But it just seems like such a mystery to me.  Taylor was president for about six years.  He’s now on trial, but Liberians and Sierra Leoneans don’t seem to care.  If George W. Bush was on trial, Americans would be following it everyday.

The always-impressive Alpha Sesay, a Sierra Leonean lawyer who writes the Taylor trial summaries for The Trial of Charles Taylor blog, has posted a lengthy article on the need for more Special Court for Sierra Leone outreach.

Sesay finds that, “Sierra Leoneans say they are losing interest in the Charles Taylor trial because it is taking too long and they are not getting enough information about the [case].”  He thinks there should be, “[i]ncreased funding by donor states for outreach… at the Special Court now more than ever – as is continued evidence of the innovation and resourcefulness that has always marked the Special Court’s outreach efforts since its early days.”

The article is fantastic, but I’m not sure I’m convinced by his recommendations.  I’ve come to think that apathy toward the Special Court is not a technical problem.   And thus I don’t think it can be solved with technical solutions–e.g. more and better outreach.

But I say this with some trepidation.  The trial is creating a narrative of the conflict in Sierra Leone and Liberia.  Of course the narrative is not perfect, but if there was more interest in the daily testimony it could serve as a platform for more open debate about guilt and power.  I don’t understand why the TRC processes in both countries garnered so much more public interest.

Sesay’s piece explores some possible explanations of apathy toward the trial.  Below are a few excerpts.

• “A Sierra Leonean court monitor…explained that ‘…too many legal issues [are] coming up that people cannot really pay attention to[.]‘”
• A Sierra Leonean university student said: “the process has taken too long. When Charles Taylor started his testimony, we all found it very fascinating but for one witness to testify for several months, it becomes boring and affects people’s interests in following the process.”
• “A local taxi driver, asked about his impressions of the trial, said in Sierra Leone’s local language Krio ‘bra, we don tire sef, anytin den wan do now, mek den do am, once we cam dreg na morning en get wetin for eat, we nor care again.’ Translated, he said ‘Boss, we are now tired, let them do anything that they want to do, as long as we can get up in the morning and come find something to eat, we do not care anymore.’”

GREG PALAST: [...] [Eric] Hermann [the owner of vulture fund FH International] refused several requests to be interviewed, so we went to his office to ask why he sued war-torn Liberia. But his office seemed to have vanished.

BUILDING PERSONNEL: Are they not there? They were there the other day. I’m sorry.

GREG PALAST: The nameplate’s gone. There’s someone in there. Hello?

BUILDING SECURITY MANAGER: Hi. Can I help you guys?

GREG PALAST: Yeah, hi. Greg Palast, BBC Television. Montreux Capital, it’s Mr. Hermann’s firm?

BUILDING SECURITY MANAGER: Guys.

GREG PALAST: Yes?

BUILDING SECURITY MANAGER: They don’t want to be interviewed. They don’t want to be seen. So we’re going to have to ask to you to leave the building.

GREG PALAST: OK, and do you know why they took the sign off their door?

BUILDING SECURITY MANAGER: I have no clue.

Something happened in Lofa County, Liberia last week.  I don’t completely get what, but I think the confusion is important.  Below is a “least-common denominator” overview of what I think happened, and then some quick comments about the confusion.

What probably happened

On Friday a woman was killed in Konia, a town in Lofa.  I don’t know why.  The woman was either 14 or 21.  I think she was Loma and Christian, and I think her body was found near a mosque. The killing sparked revenge attacks between two ethnic groups in the region: Mandingo and Loma (aka Lorma).   Attackers targeted people (including local political elite), mosques, and churches.  UNMIL restored order (or, perhaps more likely, they showed up after things had settled down).  Some are accusing UNMIL of siding with Mandingos (who are usually Muslim), as the UN peacekeepers in Lofa are mostly Pakistani.  4 people were killed and probably more than 14 wounded as a result of the clashes, mostly in Voinjama, the capital of Lofa.  Simultaneously, taking advantage of the tension, maybe 60 people escaped from the Voinjama prison.  Hundreds of people fled from Konia and Voinjama.  (As Johnny explains, both towns were hit hard by Liberia’s war.)

The confusion

First, I can’t figure out the exact name of the town.  It is alternatively spelled Konia, Kornia, and Konica.  (Sometimes different spellings within the same article.)  Also, based on 15 minutes of Google-ing, I can’t find the town on any map.   As best I can tell it is on the main road in Lofa, about 55 miles in some direction from Voinjama. [Update: It's between Zorzor and Voinjama.  Thanks Viktor.]

