Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor has been convicted by an international tribunal for aiding and abetting war crimes in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Taylor was one of arms dealer Viktor Bout’s prime clients during that period and both men were targeted by United Nations and U.S. sanctions for their role in destablizing Sierra Leone by supporting rival mercenaries. The tribunal that convicted Taylor today for his role in crimes against humanity concluded that some of those marauding troops committed murder, rape and slavery and conscripted teenagers as child soldiers.
The international court said prosecutors failed to prove Taylor had direct command in the war crimes, but his conviction was a firm confirmation of widespread allegations of brutality and wanton corruption that festered since Liberia’s 1990s incursions into Sierra Leone. From the late 1990s until 2002, forces backed by Taylor’s authoritarian regime visited chaos and death inside Sierra Leone, killing hundreds of thousands civilians and combatants and leaving thousands of mutilated and amputated victims. Forces backed by Taylor’s government also extracted precious minerals and other raw materials from Sierra Leone, including banned “blood diamonds,” lumber and other commodities.
Bout has been long suspected of providing Taylor and his insurgents with small arms and more sophisticated weapons systems, paid in diamonds, lumber, titanium and other raw goods. Bout was accused by the UN, the U.S. and arms trade activists of playing an outsized role in inflaming a spate of territorial combat and civil wars that swept Africa in the 1990s and killed millions of civilians. A UN travel ban targeting Bout, Taylor and others said Bout and his allies “supported former President Taylor’s regime in effort to destablize Sierra Leone and gain illicit access to diamonds, involved in illicit diamond sales.” In a precursor to the DEA sting that led to Bout’s 25-year prison sentence earlier this month, the U.S. Treasury Department also levied financial sanctions against his financial empire in 2005 for his role in Liberia.
“Merchant of Death” recounts Bout’s dealings with Taylor in the Sierra Leone incursions. Bout’s cargo planes flew repeated sorties into Liberia in the late 1990s, bringing everything from crates of weapons to disassembled helicopter gunships. Taylor was so delighted by Bout’s deliveries that he began calling the Russian “my pepper bush,” a reference to how essential Bout was to his continuing operations. Taylor provided Bout with a villa in the Liberian capital in Monrovia for his frequent visits, outfitting the dwelling with electricity and other luxuries in a city then broken by poverty and decay.
New York Times–“Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and once a powerful warlord, was convicted by an international tribunal on Thursday of 11 counts of aiding and abetting war crimes committed in Sierra Leone during that country’s civil war in the 1990s.”
VOA–“After leaving Colombia, Doug Farah authored with Stephen Braun in 2007 what is considered the definitive Bout book: “The Merchant of Death.”
Speaking from his home in the Washington area, Farah said that during the 1990s and early 2000s, Bout operated on the margins of the Russian power structure….In the past, Farah said, Bout would meet with an African warlord, take down his shopping list for Soviet equipment, and then say he would see what he could do. Farah said: “Bout never offered something he could not deliver.”