Today, prosecutors tried to introduce a document from actress, Mia Farrow, alleging that supermodel Naomi Campbell had informed her that Mr. Taylor had sent his men to give her a rough-cut diamond after they had all attended a dinner that was hosted by former South African President, Nelson Mandela.
That’s from a summary of today’s proceedings at Charles Taylor’s trial. Taylor denied the allegation, and soon after the trial chamber upheld a defense objection that the document could not be used in Taylor’s cross-examination because Taylor would have not chance to “cross-examine the alleged makers of the various statements that embodied the document.”
Shelby,
I would like your opinion on the performance or lack thereof of the prosecutors so far in this case. Do you still think that Charles Taylor will be found guilty ?
Hi Aki,
Apologies for taking so long to respond. Thanks for your interest in my opinion. I’m not going to guess whether or not Charles Taylor will be found guilty, but in the coming weeks I’m going to try to do a post analyzing Taylor’s cross-examination.
Best,
Shelby
Shelby,
It is time for the prosecution to throw in the towel.
Shelby, did you see that the US has arrested George Boley:
http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/george_boley_my_favorite_liber.php
Law,
Thanks for this info. I did not know this!
Law, I had not either. Thanks for sharing this link. I am going to blog about it later this week.
-Shelby
Law,
Give us some feedback on how you think the prosecution is doing in the Charles Taylor trial.
I think that the prosecution has a very difficult challenge in trying to decide how to deal with the large amount of direct testimony given by Mr Taylor. This has been compounded by the incredibly bizarre decision of the court regarding the admittance of new evidence to impeach Mr Taylor’s testimony (UC Berkeley did a good job of reviewing this).
My main observation though is that the purpose of the cross-exam is NOT to find a smoking gun, but merely to discredit Mt Taylor’s testimony.
Based on their initial case, the prosecution doesn’t need Mr Taylor to admit to anything — their case doesn’t hinge on that. But they will want to discredit him.
Therefore, this part of the trial (Mr Taylor’s testimony) is much more important to his defense than to the prosecution (who in fact didn’t call on Mr Taylor as part of their case).
So in terms of the case I think it is more important to assess how well Mr Taylor’s lawyers are doing in making their case. To that end, I think they should be worried because the prosecution is doing a good job of demonstrating a number of cases of inconsistencies in his testimony — that serve to undermine any credibility that was developed during his direct examination.
Indeed, Mr Taylor, for example, admitted to all the elements of the war crime of pillage as head of the NFPL (ie, stealing the natural resources of Liberia & allowing foreign companies to export them). Given that these crimes were committed in Liberia and not Sierra Leone, it doesn’t implicate him directly in the guilt of the indictments in the present case. But acknowledging in fact that he is a war criminal in Liberia won’t help make his case for his innocence in SL…
I believe that Mr Taylor would have probably been better off if he had not taken the stand at all, rather than be caught out lying to the judges.
Law thanks for the analysis. However when you say Mr. Taylor was stealing the natural rersources from the country. My question is who was he stealing it from ?There were two recognized governments one controlled by the Interim Government led by Amos Sawyer who only controlled Monrovia. The other government was the NPRAG which was controlled by Mr. Taylor. As Mr. Taylor rightly said in his cross examination. ” Can London impose sanctions on the rest of Great Britain?
The prosecution had neither the facts nor the law on their side in this case so they could only bang the table which they have done. However I must keep in mind that this is a political trial and for that reason you may get your wish of Mr. Taylor being found guilty.
In order to be a ‘government’ you have to be recognized. You can’t just ’set yourself up’. The international community was EXTRAORDINARILY careful to make it clear that the NPRAG was NOT recognized. Therefore, Mr Taylor was using his position in the conflict to allow the theft of Liberia’s natural resources — ie, the war crime of pillage.
The offence of the unlawful appropriation of public and private property in armed conflict has varyingly been termed ‘pillage’, ‘plunder’ and ‘spoliation’. Article 47 of The Hague Regulations and Article 33 of the Geneva Convention IV by their terms prohibit the act of ‘pillage’. The Nuremberg Charter and Control Council Law No. 10 make reference to the war crime of the ‘plunder of public and private property’.
Simply saying you’re president is insufficient; likewise, holding rebel territory is insufficient. You must be a recognized government.
The NPRAG violated both Liberian law and international law.
Mr Taylor saying he was president of the NPRAG just makes him vainglorious, not legitimate. And his spoliation of Liberia’s resources makes him a war criminal.
Actually, on reflection, President Taylor himself would be guilty of money laundering as well — even when he was the recognized President of Liberia.