These points of confusion are not insignificant, but more important is whether or not the fighting should be characterized as religious.  Land disputes between Loma and Mandingos in Lofa have been a big issue since the war ended.   Mandingo laid claim to land Loma had fled from during the war.  When the war ended, and Loma returned, land disputes arose.  (Similar dynamics have taken place across the country.  Sometimes these disputes have become violent.)  Mandingo tend to be Muslim, and Loma tend not to be Muslim.  Does this make the conflict religious?  Calling the revenge attacks religious, as VOA first did (h/t to Jina)  seems akin to a guy who happens to work at a supermarket mugging a guy who happens to be a banker, and then saying that clashes have broken out between supermarket workers and bankers.

This misrepresentation cannot just be attributed to VOA not understanding the historical context.  I saw a wire report (not the one shown above) co-written by two people, including one Liberian, that also characterized the clashes as religious.  The issue seems to be more about journalists trying to frame the story in a way that fits into people’s ideas about fighting in Africa.

A related point: Was the violence planned?   Did the murder of the Konia woman provide an excuse for people to  carry out attacks based on personal, unrelated, grievances?  These are also important questions raised by Lofa County senator Sumo Kupee.   “This thing, to me, was planned by some counterproductive individuals, who were only looking for a space to carry out such action,” Kupee said.  On a similar note, I would like to know how the clashes spread from Konia to Voinjama.

Something happens in Liberia.  Even days later, the international and local reports are confusing and riddled with inaccuracies.  This story line is not new, nor, I would imagine, isolated to Liberia.  But the consequences are always important.  Inaccurate stereotypes–in this case religious antagonism–get reinforced.

(Please let me know if I made any factual errors in this post.)

One slide from a PowerPoint presentation that would have encouraged Guinean soldiers to respect human rights.

Sometimes I think I should create a tag called “truth is stranger than fiction.”

David Crane and Alan White, two lawyers who indicted Charles Taylor in 2003, consulted for Moussa Dadis Camara’s short-lived junta in Guinea, and offered to advise Camara’s military on the rules of armed conflict.   Part of their proposal to advise the military included a PowerPoint slideshow, which you can see on Foreign Policy’s website.

Slides are along the lines of:

Members of the armed forces of Guinea treat everyone they find humanely and with respect.  Civilians!  Medical Personnel!  Prisoners!

(The official language of Guinea is French.  Why did Crane and White put together a slideshow in English?)

The proposal fell through after Camara was shot.  One might be inclined to laud this interesting attempt at promoting respect for human rights among a military junta no one was sure how to deal with.  But it is hard to forgive the internal assessment they wrote for Camara on the September 2009 soccer stadium massacre (first reported in Africa Confidential).   The report found the scale of violence to be significantly lower than human rights groups found, and downplayed the role of Guinea’s leadership.  Foreign Policy quotes an “international human rights researcher who investigated the massacre” saying:

“The CW [Crane and White's company] report is a dishonest and misleading report, and it is shameful that persons formerly associated with the Sierra Leone Special Tribunal authored it…It is absolutely clear that they ignored evidence that was widely available to them, both in terms of the scale of the atrocities and the responsibility for the massacre. Their motives in writing a white-wash report for the Guinean authorities have to be questioned.”

What were Crane and White thinking?  Were they trying to cozy up to the junta with an ultimate goal of transforming the regime?  Or were they just in this for the money?

As always, I welcome any feedback.

With No Elections, Young Ivorians Lose

Djibril’s electronics store feels too big for its wares.  Desktop computers and fax machines are spread across shelves, with large spaces between items.  “You can go one or two weeks without selling anything,” Djibril said.  So he doesn’t keep much in stock.  “For people, the priority is to get food, not buying a USB key.”

Djibril’s store is on Rue du Commerce, one of the busiest streets in downtown Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast, in West Africa.  But business has not been good.

Ivory Coast is in a political limbo.  Elections have been delayed six times since 2005, when the country’s civil war abated.

A diverse array of political and economic elite benefit from the political status quo.  But the losers are ordinary young Ivorians like Djibril, who struggle to expand their businesses or find jobs, held hostage by an economy stalled until elections take place.

More than 40 percent of Ivorians are younger than 15.  Unless the political situation changes, the ranks of un- and under-employed will swell.

