January 2002
TAYLOR's CASE THROWN OUT
Posted Wednesday, January 9, 2002 by Lansana Gberie
The High Court of London has “struck off” a libel case brought against British author Stephen Ellis, his publishers Hurst & Co., and the London Times newspapers which quoted sections of Ellis’ The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (1999) that accused Liberia’s President Charles Taylor of cannibalism. President Taylor brought the action after a Times review quoted the allegations almost two years ago. The court declared in some exasperation that such an action would not be entertained again.
The case was doomed from the start. For one thing, it was clear that Taylor’s court action was a symbolic gesture, for no one expected him to submit his appalling record to the scrutiny of a sophisticated legal system. And Ellis, who holds a PhD in African history from Oxford University and was for five years a researcher for Amnesty International and later editor of the authoritative newsletter African Confidential, convincingly documented in his book Taylor’s excesses as warlord---including mass murder, mass rape by his troops and cases of ritual cannibalism. (By some accounts Liberia’s civil war, which was triggered by a Christmas eve invasion of the country by a small force led by the colourful Mr. Taylor in 1986, caused the death of 200,000 Liberians, a proportion higher than that of Poles killed during the Second World War). For another, the UN not long after Taylor’s court action imposed a travel ban on the Liberian leader for his involvement with Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front RUF) in diamond smuggling and gun-running, which meant that even if he wanted to (and there was no indication that he did) Taylor would not travel to Britain to have his case prosecuted.
Michael Dwyer of C. Hurst & Co. expressed “undisguised glee” at the Court’s decision. But by throwing out the case, the London Court may well have done Taylor a favour. Already groups like Amnesty International and Liberian exiles, using the splendid activism of the Spanish in hurling Chile’s Pinochet in a London court as a precedent, were waiting for Taylor’s appearance in Britain so that charges of murder and other war-related crimes could be brought against him.
A former Boston gas station assistant, Taylor first came to public attention in Liberia as a flamboyant procurement officer in Samuel Doe’s murderous dictatorship. In 1983, he fled the country for the United States allegedly after embezzling $900,000 of public funds. He was arrested on his arrival pending extradiction back to Liberia but he escaped prison in Massachusetts in mysterious circumstances.
According to Ellis’ account, Taylor may have bribed prison authorities $50,000 to escape, but the fact that no serious attempt was made by the US authorities to apprehend him after the dramatic prison escape “strengthens suspicions that the US security services turned a blind eye to Taylor’s escape…for political reasons.” Taylor passed through Mexico before arriving in Accra, Ghana, in February 1986, at the invitation of H. Boima Fahnbulleh, a Liberian Marxist politician with close ties to Ghana’s then powerful security chief, Kojo Tsikata. Taylor was shortly after arrested and detained by Ghanaian authorities after he fell out with Fahnbulleh, and upon his release he fled to Burkina Faso where he joined a group of Liberian exiles. This group, which included the unstable Prince Johnson, participated directly in the murder of President Thomas Sankara, once a patron but who was beginning to show unease at the motley collection of foreign dissidents wanting to destabilize their countries. Blasé Campore, Sankara’s closest aide, became President after Sankara’s murder and arranged for Taylor to meet the mercurial Libyan leader Gaddafi. This is how Taylor got the wherewithal to launch his invasion of Liberia.
Stephen Ellis’ detailed account of events before and following Taylor’s invasion are compelling and matchlessly insightful. What has caused some controversy is the attempt in the book to understand some of these events as a form of spiritual neurosis. “The Liberian spiritual world in the past was governed by rules and procedures which had the effect of imposing moral and political limits on individual entrepreneurs of violence,” he writes. But this changed fundamentally over the years as the state withered away, leading to a corruption of values and the moral universe that made possible youths wrecking unspeakable atrocities even as they genuinely proclaim strange religious beliefs. Taylor’s alleged cannibalism, which other sources have confirmed, must be seen in this context, he argues.
Although allegations about Taylor’s cannibalism has been made before, its appearance in the highly respected Times newspaper, which reviewed Ellis’ book, jolted the beleaguered President, who was desperate for some respectability after literally intimidating Liberians who survived his horrendous carnage to vote for him in 1997, to action. The libel suit was filed by Taylor’s envoy in London. The London Court’s decision to throw it out has, alas, robbed the world of a unique opportunity to scrutinize one of world’s greatest mass murderers and despoilers.