The prosecution produced evidence of payments made by the Oriental Timber Corporation to Mr. Taylor’s personal bank account. The Liberian TRC report states that no timber operation, including the OTC operated within Liberian law — therefore, any proceeds from logging operations would be the proceeds of crime, and financial transactions would be money laundering — an offense that is indictable in the USA because the payment was made in US dollars…
It will be interesting to see what bank accounts the US authorities seize now that Mr Taylor’s son has been ordered to pay $22 million to the victims of his torture.
Law,
Firstly the pre elections NPRAG government of Mr. Charles Taylor was recognized by ECOWAS. Secondly the entire TRC report has been squashed by the Legislature. How ridiculous it is for the TRC to say that the democratically elected government (post 1997) was not legally entitled to export timber. In terms of money laundering if your case was to be brought forward then Firestone would also be accused because they exported rubber out of Liberia thru Charles Taylor controlled territories. Nowhere in the trial did the prosecution produce evidence that OTC deposited money into Charles Taylor’s personal bank account. There was some account at the LBDI in Monrovia that was a covert account. Anyway what Ms. Hollis forgot is this trial is not about Liberia. It is about Mr. Taylor’s involvement in Sierra Leone. As a reminder no evidence was produced of Mr. Taylor selling the mayonaise jar full of diamonds, no evidence of the billions of dollars no evidence of command responsibility. After the tens of millions of dollars spent on prosecuting this man I am sure you are disappointed that more evidence was not found.
Aki, the IGNU was the recognized government of Liberia, not the NPRAG. Thus, Taylor’s allowance of logging is considered a war crime.
Re: the TRC. in this case the TRC was merely reporting the results of the multistakeholder Forest Concession Review. While a democratically elected government may be entitled to export timber, the actors (including the logging companies and the president of LIberia himself) are legally obliged to obey the law — in the case of Liberian logging operations, the Forest Concession Review found that there was widespread violations of the law, so that no-one was operating within the law — hence all the logging was illegal under Liberian law.
In terms of money laundering, you are undoubtedly correct, Firestone operated outside the law and is probably also guilty of pillage, and supporting other war crimes.
The prosecutor did produce evidence of OTC (through its company Natura) depositing money in Taylor’s personal bank acct. Mr Taylor maintains it was a covert account — but it was still an personal account in his name. (Why would he make a covert account in his own name?) {Regarding the billions of dollars — the prosecutor made the point that this was the total amount of transactions, not the total amount of money in the account. The account was being used as a sweep account, and thus millions were lent to the bank overnight and returned in the morning, thus running up the total amount in transactions. Apparently the total amount in the US accounts was in the order of hundreds of millions in total money, not billions.]
You are correct that the trial is about Liberia, but as I mentioned, presumably the prosecutors don’t need any evidence from Mr Taylor, or they would have called him as a witness originally.
So in this stage of the trial, all they need to do is demonstrate his unreliability, and thus undermine the defense’s use of Mr Taylor as a witness.
I agree that more evidence was not found. But I think this is the reality of trying to prosecute a war lord. I’m actually amazed that you can find, for example, bank records for deposits by logging companies into Taylor’s personal bank accounts…
Law,
The bottom line is there is no smoking gun to convict. After the prosectution had spent tens of millions of dollars to build a case on what he did in Sierra Leone 90% of their evidence was on activites in Liberia. This is a big gamble on the prosectution’s part and based on recent rulings by the judges it is a gamble which may not pay off.
Aki, i think you misunderstand my two major points here:
my assertion is that the prosecution doesn’t need evidence from Charles Taylor himself to make their case — if they did, they would have called him as a witness.
My second point: their aim in the cross-examination was only to discredit him (impeach his testimony). And I believe that despite the judges’ rather bizarre rulings (bizarre in that they fly against normal court procedures — even the procedures of the Special Court itself) that seriously undermined the prosecutions ability to conduct their case; despite this, the prosecution achieved their goal: the demonstrated that Mr Taylor is a war criminal — by his own admission — and this will be what the prosecution can exploit in their summation at the end of the trial.
i hope my point is more clear now.
Law,
Your points are very clear there was no direct evidence so the only thing left was for the prosecution to try and discredit him. The only problem they have not done so in my opinion. Remember unlike the prosecution he has shown more documentary evidence to support his case such as him being appointed to the Committee of Five on Sierra Leone which role was to bring peace. As you know the prosecution can not call a witness to testify against himself so your argument of them calling him is moot. There is no question in most objective people’s mind that Taylor was a powerful witness. The prosecution thought that he was an African thug who would not be able to articulate his thoughts and they were wrong. Quite frankly if the prosecution could do it all over again they probably should have used Nick Koumijan as the lead prosecutor. He at times did score a few points but Ms. Hollis was a total bust.
