The NEWS (Monrovia)
7 March 2008
Monrovia — An insider of the disbanded Sierra Leonean rebel group, Revolutionary United Front (RUF) who is also prosecution witness, Mustapha Marvin Mansaray, 36, continued his testimony in the ongoing trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague.
He has been revealing plans by Charles Taylor and Issa Sesay to unseat the government of President Lasannah Conteh of Guinea, among other things.
According to the web page of The Trial of Charles Taylor, as witness Mansaray sat, wearing a white T-shirt under a grey button-down dress shirt, he looked calm throughout much of his testimony while Charles Taylor also sat calmly throughout the testimony, at times taking notes.
Mansaray continued his description of the foodstuffs that the RUF had claimed for its benefit, forcing civilians to hand over supplies of coffee, cocoa and kola nuts from their plantations in order to sell them to get money to buy arms and ammunition for the RUF. Civilians who resisted would be beaten and their property taken from them.
Around the same time, Mansaray described meeting with a man called Jungle at Sam Bockaries' house in 1997, but Mansaray and Jungle had actually known each other previously. Jungle was one of the men who Foday Sankoh would send to Liberia to get arms and ammunition, and to Guinea to get foodstuffs for the RUF.
In 1998 when Mansaray moved to Kuiva, he described lootings and killings of civilians, as the RUF and AFRC established a battalion headquarters there and took over civilian houses.
The morning after the RUF and AFRC fighters arrived in the town, Mansaray expalained that corpses littered the streets.
Around the same time, Mansaray described the decaying odor of 20 corpses of civilians who had been killed in Kailahun, allegedly by Sam Bockarie because Bockarie suspected them of being Komajors. No action was taken against Bockarie for these killings, the prosecution witness testified.
When Mansaray moved to Shegwema, he also spoke of an RUF fighter who shot 25 civilians. Mansaray reported these murders, but his superiors did nothing about it.
He described in-fighting within the RUF and AFRC in 1999 in Makeni, which led to a split, adding that Sam Bockarie, Issa Sesay and Morris Kallon headed one group, and Dennis Mingo and Gibril Massaquoi headed the other.
The two groups, he indicated, fought against each other, resulting in killings. He pointed out that during a muster parade in a nearby town of Mabroka around the same time, he found out that Morris Kallon and Siem Kolleh (an RUF vanguard) had a vehicle loaded with ammunition and arms which the Kallon/Bockarie/Sesay split planned to use against the Dennis Mingo group.
These arms and ammunition, he alleged, came from Charles Taylor, an information he claimed was provided to him (Mansaray) by Kolleh.
Mansaray described his time in Pedembu from June 1999, where he worked as the RUF's First Brigade Internal Defense Unit (IDU) Chief Clerk responsible for issuing travel passes to fighters who wanted to visit their families, and for screening approximately 500 civilians who had been captured by the fighters.
After the screening, the insider witness said civilians could be signed out by their families, but for those who did not have families to sign them out, a different fate awaited.
"For the women, RUF fighters would often come to sign for them and take them to the fighters' home to have sexual intercourse or to make the women do domestic work," he narrated.
Mansaray also testified about the arrest of UN peacekeepers by RUF member called Dennis Lansana on the orders of Issa Sesay, then the RUF's overall commander.
"These peacekeepers were kept under house arrest as the RUF leadership prepared six charges against them, including one that the peacekeepers had joined hands with the Sierra Leonean government to destroy the RUF. The peacekeepers were then taken to Liberia by either car or helicopter at the request of Charles Taylor," according to Mansaray.
Describing his role in Komba Budena from July 2000, Mansaray added that part of his duties were to record the RUF's arms and ammunition stock, and the number of fighters.
He said a stock of arms and ammunition existed at Makeni, which had come from Issa Sesay in order to run the RUF's operations.
Additionally, Mansaray stated that Issa Sesay addressed a muster parade of RUF fighters in 2000, and told them that Charles Taylor gave him the mission to launch an attack against President Lansana Conteh in Guinea and overthrow him.
"Issa Sesay told the muster parade that Taylor supplied the arms for the mission in Guinea, and the fighters should accomplish the mission set for them," he said.
Mansaray went on to describe his work as mining commander in the Ngaiya area from January 2001, where he controlled more than 200 diamond mines.
He described a system in which civilians were forced to work in the diamond mines though techincally the RUF had a system where they would divide the gravel into two piles - one meant for the RUF, and the other meant for the civilians - the RUF always confiscated any big diamonds found by civilians. If civilians refused to hand over the diamonds, they were beaten or killed, he expalined.
Mansaray also described an RUF training base in the area where he was the mining commander, saying that Issa Sesay went there one night and killed a group of recruits.
"When Sesay was confronted about this by the RUF's General Security Officer, Pa Kosia, Sesay threatened him. Nothing was done to address the killings," Mansaray pointed out.
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