July 14
After a two week holiday from politics, I spent my last day in the Netherlands at the International Criminal Court, sitting in the visitors gallery at the Sierra Leone Special Court, convened on the outskirts of The Hague, in a gleaming, tall, new white building (surrounded by prison like wire), to try Charles Taylor for crimes against humanity. It is called the Sierra Leone Court because actually Taylor is being tried, not for what he did in and to Liberia, but for what he did collaterally in and to Sierra Leone. And in The Hague, because to try him in SL risks domestic destabilization. Why both of these things is the case, I don’t exactly know.
In both of my book groups this spring, coincidentally, I read books on the chaotic and deadly politics of Liberia in the 1980s and 1990s. For Human Rights Watch, we read the autobiography of Ellen Sirleaf Johnson. For my other group, we read Russell Banks’ the Darling, in which Taylor is a character – who the lead character, a woman renegade from Weatherman, helps spring from jail, near Boston, I believe in the 1980s. (The imprisonment and escape are true.) In that group we spent a lot of time googling Taylor because we wanted to find out if he was on trial, indeed whether he was alive. We learned that he had eluded capture for a while – with the help of what African country, I cannot remember – but was in The Hague awaiting trial. So when I realized that the trial was indeed on and here I was a brief train ride away – a woman tourist, a judge from the US, told me this in a casual conversation about a week and a half ago – I thought I really had to go. If only to tell my fellow bookgroupmates that I had followed through when I could. Also, I thought about how I had one day when I was a graduate student gone to the trial of the Chicago Seven (Eight?) and saw Bobby Seale chained and gagged in the courtroom. This seemed a similar thing I should do.
I spent a long time trying to figure out on the web what procedure was necessary to sit in the gallery – I finally called the court at which time a guy said, 'oh, just come down and you can attend'. It was a day I really wanted to keep busy, for personal reason, so I decided to go. If I couldn’t get in, I would go to one of the museums in The Hague. I invited my student Jen Musto, who is in the Netherlands working on her dissertation this summer, to come with me but in the end she got an eye infection. So I went myself.
I arrived in Voorburg, one of those wealthy suburbs of the Hague much like Waasenaar, a little before noon, was easily directed to the building, and within ten minutes found myself sitting with fifty other people in a small gallery separated by a glass wall from the court. Taylor’s back was to us but we could see him on a video screen. Facing him and us was a bank of four judges, two men and two women, two black and two white, with black robes, and red and white collars. And on either side of them, barrister-outfitted camps of lawyers and assistants, prosecution and defense. A few police men and women. And everyone looking absolutely stony faced, not animated by Taylor’s presence but not bored by the endless questions and answers. Only one older very black lawyer on the defense side occasionally shook his head yes that’s right to Taylor’s answers.
I sat for 45 minutes until the lunch break, after which I returned for another hour so, at which time I moved over, and was sitting directly behind Taylor in the middle of the front row. And yet, because of the glass, the stark modernism of the room, and the strange monologue Taylor delivered, assisted by his lawyer (“help us, Mr. Taylor,” he would frequently say about some detail he wanted to fill in) about his life and his leadership (as he saw it) of the Liberian wing of the African independence movement, I could not keep my attention on the fact that I was sitting behind one of the great mass murderers of the late twentieth century. Perhaps this speaks to the kind of weird legitimation that critics of human rights procedures insist such bloodless (what a word in this context) legal procedures produce. Sitting like this, he didn’t seem a monster but a man in the grip of his own absolute conviction about his important place in history; and/or well prepared by his legal team. He is 61 years old – just a few months younger than me. He wore, of course, an elegant suit and tie and impeccable white shirt with four inch starched cuffs. The back of his neck, which is what I saw directly, had a roll of fat and close cropped, partly bald hair. He moved his thin, elegant hands constantly to emphasize his points, once even apologizing to “your honors” for speaking so much with his hands. What a thing for him to apologize for! To show that he was thoughtful and respectful of the law? He wore sunglasses, and sat alone facing the judges. His computer screen wasn’t on, he didn’t drink his water, he didn’t use his pen and paper. He relished answering the questions his lawyer put to him, as if, I thought, he really loved recalling the historic movements – African liberation, student politics of the 1970s, collaborating with Samuel Doe after the assassination of William Talbert.
I hadn’t realized that the trial had been going on for some time, and, as I learned this morning from the IHT, the prosecution had rested. Its presentation was made up of people who had colluded with Taylor and with people who had been victims of the violence over which he had presided. Many had had their hands hacked off. One person was asked by Taylor’s elegant black British lawyer, do you speak and write English, and the person, showing his stumps, said I write nothing. What would it have been like to have attended that part of the trial? Would the same sort of disinfectant process have happened? Would I have gone? Would I have stayed? Would it have been too painful for me to really even register?
By contrast, the defense, which had begun the day before, was systematic and only occasionally slightly dramatic. The lead lawyer guided his client, Taylor, through an incredibly detailed narration of his life, in the time I was there concentrating on Taylor’s leadership of the Union of Liberian Associations, a US based group, mostly of students, which regarded itself as an important wing of the movement to first reform and then revolutionize Liberian politics. He Taylor was in the US for seven years, and became the chair of this organization, which he casually referred to as “the Union.” Also on the coup against William Talbert which put Samuel Doe in power.
