Posts Tagged ‘The Hague’

Chucky T is 369; NOW WHAT Ya Cannibal ?

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

This is a waste of a good vest. he doesn’t need it. remember he said he could bounce bullets. This for those of you who have forgotten – This is the punk formerly known as Chucky T.

this hizz-ooh used to run shit into the ground in Liberia. he single-handedly started the wars that caused the rush on Blood Diamonds.. Yeah That Biaaaa-otch, with the emphasis on Biatch.

Inside Story-Charles Taylor – 03 June 07 – Part 1

If we had it our way, we’d be stewin his head right now and feedin phiranahs all over the amazon. he is too nasty to be fed back to the earth. because surely he would be toxic to anything he touches for at least a million years.

Inside Story-Charles Taylor – 03 June 07 – Part 2

this is the one person in the world; that if allowed, I would personally trade places with the guards for just 5 minutes, to let him have all my pent up sexual rage. I would fuck him up, let alone Kill His Remains.

I would send his DNA Back to L. Ron Howard and John Travolta, because he is 1000% Certified DEMON. (nuff respect scientologist, y’all know how to deal with ya demons; which is why I’d send his ass back to y’all, cause I know ya lookin for his demonic ass.)

There is no one on this earth, I think I dislike more than Chucky T.
as far as I am concerned he is the Devils Poodle; and needs to be Pit Bull Fucked. this man doesn’t deserve a trial. shoot him now. use one bullet and make it from a 50′ caliber positioned exactly 13 feet east of his head. let him begin to run so it would resemble what he did to millions of west africans.

Victims remember Taylor’s brutal rule – 14 Jul 09

It’s Time for this Farce of a Trial to be over – deliver him to My House and I’ll call my friends. believe me, we can feed this lil Cannibal; – back to the masses. no fava beans required.

Charles Taylor to Speak at War Crimes Trial

THE HAGUE — For months, Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, has watched in silence as witnesses have passed through the courtroom, telling stories of mind-boggling violence, even cannibalism. His face remained blank, eyes hidden behind tinted glasses, as women spoke of rape and villagers told how their hands or their arms had been severed with axes.

Only when longtime allies appeared has Mr. Taylor seemed agitated, passing messages to his defense team, demanding to challenge the accounts.

On Tuesday, Mr. Taylor, the first African leader to be tried for war crimes, will break his silence as he takes the stand to defend himself. His lawyers say that his testimony may go on for weeks, given the wide range of the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The prosecution, which has rested its case, has charged that he armed and commanded rebel groups to bolster his influence in West Africa and to seize a swath of neighboring Sierra Leone, in particular its diamond-mining areas.

His indictment holds him accountable for the rebels’ barbaric methods as they pillaged, killed, raped, used drug-crazed children as soldiers and hacked off limbs, ears or noses to subdue civilians.

Opening the defense case on Monday, Courtenay Griffiths, the lead lawyer, said that Mr. Taylor was not “an African Napoleon” bent on taking over a region, but a broker of peace who would exonerate himself when he gave his account.

As many as 200,000 people died in the decade of fighting, and Mr. Taylor’s war strategies are said to have affected many more in Liberia, his home country, but only crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002 are within the mandate of the court.

For Mr. Taylor’s trial, the international judges of the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone are sitting in The Hague to avoid potential unrest in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, where the court is based. The prosecution has brought 91 witnesses, many of whom made a 7,000-mile round trip to The Netherlands.

“We didn’t have documents and orders signed by Taylor, so we needed much circumstantial evidence,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the court’s chief prosecutor. “But key players close to Taylor have testified and painted the complex picture. Taylor was in another country, it was not his country’s army, he was not at the scene of the crimes. But we have direct evidence of his orders and communications.”

Mr. Rapp said that about a dozen “insiders” — witnesses once close to Mr. Taylor, whose testimony had been crucial — had been moved to other countries and given new identities. Several important witnesses had declined to testify because they had been threatened, he said.

The horrors of the Sierra Leone war have frequently perturbed the solemn setting of The Hague courtroom, with its officers in black robes with neatly starched white bibs and its crimson-robed judges high on the dais. At times, witnesses on the stand gesticulated with amputated limbs, swaddled in bandages. Or take the small but awkward incident on the day when Mustapha Mansary, a villager, came to testify. Rebel gangs had hacked off both of his hands.

The defense lawyer began: “Mr. Witness, can I ask you, can you read and write English?” Mr. Mansary listened to the translation, and then he held up his two stumps. “I have no hands to write anything,” he said.

“I appreciate that; my apologies,” the lawyer said.

At other times, witnesses described scenes of incomprehensible cruelty.

A rape victim who testified under the name “064” described the day a gang of rebels mutilated and killed many adults and children in the village of Foendor, among them members of her family, including her two children. After nine children and the adults had been decapitated, Tamba Joe, the gang leader, ordered her to look for her people. Their severed heads were put in a sack.

“They gave me the heads to carry,” the woman said. “But at first I couldn’t.”

A man was told to help her carry the sack, dripping with blood. When they got to Tombudu, the next village, the rebels ordered all the heads thrown into a pond. The heads of her two children were among them, she said.

No one knows exactly how many people were killed or maimed in the civil war of the 1990s. Human rights groups have said that close to 4,000 amputees have not survived. Up to 3,500 amputees are believed to be still alive. Numerous former child soldiers are still in rehabilitation homes.

During the trial, the magnitude of the atrocities has not been in dispute. But the prosecution and the defense have described the case as legally complicated. The defense lawyer, Mr. Griffiths, said that the prosecution must prove Mr. Taylor’s effective control over the rebel groups and that demonstrating influence or assistance was insufficient. “The case is all about linking the crimes to Mr. Taylor, but the evidence has been riddled with inconsistencies,” Mr. Griffiths said.

