For almost 2 months former RUF leader Issa Sesay has been testifying for the defense at Charles Taylor’s trial, but you could be forgiven for not knowing this. (Google news hits for “Issa Sesay AND Charles Taylor”: 18. Google news hits for “Naomi Campbell AND Charles Taylor”: 1,832.) Sesay, convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is serving 52 years in a Rwandan prison.

At first, it seems odd that Sesay would testify for Taylor. One prosecution witness alleged that Taylor ordered Sesay killed in 2008. The prosecution says Sesay is testifying because Sesay thinks Taylor might be able to help him get out of prison if acquitted. Given the extraordinary spiritual and political power West Africans attribute to Taylor, I bet this is true. I also imagine Sesay’s family in Sierra Leone might benefit, somehow, through Taylor’s associates, in exchange for his supportive testimony. But that’s just a guess. Lapsing into a Taylor-esque habit of referring to himself in the third person, Sesay said his motivation for testifying was that: “I heard my colleagues saying a lot about Issa, things that Issa didn’t do.”

Highlights from Sesay’s testimony:

• Despite testifying for the defense, Sesay’s account of how former-former RUF leader Foday Sankoh and Taylor met differs from Taylor’s account. Taylor said he met Sankoh only after he realized he would need to collaborate with the RUF to fend off domestic attacks from Sierra Leone government-supported ULIMO. Sesay said Sankoh told him that he met Taylor when they were both training in Libya. This testimony is good for the prosecution, which wants to show that Taylor and Sankoh had a relationship before the RUF invasion of Sierra Leone.
• Prosecution witnesses had testified that Taylor told Sesay that if Sesay released UN peacekeepers Taylor would help the RUF overthrow the Sierra Leonean government. Sesay agreed that he was under pressure from Taylor to release the peacekeepers, but denied there was a quid pro quo.
• Sesay testified that his meetings with Taylor never involved exchanging diamonds for weapons, as the prosecution alleges, but rather involved discussions about how to bring peace to the region. This supports the defense portrait of Taylor as a regional peacemaker.
• So how did the RUF pay for weapons, if not buy trading in diamonds? Sesay said, among other things, that the RUF sold produce harvested from civilian farms.
• Sesay’s account of how he became leader of the RUF countered the notion that Taylor had command control of the RUF.  Sesay said that when West Africa leaders decided Sesay should lead the RUF after Sankoh was imprisoned, Taylor suggested that Sankoh be consulted on this.
• Sesay admitted that the RUF committed many of the crimes Taylor is accused of committing through joint criminal enterprise (eg rape, murder) but denied that Taylor told the RUF to do these things. This is in line with previous defense arguments.

All of this is from The Trial of Charles Taylor blog.

The Analyst quotes the principal of a Pentecostal high school with this priceless reaction:

“If the Congress for Democratic Change…can justify George Weah’s butt naked video on the international information highway on some constitutional right, then Liberians’ must be prepared, God forbade, under a CDC rule, to give audience to the legality and normalness of murder and even cannibalism.”

And here’s a reaction from a Liberian businessman:

“Should Liberians rest assured that under a CDC political leadership, Liberians will be free to perform in nudity as Weah as done in the video and the likes of [Weah's spokesman] will be providing advocacy and encouragement for the society to endorse such practices?”

Well, it is a day I had long predicted would never occur, but I have never been happier to be wrong. A Thai appeals court today ruled the Russian weapons merchant Viktor Bout could be extradited to stand trial in the United States.

That’s from one of my favorite blogs, douglasfarah.com.  Farah’s post from yesterday has a concise overview of the Bout case, but if you want to read an excellent description of last year’s Russian/Thai/American legal maneuverings, check out this Farah post from September 2009.

And if you find all of this arms dealing stuff a bit depressing, check out www.victorbout.com, Bout’s personal (though sadly not-recently-updated) website for a good laugh.

