By Erich Wiedemann
In Gamboru, Nigeria, just before the border with Cameroon, two border guards flagged down a Range Rover with diplomatic plates. A customs check. The driver, a large black man wearing a white hooded cloak of the type worn by North African Bedouin, got out and without saying a word strode to the back of the vehicle. He opened an aluminium case on the tailgate and confronted the two officers with a tempting sight -- neat bundles of crisp dollar notes in large denominations. Go ahead, help yourself, said the man. But the officers weren't corrupt. They handcuffed him and took him to the provincial capital of Maiduguri. A check of his papers brought a surprise. It was Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, known to his compatriots as the "Butcher of Liberia."
A government jet flew Taylor to the Liberian capital of Monrovia from where a United Nations helicopter took him to Sierra Leone. His trial began on Monday before an international war crimes court. He pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity he faces relating to his role in Sierra Leone's 1991-2002 civil war. The charges include acts of terrorism, murder, rape, enslavement and the use of child soldiers in the diamond-rich country next to Liberia on the West African coast. Britain has asked the United Nations Security Council to move his trial to The Hague in the Netherlands.
His arrest is a victory in the fight for greater justice and humanity in the world. For the first time, an African state has handed a former tyrant over to independent judges. And a number of Africa's former dictators must now fear that their retirement won't be as peaceful and luxurious as they'd bargained for.
Charles Taylor murdered on an almost industrial scale. He is responsible for war crimes that cost hundreds of thousands of lives in West Africa. The Liberian civil war alone, in which he played a leading role, resulted in the killing of 250,000 people. After the war ended in Liberia, Taylor fomented uprisings in the neighboring states of Guinea and Sierra Leone. The "Small Boys Units," which he supplied with weapons in exchange for diamonds, were notorious for hacking the hands and feet off prisoners. After a horrendously bloody battle for power in Liberia, Taylor fled to eastern Nigeria in August 2003. Since then he and his entourage had been living quite comfortably in a villa on the outskirts of the town of Calabar on the Niger delta.
The list that doesn't exist yet
The good life was over at the beginning of last week when Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, after weeks of pressuring from the United States and Liberian governments, said Taylor would have to stand trial for his crimes. But nothing happened. The guards were withdrawn from the villa in Calabar but Taylor wasn't arrested. Obasanjo told Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf that if she wanted Taylor, she'd have to come and get him. In the end, the arrest of the prominent asylum-seeker happened almost by accident. "Who's next?" asked Biafra Nigeria World News.
No. 1 and No. 2 on the list that doesn't exist yet are Hissène Habré und Mengistu Haile Mariam, the dethroned dictators of Chad and Ethiopia. Human rights groups have been trying to get hold of Habré for years. Over a thousand regime opponents were tortured to death in the prisons and camps of his secret police in the 1980s. After his fall in 1990 he and his family lived undisturbed for 10 years in an upmarket district of the Senegalese capital Dakar. He was then charged with mass murder following public pressure from various human rights groups. But Dakar's highest court ordered the trial to be stopped.
Public prosecutors in Brussels have launched an investigation based on the same accusations. Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade had signalled four years ago that he was thinking about extraditing Habré to Belgium. But he hasn't done so yet and even though the facts are fairly clear, legal proceedings in Belgium have ground to a halt. African leaders don't like to cooperate with European legal authorities because some of them would themselves have to face trial if the rules of the Hague-based International Criminal Court were applied to them.
"An insult to Africa's honor"
The murderous warlords of Somalia for example and the regime in Khartoum which is responsible for killings in the Sudanese province of Darfur. Or Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who bear some responsibility for massacres in eastern Congo.
Legal experts from the African Union will now review the Habré case. But the presidents of the leading AU member states have already made clear that regardless of the outcome of that review, they will never agree to hand over Habré to a court on the Netherlands. That would be an "insult to Africa's honor," said President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo.
