Aegis Trust

In 2008, many Sierra Leonean villagers journeyed to The Netherlands to tell their stories in the trial of Charles Taylor. One of them, Sia Komba, spoke of how she watched as rebel forces killed her family and then compelled her to carry a bag containing the heads of her children. Another, Patrick Sherriff, witnessed the terror inflicted on his brother whose 10 fingers were cut off with a knife before he was murdered.

No live streaming of these testimonies on worldwide news networks, and the journey from a West African village to a court room in The Hague no doubt tough; devastating for some.

For those not engaged in the process, war crimes trials can appear to be interminable. Hours of evidence, legal argument, dry written filings. Same lawyers, same judges, same courtroom. It’s a long, hard grind. No wonder that people switch off.
Evidence in the Taylor trial began in January 2008 following his transfer from Freetown to The Hague in 2006. Taylor had been indicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2003, but was only arrested in 2006 – on the border with Nigeria as he fled after finding refuge there for three years. He is charged on 11 counts for offences including terrorism, murder, enslavement, rape and sexual slavery, and recruiting child soldiers. The Trial Chamber has heard evidence from 91 prosecution witnesses, over 12 months, including several experts, and over 30 insiders – former associates of Taylor or the rebel groups with whom he shared a criminal plan to take over Sierra Leone and its diamond fields. The Prosecution case was completed in January 2009. Taylor has testified in his own defence over 82 days, 55 of which were in answer to questions from his own counsel, British barrister Courtenay Griffiths QC. Former RUF leader Issa Sesay, convicted and sentenced by a separate trial chamber to 52 years in prison for crimes including terrorism, was testifying in Taylor’s defence when the court granted the Prosecution application to re-open their case to hear evidence from Naomi Campbell, Mia Farrow and Carole White. A rare spotlight was thrown on the work of the Special Court and on the conflict which tore Sierra Leone apart in the 1990s.

Naomi Campbell may – or may not – advance the Prosecution case against Taylor. Ms Campbell testified that she received in September 1997 a small pouch containing what looked like dirty-looking stones from men who knocked at her door in the middle of the night. She didn’t know who they were, she says. The Prosecution will no doubt seek to infer from this, and other evidence, that Taylor, in South Africa in September 1997, was in possession of uncut diamonds from Sierra Leone.

This was a conflict fuelled by greed and conducted through terror. Taylor’s case is about diamonds – uncut diamonds from the fields in the Kono and Kenema districts of Sierra Leone. According to witnesses who have testified for the Prosecution, in 1997 Taylor sent a special representative to visit the rebel leadership in Freetown, following a coup which brought them to power in May of that year. The representative – a notorious figure called Ibrahim Bah - negotiated a deal whereby Taylor was to orchestrate the supply of arms and ammunition to Sierra Leone in exchange for cash and diamonds. Bah left with diamonds supposedly extracted from the mining fields in Kono and Tongo, in Kenema district. In October 1997, an arms shipment arrived at Magburaka airport in Sierra Leone from Burkina Faso – it was the biggest of that year. The Prosecution case is that it was Taylor who arranged that shipment. He denies everything.

Taylor had travelled to South Africa en route from Liberia to Burkina Faso, the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and Libya. He was, at this time, President of Liberia. He had come to power after 8 years fighting in the bush at the head of a vicious rebel movement – the NPFL. Both the NPFL, and the RUF in Sierra Leone, survived as movements through the uses to which they put civilians – enslaving them, forcing their children to fight, pillaging food; and the RUF on uncut diamonds mined by civilians under armed guard, and in awful conditions.

It was the right decision to call Naomi Campbell. If the Prosecution proves that she received from Taylor diamonds from Sierra Leone, then her evidence offers useful corroboration of a case built over many months in 2008.

In the excitement over her unwilling arrival, it is perhaps easy for us – the public - to forget why these trials are important. That Ms Campbell’s evidence should generate more interest than the stories of Sia Komba and Patrick Sherriff is not altogether surprising, but it is they who define what these trials are about: this is a process of holding to account, and of bearing witness to their suffering, and of the many whose sorrowful, agonizing tales theirs represent.

By Melissa Pack and Alain Werner.   Both are Senior Counsel for the Aegis Trust, and former trial attorneys within the Prosecutor’s Office at the Special Court for Sierra Leone.