It’s September 1997.  Charles Taylor, who has been known as a violent warlord for the past few years, has just been chosen president of Liberia in a technically free and fair election.  He’s invited to a charity event hosted by Nelson Mandela.  Some say Taylor was not supposed to stay on for the dinner, but he did.  Some say Mandela’s soon-to-be wife was uncomfortable with his presence.  But he was invited, nonetheless.  The Times article says:

So, in a way, the presence of Ms. Campbell, Ms. Farrow and Ms. White was not a distraction at the trial, as Mr. Taylor’s defense team sough to suggest.  Rather, their recall of events illuminated the ambiguities of the continent’s diplomacy.

Hmm.  Maybe.

This second quote, as a friend points out, is a bit hypocritical.  As the Times is part of “The Media” and has ignored the trial almost as much as any other large news outlet.

For all its importance, his trial had been relatively obscure until the testimony this month of Ms. Campbell, Ms. Farrow and Ms. Campbell’s former agent, Carole White.  It was an incongruous blend of diamonds, brutality and fame: People magazine meets “Heart of Darkness.”

A) Rape during armed conflict

B) The systematic exclusion of women from local government

C) A picture of Naomi Campbell’s bare back appearing in a Liberian newspaper

In the style of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, I will provide the answer with a quote:

Sando Johnson, a spokesman for the Taylor family, said the paper had “disgraced womanhood”.

“This is not about Charles Taylor, this is about the pride of Liberian women and our children, and I call on women to condemn it,” he said.

That’s from a Jonathan Paye-Layleh BBC article.

“Doyouhavepizzahere?” a European man says to a Timorese woman in a bakery. The woman looks confused. Her eyes dart around, she scrunches her forehead, and she looks back up at him. The European smirks with his friend at the fact that the woman didn’t understand him. “PIZZA?” he says.

My pet peeve when traveling is watching foreigners who don’t pay attention to detail and “move” too quickly when interacting with local people. Some examples: speaking fast and not adjusting your English when conversing with a taxi driver. Not looking for and waiting for acknowledgement that the person you’re speaking with understands what you said. Inaccurately finishing the thought of a local person because you think you know what they are trying to say.

I’ve come to the conclusion that simply listening carefully, speaking slowly, and smiling make a huge difference in the degree to which local people feel respected.  This might not sound like a crazy idea, but I am consistently shocked at how badly so many foreigners treat local people in developing countries.

“If she had said, ‘I don’t have any legal obligation to come and I’m not coming,’ I think that’s the last we would have heard of this,” says William Schabas, a professor of human-rights law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a leading authority on international criminal law.

[...]

So it’s fairly clear that if Ms. Campbell were filming a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial in Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital, and the judges ordered her to be brought to the Freetown courtroom, the local authorities would have to drag her in, says Prof. Schabas.

[...]

The U.N. and Sierra Leone alone established the court, he points out. The court has rules that include contempt proceedings, but there’s no clear reason why countries not party to the agreement are bound by those rules.

A U.N. Security Council resolution is cited by prosecutors in their motion for a subpoena, but the resolution’s language is pretty soft. It merely “encourages” countries to make witnesses “promptly” available.

[Campbell's appearance] brought droves of journalists to a trial that rarely draws any observers [...]

The only marginally newsworthy part of Naomi Campbell’s testimony was that she claimed she didn’t know who the diamonds she received were from. This seems to me comically implausible.   From The Trial of Charles Taylor blog:

Ms. Campbell said that she did not know the men [who brought her the diamonds], they did not introduce themselves to her, and they did not say who they were.

“I was not sure who they were. When they gave me the pouch, I just put it next to my bed, and I went back to bed,” Ms. Campbell said.

When asked why she did not ask the men who had sent them to deliver the gift, Ms. Campbell said, “I was sleeping, I had travelled for many hours, and I was exhausted.”

This is embarrassing for the prosecution, who jumped through hoops to get the Court to issue a subpoena to compel Campbell to testify. Mia Farrow and Carole White will testify (voluntarily) on Monday, and likely will provide testimony that Campbell knew the diamonds were from Taylor.