By Abdul Tejan-Cole
Last week, the Independent National Human Rights Commission of Liberia organized a national colloquium in Gbarnga in Bong County. Under the theme “Promoting National Reconciliation through the Implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Recommendations,” the main objective of the meeting was to provide a forum for creating understanding and appreciating the TRC recommendations and implications.
Other objectives of the meeting included to critically consider the 207 recommendations and determine a roadmap for implementation to ensure that there is full accountability for egregious crimes committed against the Liberian nation and people, and to discuss the challenges inherent in the implementation of the TRC recommendations, particularly as they relate to national and international human rights violations and economic crimes during the country’s more than 14 years of civil conflicts.
Following the conclusion of its civil wars (1989-1996 and 1999-2003), Liberia set up a TRC in 2005. Following extensive consultations including over 800 public hearings across the country’s 15 counties and in the Diaspora over 20,000 statements were collected. The TRC released its final report on June 30, 2009.
The key recommendations included that the government of Liberia should adopt measures to address the immediate needs of war-affected persons; take measures to combat corruption across all sectors including criminalizing and prosecuting acts of bribery, embezzlement and misappropriation, abuse of functions, laundering criminal proceeds, and obstruction of justice.
The recommendations also include to undertake long-term reforms of the education and healthcare sectors, as well as to undertake work on the right to development and adopt measures to regain national unity including adopting measures to combat discrimination and to protect linguistic rights, land rights, and cultural rights, paying particular attention to disabled persons and minorities.
However, the recommendation that has attracted the most public attention and has been the subject matter of significant debate is the recommendation that the government of Liberia must ensure that individuals responsible for serious crimes under international law are prosecuted. The recommendation calls on the government to consider both new and existing prosecution mechanisms to give effect to this obligation. This includes authorizing a special court, in consultation with civil society and the international community, to prosecute serious violations of law. Alternatively, or in addition, the government may consider pursuing international and regional mechanisms, as well as national courts in other jurisdictions, for prosecution. It further provides that the government of Liberia must ensure that any grants of amnesty do not benefit perpetrators of serious crimes under international law or prejudice victims’ right to reparation or right to the truth.
The report also names 98 perpetrators – some of the most powerful and influential people in the country – who the TRC finds responsible for various kinds of gross human rights violations and war crimes. It recommends that these people be investigated and prosecuted. The Commission concluded that "(A)ll warring factions are responsible for the commission of gross human rights violations in Liberia," and therefore recommended for prosecution the heads of eight warring factions during both civil wars.
21 people should be investigated and prosecuted for economic crimes including 19 corporations, institutions, and state actors. 52 people are recommended for public sanction and being barred from holding public office again. Amongst them was former President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf who was banned for 30 years. 54 other individuals and entities are recommended for further investigation. The recommendation banning political leaders from politics was challenged in the Supreme Court and was declared unconstitutional as they were denied their right to due process.
There have been ongoing efforts in Liberia to push for prosecution of the individuals named in the TRC report. At the Colloquium in Gbarnga, the President of the Liberia National Bar Association (LNBA), Tiawon S. Gongloe, announced that just a few weeks ago his association had drafted a legislation to set up a war crimes court in Liberia, after the LNBA unanimously declared its support for the creation of a War Crimes Court. To date, Liberia has not prosecuted a single person for atrocities committed during both civil conflicts.
However, Liberians have been prosecuted elsewhere. The Sierra Leone Special Court prosecuted and convicted its former president, Charles Taylor. His son, Chuckie Taylor, who was head of the dreaded Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), known to Liberians as the Demon Forces, was convicted in the USA of acts of torture, conspiracy to commit torture and possession of a firearm. He was sentenced to 97 years in prison. US courts have also convicted the former ULIMO leader, Mohammed Jabbateh aka Jungle Jabbah, and one of the co-founders and leader of Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), Jucontee Thomas Smith Woewiyu, for lying on their citizenship application and failing to disclose their role during the Liberian conflict.
Moses W. Thomas also faces a civil lawsuit in the US filed by four survivors of the Lutheran Church massacre who accuse him of allegedly ordering extrajudicial killings, torture, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Taylor’s ex-wife, Agnes Reeves Taylor has been indicted in the UK on several counts of torture. Former NPFL commander Martina Johnson is under arrest in Belgium for her role in overseeing “Operation Octopus”, one of the deadliest offensives in the conflict in Liberia; Awaliho Soumaworo aka Kunti Kamara in France for crimes against humanity and Alieu Koisah indicted in Switzerland for war crimes, including murder, rape, torture and conscription of child-soldiers.
Section 46 of the 2004 TRC Act states that “the Independent National Human Rights Commission (INCHR) shall be seized with the responsibility to ensure that all the recommendations contained in the Report of the TRC are implemented and that civil society organizations and moral guarantors of the CPA shall be seized of the responsibility to monitor, and campaign for the scrupulous implementation of all recommendations contained in the report.” However, since the completion of the work of the TRC in 2009, attempts to implement its recommendations have been stalled. The primary reason has been the lack of political will on the part of the government. In addition as FrontpageAfrica’s James Harding Giahyue noted “the Commission faced the culture of ‘let bygone be bygone’. Many Liberians saw that the TRC was digging out old wounds, counterproductive to the then just few years of peace, brokered only after years of bloodlust that saw an estimated 300,000 deaths.”
Internal wrangling and infighting between the Commissioners also seriously hampered the work of the Commission and the subsequent implementation of its recommendations. Chairman Jerome Verdier had an ugly public spat with Commissioner Sheikh Konneh and the two women commissioners, Massa Washington and Pearl Browne Bull had a struggle during a public hearing that led to a headline in the Analyst newspaper “Massa Knocks down the Mighty Bull.”
Even though the government has implemented some TRC recommendations it did not directly link them to the TRC report. The government has also neglected to keep the Liberian people informed of the steps that it had taken to implement the report. According to the TRC Act, the president must report to the Legislature on the implementation of the TRC's recommendations three months after the delivery of the report, and thereafter every three months. If the TRC's recommendations are not being followed, the president must show cause to the Legislature why this is not the case. Sadly, there has been little reporting to the legislature or anyone else on implementation.
Abdul Tejan-Cole was in his previous life a prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone and Deputy Director at the International Center for Transitional Justice.
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