The Winners

President Laurent Gbagbo benefits with each election delay.  Ivory Coast is the world’s largest cocoa exporter, and Gbagbo controls revenue from cocoa harvested in the country’s south.

If elections were held today, Gbagbo might not win.  Since he was elected in 2000, the number of registered voters has increased dramatically.  Many of the new voters live in the north, where he lacks strong support.  Thus Gbagbo has a “vested interest in delaying the elections as much as possible,” according to a recent International Crisis Group report.

But nor is there a guaranteed victory for either of the main opposition candidates, Alassane Ouattara and Henri Konan Bédié.  Ouattara is popular in the north, but lacks national appeal.  Opponents claim he is not Ivorian, and his frequent trips to France work against him, as anti-French sentiment in Ivory Coast is high.  Bédié leads the party that ran Ivory Coast for the four decades after independence.  His base is among the Akan, the country’s largest ethnic group.  Yet Bédié is 75 years old, and his nostalgia for the good old days rings hollow among youth.

Moreover, in the event of a run-off, it is unclear that Bédié supporters would vote for Ouattara, or vice versa.  Both opposition parties control a handful of positions in the current transitional government.  They may calculate that it is better to control some ministries than risk losing everything with elections.

The New Forces, a rebel group controlling the north of the country, pockets money every day that passes without elections.  Credible elections will bring the north back under control of the government, starving rebels of cocoa, coffee, and diamond profits.  Global Witness, an environmental watchdog group, estimates the New Forces have earned $30 million each year since 2004 from cocoa alone.

The Losers

The losers of this transitional arrangement are ordinary young Ivorians.  Foreign investors are reluctant to put money into the country until elections take place.  As a result, jobs for young Ivorians—even for the most educated—are scarce.

Koffi Kouadio Constant is 26 and works at a photography studio in Abidjan.  Many of his friends cannot find jobs.  He attributes this in part to reluctance among entrepreneurs to invest and consumers to spend.  People “don’t want to spend money in this situation,” he said. “We are not in peace, we are not in war.”

Young Ivorians in the north also struggle.  The de facto rebel government invests little money in public education.  With their cocoa profits, they have no need for taxes from civilians, and thus limited desire to provide public services.

Foreign Pressure

France, the United Nations, and America have all exerted pressure on Ivory Coast to hold elections, to no avail.  France has troops in the country supporting UN peacekeepers, but wants to normalize relations with Ivory Coast and pull them out.

“They cannot dance faster than the music,” said an Ivorian journalist, referring to the seeming impotence of foreign powers.  There is only so much effect the international community can have when the political stakes are so high.

But, the journalist notes, if elections would reignite conflict, then the country is not losing by waiting.  Ivory Coast’s war was rooted in land tensions, unequal distribution of state resources, and the manipulation of ethnicity for political ends.  To a large extent, these problems remain unresolved.

Djibril, the electronics store owner, motions to the sparsely populated shelves in his store.  He is optimistic.  “There will be more things on the shelves after the elections” he said.  “After the elections, things will be better.  People are waiting.”

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Taylor’s direct examination lasted 13 weeks.  Based on people I’ve spoken with, this is an extraordinarily long time for a defendant to offer uninterrupted testimony.

With few exceptions, the trial chamber judges let the defense do whatever it wanted to.  (This laissez-faire attitude is consistent with Tim Kelsall’s assessment of the behavior of the Civil Defense Force (CDF) trial judges, and previous Berkeley reports on the judges’ behavior at the Taylor trial.)  The judges did not try to cut down the length of Taylor’s testimony, nor did they attempt to limit the scope of Taylor’s testimony.  By the end of his testimony, Taylor had told his version of his life story. The judges were, “very lenient in allowing Taylor to stray off-topic during long and tangential answers to direct questions,” according to the Berkeley report.

At the start of Taylor’s testimony the prosecution raised a variety of objections, but the judges consistently overruled them.  The prosecution quickly learned to keep its mouth shut, and stayed mostly quiet for the rest of Taylor’s testimony.  The prosecution’s most frequent objections related to the defense mischaracterizing the nature of prosecution witness testimony.  The Berkeley report calls the repeated overruling of objections part of the judges’  ”standard passive approach to courtroom management.”

So what were the defense’s main arguments and strategies?

