. I do ride on a Toyota truck for a long distance journey or beg for lift here in town. Such practices pose a high risk on my security but I have no alternative. I am asking you to arrest this situation by providing me even a second hand pick up [truck] to enhance my mobility. While anticipating your usual consideration, I would be grateful to you for your continued support in my struggle to liberate my people.
Kindest regards Yours sincerely, Cpl. Foday SankohThe letter revealed indisputably the contact between Taylor and Sankoh, and the support the latter was receiving from the former in his war efforts. The letter further exposed the asymmetrical relationship between them (Taylor providing arms and ammunitions while Sankoh could not afford a vehicle, for instance). More significantly the letter demonstrated that Taylor provided military support, weapons, and strategy to Sankoh. On the military side also, the letter showed their awareness of the deployment of ECOMOG forces and the calculations they needed to make to deal with this multilateral force. (One of the counts the UN-backed court found Taylor guilty of in its April 26 judgment reads: Taylor had “aided and abetted the rebels by providing them with arms and ammunitions, military personnel, operational support and moral support.”) Sankoh’s letter of 1992 had established this indisputable truth.
At Liberty Voice, the letter was a journalistic coup. It was reported in newspapers and radio stations, and its contents traveled far and wide in West Africa and beyond. Taylor could not now deny this unambiguous evidence that linked him to the war in Sierra Leone.
To say that Taylor was dissatisfied with the letter’s publication is an understatement. He was furious, and madly so. His response was swift. From his radio station in Gbarnga and also through other international radio outlets, he categorically denied any such connections that the letter revealed. Specifically, he decried the “false” information I had peddled linking him to Foday Sankoh, whom he said he had never met. (Taylor and Sankoh in fact trained in Libya in the 1980s.) He not only stopped at the denial, but also promised to “eliminate” me from the face of the earth. He declared me an enemy of the rebel cause who must be purged through death by bringing my head to him at Gbarnga. I was scared. All of us at Liberty Voice were scared. In fact, we were so scared that the day and week after the publication we didn’t go to the office.
We had to be scared.
By this time, Taylor’s rebels, operators, and commandos had infiltrated Sierra Leone, which they had entered furtively, fighting alongside Sankoh’s rebels. Also, Taylor had created an efficient network of spies and informants who were as effective as they were ruthless. They crisscrossed Sierra Leone and Liberia murdering anyone they perceived to be a threat to Taylor and his brutal rebel cause. Among their targets were journalists who were critical of or questioned Taylor’s agenda. Indeed many journalists disappeared during Taylor’s ruthless quest for power in Liberia. (Many were also later killed in Sierra Leone.) His ransom decree following the letter’s publication meant that I was not to be an exception. Taylor had a devious and devilish mind when it came to dealing with those he considered his “enemies.” This spirit of deviousness animated the barbarously vile vision he trumpeted unapologetically through a monstrosity of violence that was unforbidding as it was ruthless. His devilish mind fed his appetite for power and guided his macabre uses of violence in pursuit of his agenda of revenge and retribution. And no site was more central to the vistas of violence Taylor put in place than Gbarnga, where he had asked for my head to be taken.
Taylor enamored West Africa from his headquarters in Gbarnga where he gave charismatic radio interviews, characterized by his exaggerated and calculated mannerisms, assured arrogance, and a flippancy bursting with megalomania. He laced his bombastic rhetoric of self-admiration with insults and intimidation against anyone who questioned his legitimacy or connected him to the war in Sierra Leone. But Gbarnga was not only about flowery speeches: it was there Taylor engineered the tools of dehumanization that Sankoh was to finesse in Sierra Leone.
From Gbarnga, he developed the mechanisms of violence that promoted a reign of terror that flagrantly disregarded the sanctity of human life. It was from Gbarnga that he institutionalized the rituals of violence that were to characterize his approach to power, whose hierarchies, flamboyance, and protocols he simultaneously violated and venerated. Gbarnga represented Taylor’s glamorization of brutality as well as the propagation of a brand of violence that was pathological, bizarre and apocalyptic in its vision and practice.
Taylor’s rebel war, and its export to Sierra Leone, represented a paradigmatic shift in the spectacle of violence in West Africa, a region by this time that was infamous for its unending military coup d’états and public executions, of mostly politicians. But from Gbarnga, Taylor introduced to West Africa a version of violence that was indiscriminate and mutable; it massacred innocent and helpless civilians for no just cause other than to promote fear and paranoia. Taylor and Sankoh deployed crude technologies of brutality, torture, and slaughter that desecrated and defiled the human body in ways never seen before in West Africa. The newness and swiftness of this brand of violence and its ritualized strategies of torture, sadism, and psychosis bordered on the unimaginable for its sheer antipathy toward human suffering and dignity. (My newspaper also became the first media outlet to publish the picture of Foday Sankoh in the June 30, 1993 edition titled “This is Foday Sankoh.” When the war started in 1991, there were no known photos of Sankoh, a circumstance the rebels used to construct a phantom aura around their leader that at times claimed he did not exist. Dispelling this myth doubled the death threats against me, this time by RUF rebels. At this stage in the war, disclosing any markers about Sankoh’s identity or existence was one of the most serious crimes one could commit against the rebel cause.)
I knew that publishing the letter was fraught with deathly danger for me and my reporters; but I was enthusiastic to take the risk, if not for anything else but to alert the world of the horror Taylor and Sankoh presented to Sierra Leone. I will take that risk again if I have to in the service of humanity. If only the powers that be, particularly the international community, had taken the action they took thirteen years after I published the letter, the thousands of innocent people who lost their lives in that senseless war would be living today. Taylor was indicted in 2006 for war crimes committed against the people of Sierra Leone during its civil conflict. The letter had revealed that truth in 1993!
I left Sierra Leone before the Civil War reached its most brutal stages. Two journalists, a reporter and a cartoonist who worked with me, were later killed in the war. My younger brother was also killed in the war. For me, Taylor’s 50-year prison sentence brings a painful closure: I now can breathe a huge sigh of relief, confident that my head will never be taken to Charles Taylor in Gbarnga.
By Patrick S. Bernard
Patrick S. Bernard is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA
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