Posted on 03/29/2006 5:23:09 PM PST by blam
Tyrant of Liberia is captured in border raid
By Katharine Houreld in Monrovia and Alec Russell in Washington
(Filed: 30/03/2006)
Charles Taylor, once one of Africa's most murderous dictators, was arrested last night after two days on the run and handed over to United Nations officials to face trial for war crimes.
The capture of the former Liberian president on the Cameroon/Nigeria border was greeted with delight in his homeland.
Charles Taylor: Arrested
Taylor was flown there briefly before being taken to a jail in neighbouring Sierra Leone where he faces multiple charges for crimes against humanity.
His arrest followed an intense bout of diplomatic arm-twisting in Washington where Nigeria's president Olusegun Obasanjo was warned that he risked the cancellation of yesterday's long-planned meeting with President George W Bush if Taylor was not found.
To the outrage of human rights groups and world leaders, Taylor slipped away on Monday night from the Nigerian villa where he had been under house arrest since he left Liberia in 2003 as rebels advanced on his capital.
US officials made clear that they held Nigeria responsible for his escape and suggested on Tuesday that Mr Obasanjo risked the diplomatic humiliation of missing out on the meeting with Mr Bush.
Taylor's escape came just days after Mr Obasanjo reluctantly agreed to hand him over after long-resisting calls to deliver him to the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.
Yesterday however, just hours before Mr Obasanjo's White House rendezvous, it was announced that Taylor had been recaptured. Mr Obasanjo marched into his appointment with Mr Bush suggesting that there had been a terrible misunderstanding.
"I feel vindicated," Mr Obasanjo said, rejecting the widely held idea that Nigerian officials had been complicit in Taylor's escape. Those who spread such ideas "are wrong and owe an apology," he added.
Taylor rose to power in the early 1990s as one of the warlords who tore Liberia apart in the civil war that ended the military regime of Samuel Doe.
The UN-backed court in Freetown has indicted him for his support of the Revolutionary United Front rebels who hacked the limbs, lips and ears from thousands of civilians during a struggle to control the country's diamonds fields.
No charges have yet been brought against Taylor in his homeland, but Jerome Verdier, the head of the country's truth and reconciliation commission, has refused to rule out prosecuting any of the masterminds behind its bloody civil wars.
Up to a quarter of a million died between 1990 and 2003 before Taylor was forced into exile declaring: "God willing, I'll be back."
Yesterday he was, but there was no triumphant home-coming as he arrived in Monrovia. He was hustled off a Nigerian plane in handcuffs into the custody of UN peacekeepers, read his rights, then taken by helicopter to jail in Freetown.
The drama of the past few days was precipitated by Liberia's election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf last November as Africa's first woman president. She formally requested the end of Taylor's asylum earlier this month.
Great, handed over to the UN.
I guess we can count on him dying of old age during the trial
It would have been nice if we'd done the same for Idi Amin.
Hey, with the premature end of the Milosevic trial, a lot of people were put out of work. Trying Taylor will assure their continued livelihoods.
I thought they had BJ Clinton on tap for Sec General?
Isn't that the truth?!! The UN is a bunch of professional boondogglers
Let him have it, we can send the UN to Liberia, then revoke his passport. How sweet it'd be.....
Actually, when Taylor's men caught Samuel do, they severed his arms and legs and placed him in a wheel barrell and carted him around Monrovia while he was still alive.
But this was a populist movement by Taylor backed by Africans, ousting the American-African regime which went back to the return of American slaves, the original fathers of Liberia. hence, the cities are named after American Presidents and the economy was stable until 30 years ago.
Liberia was a big rubber producer, Good Year had rubber plantations there at one point. It used to be a very stable, and (small) American ally.
Not me, brother.
Anyway, what did Charles Taylor do that was so wrong? Aside from the mass murder and the human sacrifice and the cannibalism, that is...oh, and torturing his predecessor to death and then eating him. Chuckie's loads of laughs at a party...
"Charles Taylor was an appointee of Samuel Doe after the Doe Coup in 1980. Both soon fell apart and Taylor fled into exile, having been accused of embezzlement. He was detained in a US prison from where he staged a miraculous escape. He and his supporters went for military training in Libya and Burkina Faso and on Christmas eve 1989, he invaded Liberia from Ivory Coast, leading a rebel group called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. From this brief summary, it is evident that there were several angles to Charles Taylor's rebellion. Firstly, was the Libyan angle. Secondly, was the Bourkina Faso angle. Thirdly, was the Ivorian angle. Fourthly, was the United States angle. I will now deal with these angles briefly."
As head of the General Services Agency, Taylor directed the purchasing of the Liberian government. He was later ousted from the post in May of 1983, accused of embezzling more than $900,000 in government funds to a Citibank account. That October, Taylor fled to the United States.
Taylor was arrested in May of 1984, and a court in Boston determined that there were sufficient grounds to detain him while Liberia's request to send the fugitive back were considered. In September of 1985, while awaiting extradition, Taylor escaped from the Plymouth House of Corrections.
Several years after Pat Robertson's first feature film!
Jesse will get him off. Jesse needs more diamonds.
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