” The prosecution thought that he was an African thug who would not be able to articulate his thoughts and they were wrong. ”
I am interested to know why you think this.
If that’s the case, then the prosecution doesn’t know Mr Taylor. He’s always been a charismatic fast-talker — which is why I think he insisted on taking the stand: he probably thought he could talk his way out — after all, he always has before.
But I think in the confines of the court room it isn’t so simple — the prosecution was successful in repeatedly demonstrating that Mr Taylor plays fast and loose with the truth — in the case of what he calls ‘diplomacy’. It is clear that Mr Taylor doesn’t believe in either the rule of law or in being an honest broker in negotiations. He repeatedly said that in diplomacy you must lie. He failed to understand the difference when ‘recognizing the NPRAG’ between recognizing existence versus recognizing legitimacy.
I confess I haven’t followed the trial on anything like a daily basis, but I would really like to know why you think that the prosecution considered Taylor to be an inarticulate thug.
Law,
They thought he was an inarticulate thug because that is how the West wanted him portrayed. Remember Time magazine had him captioned ” The big man in Africa” reminding us of the days of Idi Amin and Mobutu of Zaire. Then the following week they portrayed Liberian soccer star George Weah. ” The good man in Africa” prompting this middle school drop out to feel he could run to be president of Liberia. I agree Charles Taylor is an enigma wrapped up in a riddle. However before you send someone to jail for the rest of their lives accusations have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Given this high threshold do not be surprised if the Judges acquit. Not speaking about you but I think already the anti Charles Taylor people out there are already looking to blame the judges for the prosecution not having enough facts. It kind of reminds me of the O.J. Simpson murder trial where the public blamed the jurors for the poor performance of the prosecution.
Aki, thanks for your explanation, but I don’t think “the big man” refers to being inarticulate.
I think it refers to sentiments such as these:
“Africa has been failed by ruthless eccentric leaders with insatiable passion for self-gratification and with an orgy of self-enrichment.”
(http://wardheernews.com/Articles_09/May/Abdi_Gouled/24_Policy_challenges_for_Obama_in_Africa.html)
Which is why things like Taylor having a personal bank account in which timber payments were made in exchange for tax credit for the companies is so condemning of his rule.
But I do agree, that in the end, the prosecution doesn’t have to prove that Taylor stole from mama Liberia, it has to prove his role in the RUF — but they also don’t have to gain convictions for every one of the indictments… so it will be interesting to see how many they can prove to the judges satisfaction.
Law,
I agree with you on the last point. The success of the Special Court should not depend on the number of convictions it gets. I do think that those most responsible for the crimes in Sierra Leone have already been rightfully found guilty the RUF, AFRC and Kamajor leaders. It’s amazing that most Sierra leoneans including the Sierra leone judge felt that because the CDF or Kamajors fought to protect Freetown and other parts they somehow were not as guilty or shoudn’t have been prosecuted. In the case of Charles Taylor there just is not enough evidence. You place alot of emphasis on the timber industry in Liberia. I myself am against the uncontrolled logging which has gone on in Liberia since the 1980’s. However one must remember this is needed revenue which even the present government is anxious to get at. So far I have not heard any real efforts at reforestation with regards to the concessions the Ellen Sirleaf government has handed out.
The timber industry is no more important than any of the other industries — and there are plenty of others, like Pat Robertson & gold mining. I bring up the timber because Mr Taylor admitted all the elements of pillage of timber in his testimony & the TRC reported the results of the timber concession review (which seem to be more comprehensive than reviews in any other industries). It would be interesting to see the results of a similar review of the mining industry, for example.
And I agree that the current logging concessions must to repeat the mistakes of the past. But I haven’t heard accusations that the current industry is fueling conflict nor enriching government elites the way it did during the Taylor and Doe periods. So I think it is a fundamentally different issue (ie, it isn’t just about reforestation, for example).
The timber industry did not fuel any conflicts this is a falacy. Remember the biggest timber merchant of them all Gus Kouwenhoven who worked for Oriental Timber was found not guilty by a Dutch court of the charges of war crimes. What we need is accountabilty which the present government has tried to put in place. Unfortunately as can be seen by the latest resignation of AB Johnson the Internal Affairs Minister, Dr. Bropleh and several other ministers corruption has reared it’s ugly head in Ellen’s government . Although there is no excuse for stealing it is more surprising that her officials are being corrupt given the fact that unlike previous administrations these people are paid salaries comparable to what they were making working in the States. I hope she can over come these problems because just like Charle Taylor was the right person for the times in 1997 when he was elected. I believe she is the right person to be leading Liberia at this present time.