My friend and former co-worker Barward Johnson has an interesting quote in a recent South Africa Times article by Rowan Philp about Charles Taylor’s trial:

Johnson said other than a billboard in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, reading “Charles Taylor is Innocent”, being defaced three times recently, public interest [in Taylors trial] in the country was “only moderate”.

Barward works for Liberia Democracy Watch, a great democracy-promotion NGO. Barward is at The Hague with three other Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil society leaders to observe Taylor’s trial proceedings. Philp talks about the odd mix of people watching the trial–few West Africans are there, but one day a visiting school group from Florida attended. Random fact I just learned from the article: Taylor has never stepped foot on Sierra Leone soil. Crazy.