Ethiopia's farmer killer, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who made history with his "Red Terror," has also largely been spared legal recriminations. He used napalm, splinter bombs and even mass starvation in his war against the civilian population. At least 100,000 farmers fell victim to his forced relocation programs. Mengistu's role models were China's communists. In one lawsuit against one of his regional governors, a witness testified that his father had been beheaded because he owned his own field and therefore was regarded as "feudal". The severed head was offered for sale in the market square. Mengistu's executioners were also notorious for refusing to hand over the bodies of their victims for burial unless their next of kin paid "bullet money."
Since he was toppled in May 1991, Mengistu Haile Mariam has been living in a white villa on Cowie Road 2 in Zimbabwe's capital Harare. President Robert Mugabe won't let anyone touch him even though his huge telephone bills are a strain on the country's budget and he occasionally beats up his servants in drunken rages. In late 1999 Mengistu narrowly avoided forced repatriation to Addis Ababa while he was being treated for a heart condition in Johannesburg's "Garden City Hospital". The South African government had assured him freedom of passage. But when the Ethiopian ambassador submitted an extradition request, the South African government no longer felt bound by its promise. Mengistu only just managed to avoid arrest by catching a plane back to Harare before the police could get to him. His message to his former comrades in Pretoria whom he had helped politically and financially while they were fighting Apartheid? "Ungrateful bastards."
It's not just the Africans who are protecting tyrants. Idi Amin Dada, the former president of Uganda and reputedly the most bloodthirsty despot in Africa's post-colonial history, spent 25 peaceful years in the Saudi Arabian port of Jeddah after he was toppled. He died of kidney failure shortly after his 75th birthday. His friends called him "Big Daddy" and the Saudis treated him like a good friend. He got room and board for free, a decent annual entitlement and always had the latest limousine in his garage. Everyone knew he had had at least 300,000 people killed. But he was a good Muslim and visited the mosque twice a day. That was more important to the Saudi theocrats.
A slightly stupid clown
The friendship between Amin and his hosts was only in danger once, in 1989, when he flew to Congo to raise an army and get himself re-installed as leader of Uganda. The comeback failed. The Saudis let him return only after he swore never to engage in political or military adventures again. He wasn't even allowed to give interviews anymore.
Amin was never seriously challenged over his criminal past. People preferred to forget that he had fed his political opponents to crocodiles or forced them to crush each other's skulls with sledgehammers. Even the West remembered him not as a mass murderer but as a slightly stupid clown.
Central African Emperor Bokassa is another example. The former soldier in the French Foreign Legion could rely on his old friends when he was chased off his throne in 1979. He lived freely in France until 1986, when he unwisely visited his country and was promptly arrested.
The French had known very well who they were honoring with their hospitality. Bokassa was a notorious murderer. The torture that went on in the cellars under his palace in Bangui put Stalin's secret service to shame. Shortly after he seized power he ordered 100 schoolchildren to be tortured to death because they had demonstrated against wearing school uniforms. He reportedly ate some of his prisoners. Bokassa was sentenced to death in 1987 but that was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released from prison after a few years and died peacefully in his bed in 1996, leaving behind 17 wives and about 50 children.
"No canonization of saints"
Three years ago, Boston University launched a series of seminars against tyranny and invited African dictators to hold lectures on their work. Without a hint of sarcasm, the university instituted the "Lloyd G. Balfour African Presidents in Residence Fellowship". The US government had agreed to grant visiting dictators freedom from prosecution. The only precondition was that speakers had to have ended their rule voluntarily.
There wasn't much response from Africa. The first and only guest was Kenneth Kaunda, the long-time ruler of Zambia. He was one of the softer dictators. He had governed for 27 years, then allowed democratic elections and promptly lost them. Charles R. Stith, who founded the university program, said at the time that one has to make compromises. "We're not trying to canonize saints." Stith would also have invited Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il, even though they didn't fit into the program geographically. He would only have insisted on the one precondition -- the voluntary departure from office.
Charles Taylor would have met this requirement. He resigned on August 10, 2003 under American pressure, but not involuntarily, after Nigeria's Obasanjo agreed to grant him asylum. So it's probably a good thing Boston University didn't continue its seminar program.
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