Charles Taylor: warlord now on the defence

A bloody conflict for control over Sierra Leone’s diamond mines led to the deaths of approximately 100,000 people between 1991 and 2001.

Next door in Liberia, a series of conflicts after an economic collapse led to the deaths of more than 250,000 people between 1989 and 2003.

Charles Taylor is alleged to have been one of the most powerful figures in these clashes, backing the rebels responsible for the widespread murder, rape, conscription of child soldiers, enslavement and pillaging that occurred.

Charles Taylor was born in 1948, to an Americo-Liberian family. He went to the U.S. and obtained an economics degree from Bentley College in Massachusetts in 1977. He returned to Liberia just after a coup d’etat in 1980.

Taylor joined the civil service under military leader Samuel Doe, but was accused of embezzlement. He denied the allegations and fled the country before being caught in the U.S.

Taylor escaped, and disappeared for almost five years, only to return to Liberia in 1989 to launch a rebellion to overthrow Doe. His National Patriotic Front of Liberia is alleged to have conscripted children to fight in the ensuing seven-year conflict, some as young as ten years old.

In 1991, the RUF rebellion began in Sierra Leone. According to prosecutors at his war crimes trial in The Hague, Taylor helped arm and train the rebels who were known for hacking off the limbs of their victims.

In return, he is alleged to have accepted illicit diamonds, a rich resource in Sierra Leone, to fund his own operations. The trade in “˜blood diamonds’ from the country perpetuated the brutal war there.

Liberians voted Taylor into the presidency in 1997, but critics allege he bullied and bought his way into office.

The fighting continued with anti-government groups in north Liberia, leading the UN to impose sanctions on the country in 2001. Two years later, Taylor was surrounded by rebels. He stepped down and went into exile in Nigeria.

By the time Taylor left the country, 250,000 people were dead, the economy was in ruins, weapons were widespread, thousands of citizens had been displaced, and thousands more were orphaned, disfigured, illiterate and unemployed.

Nigeria resisted international pressure to extradite Taylor until 2006. After a lengthy car chase, the former president was arrested at the Nigeria-Cameroon border with large bags of cash in his disguised diplomatic vehicle.

He is now facing charges of war crimes at the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone in The Hague.