By Isaac Massaquoi
In less than a month from now, the mercurial and idiosyncratic former Liberian president, Charles Taylor will take up residence in Belmarsh prison, South London to spend the rest of his tragic life. He probably wouldn’t get a life sentence, but forty years which is a real possibility will represent a life sentence for the sixty-four year old. His life could be summed up in this way: here was a man who gained the whole world but will now lose his own soul.
In this article, I am attempting to put on record some information I picked up working as a journalist in the MRU while Charles Taylor was active in the region. Convicting Mr. Taylor for aiding and abetting the RUF mission to kill our people and destroy our country was absolutely correct. I believe that Taylor was in fact the Field Marshall for the rag tag RUF army that ravaged Sierra Leone for ten years. The standards of proof were so high in this court that no matter how hard they tried, the prosecution couldn’t prove this. The important point to make though is that Mr. Taylor is today a War Criminal.
TAYLOR AND THE MRU To me he was disrespectful to our government at all times.
Charles Taylor’s relationship with President Kabbah was what the late reggae star Joe Hills described as hand a bowl; knife nar throat. Taylor was a perfect example of a Jekyll and Hyde character – in one situation posing as a peacemaker and in another helping rebels overthrow the government of Sierra Leone. He was very disrespectful to the leaders of Sierra Leone and Guinea, particularly, Alhaji Tejan Kabbah. It was even reported once in the local media that he maltreated our former Vice President, Albert Demby who travelled to Liberia to deliver a special letter from his boss. The politically inexperienced Demby arrived in Monrovia in mid afternoon and made his way to the Executive Mansion for his appointment with Taylor. The reports said that Taylor kept Demby in his waiting room for hours before asking his aides to tell him to go to the hotel and return in the evening.
Demby did not see Taylor until 3 am the next day and their meeting lasted less than five minutes. What a way to treat a visiting Vice President.
MRU PEACE-MAKING
I spent three months working at the presidential lodge as a reporter during my time at SLBS. Covering State House in those periods was a drab business. My journalism was restricted to five minutes photo opportunities for the many local and international groups that visited the lodge. I truly hated hanging around listening to idle gossip by security personnel and other sycophants waiting to see the president. In fact, State House under Kabbah was a boring place characterised by infighting and juju talk particularly when it came to travelling abroad. Kabbah made very few trips out of the country, but that only intensified the struggle for the few overseas trips that happened. So I was very surprised on November 12, 1998 when I was told to prepare for a trip to Conakry with the president. Alhaji Kabbah was travelling to a summit of the moribund Mano River Union with the Rev. Jesse Jackson playing a facilitating role.
Our flight to Conakry onboard a rickety Russian-made helicopter lasted just under an hour and a half. Eleven people including the foreign minister made the trip.
The Weasua flight carrying Taylor was one hour late and his guards were already involved in some scuffle with Guinean soldiers as we were being driven to the same presidential villa at Bellevue where Kabbah had spent a year in exile.
As far as I am concerned, the meeting was another opportunity for Taylor to show himself off as a “respected statesman” while plotting the attack on Freetown with a sixty-eight tonne arms and ammunition consignment that would land in Sierra Leone two months later. Throughout the press conference that followed their lengthy meeting, the president of Guinea, Lansana Conteh looked totally unimpressed. He shook hands with Taylor only once and that was after the signing of the communiqué that said nothing. His mind was made up long ago that Taylor understood only the language of force. He was to employ that effectively with the help of Damate Kone’s LURD, the rebel group that eventually helped bring down Taylor. We returned to Freetown late that evening and I found myself basing my report largely on the communiqué and a few words I got out of Jesse Jackson. My attempt to interview Taylor was thwarted by a bulky fidgety fellow who introduced himself to me as chief protocol officer to Charles Taylor.
INSIDE MONROVIA
Two months after that meeting, Freetown witnessed the most horrendous atrocity in its entire history. The rebels attacked Freetown and killed three thousand people; they abducted almost two thousand children; not to talk of rapes or arson attacks.
When I arrived in Monrovia towards the end of 1999, I was keen to find out how much Monrovia knew about the January 6 attack on Freetown. I wasn’t going to interview any officials but I would talk to ordinary people and people who would know about such things.
The voyage from Freetown lasted an unbelievable 27 hours onboard MV Madam Monique. The captain, a talkative middle aged man allowed me to go up to his bridge to watch him plot his way through the choppy waters. Like the old former seamen of Krootown road, he told me endless stories of his work at sea for over twenty-five years while the rest of the staff of Madam Monique brought me a constant supply of tea and hot food. They were really nice people. Also I thought they wanted to have good coverage back in Freetown because they had just been given a contract to repatriate Sierra Leonean soldiers numbering in their thousands who had either fled to Liberia or had refused to return home at the end of their tour of duty with ECOMOG. Madam Monique just didn’t want a journalist saying anything negative about how they executed this lucrative contract.
This was my second experience with sea sickness. The first occasion also had Liberian connections. I was among about ten journalists given the privilege by the American embassy to visit the USS Guam while on its way to a mission just off the Liberian coast.
