In an ideal world a tyrant would stand trial for all the evils of which he is accused. But in the real world it's not possible, writes CHRIS STEPHEN
THE MEDIA spotlight shone on the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor by Naomi Campbell’s celebrity appearance this week has highlighted the awkward truth that international war crimes justice is in trouble.
First is the question of just how desperate prosecutors must be if they are relying for their killer evidence on a temperamental supermodel recounting a gift of diamonds given to her by two strange men in the middle of the night. As evidentiary process goes, this is the equivalent of blaming it all on Professor Plum in the library with the lead piping.
More seriously, the arrival of all this attention has exposed the ramshackle nature of a case that has lasted four years, cost tens of millions of euro, and which still has no end in sight.
It was not supposed to be this way. Charles Taylor was, for more than a decade, a monster even among the company of Africa’s assorted warlords and strongmen.
Having had terrorist training in Libya he engineered a bloody coup in Liberia and then organised a war in neighbouring Sierra Leone with the object, say prosecutors, of plundering that country’s rich diamond fields.
More than 100,000 perished in horrific violence which ran the full gamut from mass murder to torture, enslavement, mass rape and even cannibalism. A speciality of the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which Taylor is accused of commanding, was to use machetes and axes to hack the limbs from villagers to spread terror through the countryside.
The tactic worked: Taylor allegedly grew rich and powerful on the diamond profits, setting up what amounted to a vast West African criminal network that stretched to Guinea and Ivory Coast.
When he was deposed and fled to Nigeria, an unprecedented campaign by civil rights groups across Africa, co-ordinated across the internet, saw Lagos pressured into handing him over to justice.
Yet four years later his trial is still dragging on, with no real end in sight. The Special Court for Sierra Leone has pleaded for donations to meet its $18 million (€13.5 million) budget for next year. Good luck with that one.
For the fact is that the prosecutors made a fundamental mistake in designing their strategy as one that might be described, in a non-legalistic term, as “throwing the book”.
Taylor has been charged with a wide range of crimes, a fine idea in theory, but which in practice has produced a whale of a trial with hundreds of witnesses. Taylor has taken full opportunity to wreak his own kind of havoc, demanding more than 200 defence witnesses to further complicate and stretch proceedings, triggering complaints from prosecutors that he is not respecting the court.
But Taylor knows he faces life in jail if even a fraction of the charges against him are proved, and it is not up to the defendant to make the trial work properly. That should be the job of the prosecution.
They have already cut his charge sheet from 17 counts to 11, but it is still way too long, spanning murder, rape, terror, sexual slavery, use of child soldiers and plunder.
Plunder? That is like adding a charge of displaying an expired tax disc to the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper. The charge sheet could be cut by half and still provide a formidable indictment.
What is worse is that prosecutors had been warned. The only other world leader to come before a UN court was former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
He was blamed for violence spanning nearly a decade in the wars of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Proving a fraction of the charges in just one of those wars would have sent him to jail for good. But prosecutors in their wisdom decided to hit him with the whole truckload. The result was a trial that went on so long – four years – that it outlasted the defendant, who died in his jail cell of heart failure before a verdict could be reached.
The signs were clear back then: Taylor should have been charged with a few of the most horrific crimes and the world would have seen a streamlined trial and, in all probability, a guilty verdict and a life sentence.
That in turn would send out the signal that even world leaders are not immune to the long arm of international law.
Instead, a trial that was supposed to be a tiger has turned into a bloated whale. Even if Taylor is finally convicted, it remains to be seen how keen the outside world will be to fund another five-year trial at a cost of perhaps $50 million.
And the failure of international justice to get itself a poster-boy conviction has weakened its case at the UN, where political support for the process is waning fast.
In the same building as the Taylor trial is the International Criminal Court (ICC), the world’s first permanent war crimes court. It remains extraordinary that after seven years in operation, with a staff of 586 and a budget of just over $100 million, the ICC has failed to convict anyone of anything. Yet the court is hamstrung by lack of funds at the sharp end, lack of political support and no international police force to carry out arrests.
This is a tragedy, because in their less complex cases, war crimes courts have proved their worth. The UN’s Hague Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, the first of the new war crimes courts, has jailed more than 100 assorted generals, warlords and thugs, including virtually the entire Serb leadership responsible for the horrors of the Bosnian war.
And, until it hit the buffers with the Taylor case, the Special Court for Sierra Leone had pioneered a new, streamlined approach to war crimes justice. Knowing funds were tight, the architects of the special court, jointly run by the UN and the government, decided to indict only the top leaders, Taylor among them. Everyone else accused of war crimes was given the option of testifying before a truth and reconciliation commission. The deal was simple: admit your past crimes and get immunity.
This approach saved the global taxpayer millions and provided an unexpected bonus, as the former subordinates of the wartime commanders lined up to testify against their former bosses.
Increasing numbers of states are now operating their own war crimes justice processes, the latest being Bangladesh which has begun prosecuting past military leaders.
And while Britain may be trying to turn back the clock by amending the right of citizens to bring war crimes charges against visiting dignitaries, elsewhere more and more states are setting up laws allowing war crimes prosecutions under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
What is needed in the Taylor trial and among war crimes courts in general is a dose of realism. Yes, in an ideal world a tyrant would stand trial for all the evils of which he is accused. But in the real world, that is not possible. Prosecutors need to cut the suit according to the cloth, framing a few choice charges which can produce a streamlined case. Only then will war crimes justice have a future, providing the hope that future warlords in future wars will be deterred from committing atrocities in the first place.
Chris Stephen is the author of Judgment Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Grove Atlantic, New York, 2005)