The Gruesome War Crimes Trial That Includes a Recipe for Human-Flesh Stew

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Charles Taylor's Long Goodbye
Naomi Campbell, Pat Robertson, and a recipe for human-being stew.
By Doug Merlino
Updated Wednesday, May 19, 2010, at 7:08 AM ET


For more than two years, a recurring scene has played out in an antiseptic courtroom in The Hague. Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia—looking natty in bespoke suits and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, his hair salt-and-pepper—has listened as witnesses have bandied charges and countercharges about horrific crimes that prosecutors allege were committed with Taylor's complicity in neighboring Sierra Leone in the 1990s.

In that decade, Taylor's Liberia was a hub from which violence radiated out through West Africa. His charismatic manner and the grisly crimes his forces were accused of drew international attention. After he began an insurrection with a small band of soldiers in 1989, years of civil war eventually resulted in Taylor's election as the country's president in 1997. (His supporters were said to have chanted: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll still vote for him.") Taylor didn't invent child soldiering, but he certainly put his own spin on it with his Small Boys' Unit, his personal protection force of devoted, AK-47-armed orphans. It's been estimated that wars Taylor started or helped to fuel resulted in 300,000 deaths.

The prosecution now charges that Taylor wreaked havoc in the region in order to get his hands on some of Sierra Leone's notorious blood diamonds. Taylor was indicted in 2003 by the U.N.-backed court charged with trying those with "greatest responsibility" for the crimes committed during the war in Sierra Leone. That year, with Monrovia besieged by rebel forces seeking to unseat him, Taylor agreed to asylum in Nigeria. He was finally arrested and shipped to The Netherlands in 2006.
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For most people, the story ended there. But although Taylor's trial moves at a pace that makes the O.J. Simpson proceedings seem speedy, it is far from staid. The proceedings have unfurled a series of grotesque allegations, bizarre accusations, and unexpected celebrity cameos. In the process, the trial has exposed some of the seamier American connections to a gruesome era in West Africa and the country founded in 1847 by returned slaves.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2253842/pagenum/all/#p2