SOMALIA DRIVE - MONROVIA
Now back to that voyage to Liberia. We arrived at the Free Port of Monrovia at about 10am. Liberia has a long and beautiful coastline, a bit like ours. The port itself was deserted. This was the middle of 1999 and Liberia was just beginning to put itself together again after the election of Charles Taylor two years earlier. Our captain was told to stay just off the coast while contacts were made with authorities in Freetown and Monrovia to get a clear picture of who we were. That process lasted two hours. In the meantime a lady Reverend, who travelled with us and had been praying and singing throughout the journey, burst out singing again “this mountain shall be removed”, she sang lustily. Other scared and weary people on the vessel joined in the extremely poor harmony.
It was now a real mountain because somehow word came from the shore that Liberian defence minister, Daniel Chea had ordered the ship back to “where it came from.” We were running out of food, water and fuel too; it was getting serious. Many of the passengers rushed to the Captain to confirm the news. He was the only man communicating. He had by this time lost his cool and was busy kicking people off his bridge. I lost my privileged status and was also asked to leave, politely but firmly.
I was soundly asleep when we were finally given permission to berth. Hungry-looking immigration officers in threadbare uniforms asked us all sorts of questions and scrupulously recorded our answers and our personal information.
Many Sierra Leonean came to the port to receive us and to ask whether their family members survived the devastating January attack on Freetown. All kinds of stories were making the rounds in Monrovia about what happened in Sierra Leone on January 6 1999 and the two weeks following that.
My mother who lived in Liberia for more than twenty-five years wept openly when she saw me for the first time in about ten years. She’d been told that when rebels attacked SLBS, I was among the casualties. She in fact was the real reason I was on this trip. So doing journalism was why I was allowed on the ship, but seeing my mother in the process was why I took on the assignment.
She looked pleasant as ever but hard times and the wretchedness of life on Bushrod Island, had taken a heavy toll on her health and beauty.
We were taken to house on Somalia drive that was to be our home for the next three weeks. Around seven in the evening of the same day, two pickup trucks loaded with soldiers entered the compound. All fifteen of them were Sierra Leonean soldiers attached to the Executive Mansion – Taylor’s fortified seat of power. They offered us drinks and by mid-night, they were now talking freely about their exploits on the battle field in Sierra Leone. I had told the crew members and our hosts never to identify me as a journalist. These nocturnal visits were to continue at least every other day for two weeks. One of the young girls who were in fact the reason these soldiers always stopped by was a very nice person. She told me a lot about her trade links with rebel –controlled areas in Kailahun and Kono and that she travels on a helicopter that brought supplies to the rebels in rural Sierra Leone at least once every two weeks. She travelled to Kailahun once while we were there and reported that “business was good” and that many other people were openly trading in the same way, travelling to Kailahin and Kono by road. She actually told me all this to demonstrate how difficult it was to make a living in Liberia.
I have no reason to doubt that the Liberian government of Charles Taylor knew about this trade that was so crucial to the survival of RUF combatants.
MY VISIT TO SINJE CAMP
Our trip to Monrovia was all about bringing home Sierra Leone soldiers who had found their way into Liberia at different points of the war. Our ambassador to Liberia at the time Dr. Kemoh Salia Bao arranged preliminary visit to the refugee camp at a place called Sinje, to the West of Monrovia close to the border with Sierra Leone. At the camp, I found at least nine soldiers who were my classmates in secondary school. I leave you to imagine the kind of questions I would have asked. Here was I in this camp with soldiers who were prepared to speak to me both as a journalist and a friend. At least three of them really cleared their minds. The details will be for some other publication but I can say that it’s a fact that some of the soldiers in that camp were recruited to join the attack on Freetown in January 1999. There were more than one thousand of them there. We brought back six hundred of them to Freetown.
When I visited the United States in 2006 under the US government’s International Visitor’s program, I was handed a video at the Centre for Investigative Journalists in San Francisco in which the journalists followed a particular shipment of arms and ammunition from Ukraine to Sierra Leone just before the rebels attacked and destroyed Freetown in January 1999. Burkina Faso provided end-user certificates to facilitate the supply which was brought to Sierra Leone through Liberia with a senior Liberian government official organizing the shipment. After watching that video, my mind raced back to my first meeting with Felix Mujakperou, the Nigerian ECOMOG commander who took over from the squabbling Generals under whose watch rebels ransacked Freetown. Mujakperou was addressing a programme organised by the Sierra Leone Chamber of Commerce at the Bank Complex, Kingtom in the north-west of Freetown. It was in that ceremony that he disclosed that a shipment of sixty eight tonnes of arms and ammunition was brought to Sierra Leone through Burkina Faso and Liberia for the invasion of the city. The video confirmed that several years later.
I hope people now understand why some of us have questioned why Burkina Faso was the first country President Koroma visited after his accession to power. And why indeed is Blaise Compaore still in power acting as mediator for all conflicts in ECOWAS when his hands are equally drenched in blood.
Mr. Taylor will never see daylight in Freedom. Some of us knew that “wickedness will prevail but only for a little while.”
