Tales of brutality begin Taylor war crimes trial

The brutality of civil war in Sierra Leone was described by a survivor testifying at the international war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor in The Hague on Jan. 8. The courtroom in the Netherlands heard evidence from Alex Tamba Teh, a churchman from Sierra Leone. He told the trial of watching young men cut off the hands and feet of another teenager, hearing women being raped, and unloading weapons for rebels from a Liberian helicopter. Taylor, the 59-year-old former warlord turned head of state, has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including mass murder, the sexual enslavement of girls, mass rape, the recruitment of child armies, and the systematic amputation of limbs. He is also accused of fueling the civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone to profit from the country's million-pound diamond trade. Tamba Teh, 47, said he was part of a group of 250 civilians captured by rebels in April 1998 in the diamond-mining district of Kono. He was brought before a group of 30 rebel commanders and narrowly survived a vote against killing him, before being taken to a rebel camp where captured women were repeatedly raped and forced to forage for food. The men were separated from women and children, and taken to a shelter near a mosque. There, a rebel commander, known as Rocky, told the churchman to pray for his fellow captives. Rocky then shot them all with a machine gun and later told another commander called "Rambo" that he had killed 101 men. "After he had killed the civilians... he gave instructions that they be decapitated," said Tamba Teh. He went on to describe how a group of child soldiers known as a Small Boys Unit beheaded the corpses with machetes and cutlasses, although some were too small to lift the guns they were carrying. The churchman did not give evidence of any solid links between Taylor and the rebels he is accused of supporting, particularly the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF. Taylor, the first African president to be tried by an international court, sat calmly throughout the testimony, taking notes and sipping water. Taylor was president of Liberia for six years until 2003. He was indicted that same year and later arrested while attempting to flee Nigeria in 2006. Before coming to power in Liberia, he spent 14 years engaged in vicious conflict in his own country and then, as Liberian leader, supported the rebel army of the late Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone, allegedly supplying weapons to the insurgents in return for access to the country's lucrative diamond mines. The trial opened last June, with Taylor boycotting the court and refusing to acknowledge the tribunal's legitimacy, triggering a six-month adjournment. It is being held in The Hague because of fear that it could destabilize Liberia.