• Taylor said his interactions with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had two purposes:  1) To enlist their support in protecting the Liberia/Sierra Leone border from a United Liberation Movement of Liberia (ULIMO) incursion, and 2) to engage in diplomatic negotiations as part of his efforts to bring peace to the region.
• Taylor’s lawyer attempted to politicize Taylor’s indictment, saying the US wanted to get back at a man they didn’t like.
• The prosecution had argued that peace in Sierra Leone was not in Taylor’s interest, as he profited from his dealings with the RUF.  Taylor countered this by saying that peace in Sierra Leone would have brought development aid to Liberia, thus peace was in his interest.  The Berkeley report says this claim will be hard for the prosecution to refute, as the judges allowed the defense to present official documents showing Taylor’s role in peace negotiations.  It will be hard to find official documents that show otherwise.
• Taylor frequently blamed the international community for trying to thwart his peacemaking efforts.
• Taylor did not deny many arms purchases, but argued they were used to defend the country from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).
• The Berkeley report points out an important inconsistency in Taylor’s testimony.  At one point he said he did not have sufficient ammunition for his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) troops in 1991/1992.  Later he said he had sufficient ammunition, and could have gotten more had he wanted it.  For the implications of this inconsistency, check out the report (4.f.ii).

Taylor was remarkably enthusiastic for the duration of his direct examination.  He lost his temper only occasionally when asked to discuss prosecution witness testimony that he found erroneous.   The Berkeley report offers this gem:

Taylor addressed the Court several times out of fear that his appearance would bias the Court in their judgment.  For example, Taylor told the Court that although he may often be smiling, “[t]hese smiles are not funny smiles to say Mr. Taylor is not taking it seriously.”

Though perhaps not that important, the Berkeley report noted something I found fascinating:

Taylor could easily provide the Court with information regarding events that occurred many years ago, such as the specific day, month, or year in which the event took place.

This stands in utter contrast to Tim Kelsall’s description of Sierra Leoneanand Liberian witness testimony at the CDF trials.  Kelsall describes how temporal markers were excruciatingly difficult to get from witnesses, partly because of a culture of secrecy, and partly because of different conceptions of time.  This highlights how Western the Liberian political elite have been.

Boley, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Akron, received his undergraduate degree at SUNY Brockport, and he kept his family in upstate New York for the duration of the civil war. I’ve been speaking to him on and off now for a year, and his excuse-making had become increasingly ridiculous. The last time we spoke, he told me that there had been two organizations in Liberia during the civil war named the Liberian Peace Council: His, which was peaceful, and someone else’s, which was a fighting faction.

• For the Charles Taylor trial, “The Prosecution expects to conclude their cross-examination late this week or early next week, and the Defence will likely re-examine Mr. Taylor prior to calling their next witness.”  The trial schedule is being altered this month and next month, ”due to the necessity of sharing the courtroom with the ICC’s Lubanga trial…”
• “[T]he Special Court completed the relocation of its offices in The Hague to the premises of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon…The move will result in significant cost savings for the Court.”  Taylor’s trial will continue to be held in the ICC building.  (My understanding is that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is in Leidschendam, The Netherlands.)

First of all, I want to make it clear that while I have done work with Vice, I do not work for Vice, and differ with them on a lot of issues. They hired me to assist with a project that originally had a lot of positive elements to it, and looked at the complex situation in Liberia. And because they are not afraid to go places that other media outlets are (seemingly) not willing, and talk about important issues in a manner other media cannot (which they have done to great success with past projects), it seemed like a good fit.

…I direct you to the Gettin’ By [series], and any of the blog entries found with that tag, if you doubt that. Or any article I have ever written about Liberia. The whole purpose of my work as a journalist here is to show that many people face great hardship, that real people in Liberia work exceptionally hard to make ends meet, for them and their families, and that Liberia is moving in a positive direction.

…As many people have pointed out, the overall portrait of Liberia they purport as fact is misleading. They touch on some very important ideas facing Liberia, but don’t properly contextualize them.

…My role as a fixer/field producer was to direct Vice to a wide range of stories. What I gave them was a 10-page document of story ideas, both positive and negative. Looking at the challenges of life in West Point, life in some of the remaining squats, and talking to ex-child soldiers and generals and the struggles they were facing, but also involving tons of other positive elements, like music, nightlife, soccer, religion, community leaders and some of the stories you find in my ‘Gettin’ By’ series about real people working exceptionally hard to make ends meet in an honest manner.