Obasanjo's
reservations on handing
Charles Taylor over
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
March 26, 2006
LONDON - "Charles Taylor came to
Nigeria on his own free will," President Olusegun
Obasanjo of Nigeria explained to me on the phone
yesterday. "He was not arrested and he has not been
detained". Thus what on Saturday - the imminent
deportation of Taylor to the newly democratic Liberia and
from there on to the UN-backed War Crimes Court in Sierra
Leone - had seemed very clear has become rather cloudy.
But whoever said arraigning war criminals - in this case
one who in his time as a rebel leader in Liberia and then
president was responsible for some of the worse and most
savage mass killings ever witnessed by mankind - was
easy?
In Yugoslavia, it took years before
Serbian politics shifted through enough gears that it was
able to send Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague for trial,
and even today Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the two
evil forces who decimated Bosnia are still on the run
despite the best efforts of Nato troops on the ground.
Besides, for many years the Western powers preferred the
bloodstained Milosevic to stay in power so that the
Dayton Agreement could be implemented, even though his
war crimes were common knowledge.
With Obasanjo and Taylor the
understandings are just as complex. The civil war in
Liberia- and the adjacent one in Sierra Leone- ended when
Obasanjo, after long personal negotiations, persuaded
Taylor that for his own good he should leave Liberia.
Obasanjo convinced him that the roof was falling in
around him, that if he stayed he would be killed, and
that in Nigeria he could live out his years in peace and
comfort.
At the same time as he flew Taylor
out in his personal jet Obasanjo arranged for ECOWAS to
deploy Nigerian and Ghanaian peacekeeping troops. Backed
up by U.S. troops, mainly offshore but some on the
ground, Liberia finally escaped its two decades of
bloodbath and set out on the road that led to last year's
elections and the election of Africa's first woman
president, the feisty and experienced Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf. When I talked to her just before the
election it was clear that she wasn't going to shy away
from biting the Taylor bullet, despite the residue of
support that still exists for him inside Liberia, and
recently she formally asked the Nigerian authorities to
hand him over.
But Obansanjo is caught on a
dilemna of his own making. He didn't arrest Taylor. As he
says, he gave him his word that he could live unmolested
in exile in Nigeria. He told me at the time this was the
only way that Taylor could be removed without further
massive bloodshed and the world community applauded the
deal. "Yes, I keep one man alive", he said, "But how many
thousands of lives did I save?"
In yesterday's phone conversation
Obasanjo told me that he had consulted with his
colleagues at the African Union and ECOWAS and everyone
agrees with him that Taylor should go to trial. The only
doubts were on the timing. Was there sufficient peace in
Liberia for this to go forward without destabilizing the
country once again? "I told them that is for Ellen's
judgment not ours. I have no choice but to agree with
her."
But Obasanjo is still obviously
troubled that he gave Taylor his word. Obasanjo became a
born again Christian when he spent two difficult years in
prison at the time of the military dictatorship of Sani
Abacha. Since then he has given up alcohol, multiple
wives, fornication and all the other "sins" of his
pre-Christian days. He has become an African Jimmy Carter
who prays every day, fasts during Lent and wrestles with
his conscience.
So when I asked Obasanjo if Taylor
might run away, he answered, "He is a free man". When I
remonstrated with him he got testy and in the end put the
phone down on me.
I understand the value of giving
one's word and living by it. Yet as Christ said, "Render
unto Caesar what is Caesar's". Christ lived in a
law-abiding society where both Jewish and Roman law
governed much of everyday life. Although Christ
introduced a set of principals that demanded much of his
followers, he never sought to abolish the law only to
complete it.
We now have the Rome Treaty of 1998
and the creation of the International Criminal Court. War
crimes are not only outlawed they are punishable. Nigeria
has ratified this treaty. Its head of state has no
alternative but to honor the demands of it and its sister
court in Sierre Leone. He has to arrest Taylor and hand
him over.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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