Mr. Rapp, the chief prosecutor, insists that Mr. Taylor’s criminal responsibility has been more than demonstrated with the insider witnesses. These included radio operators, describing orders given from the secret communications center in Mr. Taylor’s mansion, and members of the president’s security force who said they witnessed the movement of arms and ammunition to the rebels and attended high-level strategy sessions.

One of the most dramatic accounts came from Joseph Marzah, a longtime associate of Mr. Taylor’s. He described himself as Mr. Taylor’s onetime chief of operations and head of a death squad, now an affluent businessman. He said that African peacekeepers were killed and eaten by Mr. Taylor’s militiamen and that weapons were easily smuggled. Four other witnesses also referred to the ritualistic eating of enemy flesh by Liberian combatants.

Mr. Marzah, known as Zigzag, spoke of the ease with which weapons were moved to Sierra Leone from Liberia during the Taylor government, despite an arms embargo. He said that Nigerian peacekeepers at the airport in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, were bribed and the weapons were transported in the peacekeepers’ vehicles.

He became angry as the defense lawyer repeatedly insisted that he had no close contact with Mr. Taylor. Stung, Mr. Marzah blurted out that he and Mr. Taylor belonged to the same secret society and had together eaten human hearts. With that he nervously crossed himself.

When the lawyer asked if he crossed himself because he had just lied under oath, Mr. Marzah said he had just broken the secrecy laws of his society.

Profile: Charles Taylor
July 14, 2009

By Al Jazeera, Doha, Qatar

Jul. 14–DOHA, Qatar — Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader, is considered by some in Africa to be a man of many faces.

To his supporters, he is a Baptist lay preacher who drifted into nationalist politics while studying economics in the US. To others, he is a rebel leader who later became president in Liberia’s first democratic elections.

But he is most likely to be remembered as the first former African head of state to face an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.

In 2003, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), an independent judicial body established with United Nations Security Council backing, issued a 17-count war crimes indictment against Taylor for his role in the 1996-2002 civil war which took place there.

The indictment charges that Taylor had used his power and influence in Liberia to support rebel groups who committed atrocities against civilian populations in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

The charges include knowingly supporting, directing and effectively commanding rebel factions, such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who committed “acts of terror, murder, sexual violence, including rape and sexual slavery, physical violence, including amputations, the conscription of child soldiers, enslavement and pillage”.

Prosecutors say that Taylor used the so-called “blood diamonds” trade in Sierra Leone to arm the rebel factions, destabilise its government and boost his regional influence.

The UN estimates that about 120,000 people were killed during the civil war.

Taylor has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery.

His defence team has argued that the case against their client is “political” and that the SCSL is “a political institution controlled by states opposed to Taylor’s policies”.

Rise to power

The US-educated Taylor entered the world of politics when he led a demonstration in front of the Liberian Mission to the UN in New York City and publicly debated William Tolbert, the then-president of Liberia, in 1979.

In 1980, Taylor returned to Monrovia, the Liberian capital, after a bloody coup d’etat led by Samuel K Doe, an indigenous army sergeant, deposed and killed Tolbert.

Doe appointed Taylor, who is of mixed indigenous and freed American slave (known as Americo-Liberian) heritage, to the post of director of the General Services Agency, a body which controlled much of the state budget.

But in 1983, Taylor fled Liberia for the US after being accused of embezzling nearly $1m of state funds. In 1984, he was arrested and jailed in the US, but while fighting an extradition order, he managed to escape with four other inmates.

Although they were later caught, he disappeared only to resurface in 1985 in the Ivory Coast, where he had begun to amass men, material and money to return and unseat Doe from power in Monrovia.

In late 1989, he slipped back into Liberia with a token force of 100 men, known then as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). His mixed heritage allowed him to appeal to both Americo and indigenous Liberians.

Taylor also made use of long-harboured animosity between Doe and neighbouring countries such as Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast, who supplied the rebel leader with arms and funding.

Targeting Monrovia

By July 2, 1990, Taylor’s 10,000-strong army surrounded Monrovia. As the conflict dragged on, the NPFL splintered into several breakaway groups which led to factional fighting and all-out civil war.

It was during this time that news of widespread slaughter and massacres against ethnic groups began to surface.

As the fighting intensified, Nigeria proposed the creation of an armed peace-keeping force, Ecomog, which despite several setbacks was able to broker a ceasefire that led to the country’s first democratic elections.

Taylor was elected president in free and fair elections, though he was accused of intimidating voters.

However, the country had already become fragmented. According to the UN, some 200,000 people had been killed and 800,000 been made refugees in nearly eight years of civil war.

Losing control

In 1999, war broke out again as opposition to his rule mounted and Taylor began to lose control of the country.

Things worsened for the embattled leader when Nigeria led the chorus of neighbouring states who accused Taylor of fomenting the civil war in Sierra Leone by selling weapons to rebel groups in exchange for diamonds smuggled out of the war-torn country.

In March 2003, the SCSL charged Taylor with crimes against humanity.

As he began to lose more control in Liberia, Taylor agreed to resign his post as president in exchange for the deployment of US peacekeepers in Monrovia.

He was then granted asylum in Nigeria. It would be another three years before he was handed over to the UN war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.

Although it is the first such international tribunal to be established in the same country where the crimes were committed, Taylor has been on trial at The Hague since June 2007 for fear that his presence in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, could destabilise the region.

His defence team is expected to open their case in The Hague on July 13, 2009.

Taylor will take the stand as the first witness for the defence.

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