An odd bureaucratic aspect: Taylor’s lawyer stopped all the time to spell into the record the names that Taylor mentioned, some I hadn’t heard of, many of which were of course Americo-Liberian names like Paul or Jones, and some were famous historic names like Nkrumah or Ben Bella. We wouldn’t want any mistakes in the details. Once, when Taylor misdated an important event (the coup d’etat that murdered William Talbert) the lawyer paused, and asked him if this was indeed the date he wished to cite; Taylor corrected himself). When I entered at noon, Taylor was talking about an even in 1979 which both of my books covered, the Rice Riots, in which I think Tubman raised the price of rice beyond what most Liberians could pay; Taylor thought this was a good idea to increase Liberian economic self sufficiency. One of the judges, the only time I heard anyone else but Taylor or his lawyer speak, wanted to make sure that the record read “rice riot” instead of, as it sounded “race riot.”
There were a few breaks in this uninflected narrative, a few flashes of anger or passion, in the laborious personal history he was laying out. Was he a Marxist Leninist like some other anti government groups at the time? Absolutely not. He was a democrat, he insisted. And what did he think of the U.S? When he got to the coup that overthrew Talbert, he accused the US of organizing it, since the two dozen men who took over the government had all just been through a US directly training program. In a longer discussion of his attitude to the US, he said he was angry on behalf of his country that the US had left Liberia, its child (he used this metaphor directly) underdeveloped, unlike France and England which had left their colonies with infrastructures, educated colonial elites, highways, economies, etc. Only Firestone, whch had come to Liberia for the US’s own strategic reasons during World War II (need of rubber).
As he was talking I was thinking about what Obama had said just the day before about Africa needing to take responsibility for its own future, despite the history of colonial exploitation. NO reference to this though. So both anger at the US and disappointed attachment. It was clear, through the language that he used, the slang and metaphors, that his years during the 1970s in the US had left a major impact on him. And yet, in one other directed answer, he insisted that he and his fellow Liberian students had established no connections with African American groups, because they realized that any such interference with US politics would have exposed them to jail or expulsion, that they had rigidly observed their obligation to steer clear of domestic engagements.
Which reminds me of one detail of this part: his account of how he was arrested in the 1970s, I think on a federal warrant and by the FBI, for purchasing guns to aid opposition forces in Liberia. I don’t remember the outcome – whether he served time, or for how long – but I do remember how he dismissed the episode – as a youthful mistake, the kind of foolish excess that student revolutionaries can make when they get overexcited about their political passions. I believe he even chuckled a bit at his own naivete.
The other part of his testimony focused on Liberian politics and his perception of and participation in, starting with what he called the fractures in the Tubman presidency, Tubman, the 27 year long president who he remained quite proud of, indeed of Liberia in general, Africa’s oldest republic, who and which had played a major role in assisting other African nations to realize their own independence. But Tubman had become too subservient to US needs and so Taylor’s story shifted to the efforts of various groups to establish an opposition party.
Tubman was succeeded by William Talbert, against whom Taylor and his fellow ULAA demonstrated – seizing the DC embassy, disrupting the General Assembly was what he said. Then Talbert invited Taylor to come to Liberia to reacquaint himself with his country. Taylor described himself as afraid that he might be arrested or murdered, himself a potential object of violence. While he was there, Samuel Doe and other very young non commissioned military offices led a coup against Talbert and murdered him. His description of the Doe coup was interesting – he emphasized the youth of the members of the coup, and their lack of education, in contrast implicitly to his own. He located himself as an educated, disciplined person who could bring the excesses of this revolution under control. (IN actuality, his educational record was not, I hink, distinguished. I believe he attended an undistinguished Boston college and I don’t think he fnished there.) He distinguished the Americo-Liberians (he is one and this is obvious by his name but he did not emphasize this) with what he called “the aborigines,” usually specified by tribe and language group and his own family affiliations or those of his “fiancé.”
He wanted, he said, to get Doe and the others “back to the barracks,” where they belonged. In his account of the coup, there was violence and chaos around him, but he was invited to join and he did so to “secure the revolution” and to – he said this several times – quiet the fears of the diplomatic community (other African nations) that the chaos and destabilization would spread beyond Liberia’s borders. (Eventually it did, which is what brought him to this tribunal.) This added to my impression that he saw himself and his actions in the context of a larger Africa. At one point, he talked with regret that original plans, (led by who?), for a fully federated United States of Africa, failed (blaming US and western fear for lack of control). Perhaps this is strategic, given that he is being tried by a country other than his own and accused and fostering violence in an adjacent Sierra Leone State (getting involved in the blood diamond trade to buy weapons.)
I left at this point. I thought several times of something that both Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and Russell Banks said about Taylor: that he was charismatic, that it was easy to believe that his intentions for Liberia were pure and good, and that he was the kind of person that people wanted to follow.
Is that what I saw?
