Amby Uneze
14 May 2005
Calabar — As the United States-led international pressure mounts on Nigeria to hand in exiled former Liberian leader, Mr. Charles Taylor, to the United Nations Human Rights Court, the former warlord is now struck with fear and may sneak out of the country.
Taylor, who is currently in exile in Nigeria, is reportedly afraid of what might be his fate if President Olusegun Obasanjo bows to the pressure, particularly from the United States of America.
The US President, George Bush, last week at a bilateral talk with Obasanjo gave a condition for his country's support to Nigeria's quest for a seat on the UN Security Council, only on the release of Charles Taylor to answer allegations on human rights violation at the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal.
Again, a day before Obasanjo's arrival in the US, the House of Representatives had passed a resolution demanding that Taylor be handed over to the court by Nigeria. The resolution was thought to have cast a shadow on the visit of Obasanjo to US.
Taylor, who resides in a highbrow area in Calabar, Cross River State, rarely comes out these days, unlike before and is now shielded by tighter security.
Sources told THISDAY that Taylor is seriously considering the next line of action to be taken, if Obasanjo finally yields to the demands of the US.
The source disclosed that Taylor is, among other options, thinking of rejecting the political asylum granted to him by Nigeria and looking for an alternative country he can go to secretly.
Obasanjo had in the past challenged the US that Taylor was in Nigeria as a result of resolutions agreed to by African leaders, and not a unilateral decision taken by Nigeria, he had defended Taylor's exile in Nigeria, at least in line with international sovereign status of the country.
But with the US pressure now, Obasanjo seems to have modified his view, thus: "Nobody should, of course, condone any crime that anybody has committed no matter how highly placed".
He, however, added, "we must not forget the circumstances under which Charles Taylor was brought to Nigeria by the leaders of Africa".
In 2003, Obasanjo offered Taylor protection in Nigeria in exchange for a promise by the former warlord to leave Liberia. The Nigerian gesture was praised by George Bush and many other world leaders at the time.
Taylor was accused by human rights groups of masterminding regional conflicts and later indicted in June by a U.N.-backed war crimes court in neighboring Sierra Leone on charges that he armed and trained rebels in exchange for diamonds. During the country's 10 years of civil war, an estimated 50,000 people died.
According to Amnesty International, Sierra Leone's civil war "was characterised by some of the worst abuses known: widespread deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, torture, including rape and deliberate amputation of limbs, and abduction and forced recruitment of large numbers of people, including children."
On July 6, 2003, Taylor accepted an offer of asylum from Nigeria's president, and on August 11 he stepped down as president, handed over power to Vice President Moses Blah and left for Nigeria.
A special prosecutor with the special court in Sierra Leone said then that offering Taylor asylum from the war crimes charges would violate international law, but one senior U.S. official also added that the issue of whether Taylor should escape prosecution "is really on the back burner."
Taylor was born in 1948 -- the third of 15 children of Americo-Liberian parents, descendants of the freed American slaves who established the Liberian republic in the 19th century.
His father sent him to the United States, where he obtained a degree in economics from Bentley College in Massachusetts.
He became involved in radical Liberian student politics. Influenced by Marxist and Pan-African ideas, he once advocated burning down the Liberian Embassy in Washington. He earned cash in his spare time working on a production line at a toy factory.
He became a teacher and was part of dictator Samuel Doe's government in 1980 before being exiled to the United States.
In the United States, he was jailed for allegedly stealing $900,000 in Liberian government funds -- only to escape from a Massachusetts prison, along with four petty criminals, in 1985 after a year in captivity.
In 1989, he returned to West Africa and launched a revolt from the Ivory Coast against Doe, an ethnic Krahn who had taken power in a military coup.
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