Who is Charles Taylor and what is he on trial for?
In 1921, Charles Taylor limped into a Converse shoe store in Chicago with sore feet and a business proposition. If Converse could make a comfortable basketball shoe with decent ankle support, Taylor believed he could sell it.
The following year, Taylor began visiting basketball coaches around the country, selling his "Chuck Taylor All-Star" shoes as fast as the factory could make them.
Some 85 years and 600 million pairs later, Taylor is not only in the Basketball Hall of Fame, but he has joined the pantheon of quality footwear's elite alongside Thom McAn, Jimmy Choo, and Drs. Scholl and Marten.
Oops. Wrong Charles Taylor.
The Charles Taylor we need to think about was Liberia's president from 1997 to 2003.
President isn't really the right word. It doesn't convey the essence of his rule. The right word is warlord.
Taylor's rise to warlordhood is fascinating and mysterious.
Born in Liberia in 1948, Taylor came to the United States in 1972 on a student visa. He studied economics at Bentley College in Massachusetts. While in school, Taylor became politically active within the Liberian community in the United States.
In 1979, when Liberia's then-president visited the United Nations, Taylor led a demonstration outside Liberia's United Nations mission office. Rather than ignore the protestors, Liberia's president came out and debated them. The president was so impressed by Taylor (who reportedly threatened to take over Liberia's U.N. office by force) that he invited him back to Liberia to serve in government.
And so he did. Things seemed to go swimmingly for Taylor until 1983, when he was charged with embezzling government money. He fled to Massachusetts, where he was arrested. Before he could be extradited to Liberia, however, Taylor cut his way out of a Plymouth, Mass., jail with a saw. With the help of friends and family, he made his way to Libya. With the assistance of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, Taylor popped up in Liberia in 1989 with an army of a few hundred men.
Taylor led one of two rebel groups that toppled Liberia's government before waging war on one another. About 150,000 Liberians died in the fighting. By 1997, Taylor's forces had won out and he was "elected" president. His campaign slogan, I kid you not, was "I killed your ma, I killed your pa, you will vote for me."
After a short exile in Nigeria, Taylor was arrested in 2006 and brought to The Hague, Netherlands, for justice.
But Taylor isn't in trouble for any of the stuff mentioned above.
He's been brought to the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. Taylor faces charges related to his involvement in Sierra Leone's civil war. Sierra Leone and Liberia are neighbors.
Even if the names don't ring a bell, you probably know a little bit about Sierra Leone's civil war.
Throughout the 1990s, Sierra Leone's United Revolutionary Front rebels waged an unimaginably hellish terror campaign against their countrymen.
Using kidnapped and drugged child soldiers, the rebels shot and raped and amputated their way through this tiny nation from 1991 until a U.N.-backed cease-fire in 2002. An estimated 50,000 Sierra Leoneans died in the war.
Taylor is accused of funding Sierra Leone's rebels by laundering diamonds mined in their country. Taylor faces 11 counts, including terrorism, murder, rape, sex slavery, conscripting children, enslavement and "pillage."
The arrest and trial of Taylor is a milestone in human rights and international law. Taylor is the first-ever African head of state arrested and tried for war crimes.
After World War II, the Allies put Nazis on trial for their, um, Nazism. But the idea that war criminals should be held accountable for their evildoing fell out of favor until the 1990s, when various actors in Yugoslavia's post-Communist civil war were captured and punished.
Though the United States opposes the permanent International Criminal Court headquartered in Rome, it's the main international supporter of Sierra Leone court. The United States is fronting most of the cash, and the prosecutor is from Iowa.
The trial began in June, but last week Judge Julia Sebutinde granted the defense until January 2008 to prepare a defense.
andisheh.nouraee@creativeloafing.com
This article appears in Aug 29 – Sep 4, 2007.