Concord Times (Freetown)
Olusegun Ogundeji
8 September 2008
Freetown — Prosecutor at the Special Court has told Concord Times that international conspiracy against former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who is being tried for war crimes at The Hague, was irrelevant to his trial.
Stephen Rapp said: "Whether Taylor is guilty of embezzlement during the Doe government; whether he broke out of jail on his own or was helped...that's not relevant to the crime. That's not, in our view, a material issue. The issue 'was Charles Taylor responsible for atrocities in Sierra Leone?'"
He added that though a variety of issues mentioned may say something about how Taylor came to be who he was and could therefore serve a kind of smokescreen if they could not prove that he committed war crimes in Sierra Leone trial judges would not look at them.
"My enemies are nasty people, is not a defence. Some people don't like me in the world is not a defence. Some people love me is not a defence. It doesn't make any difference at all to our case," Rapp said.
This dialogue with the prosecutor came in the wake of a revelation made last week by former warlord on the war in Liberia, Prince Johnson, while testifying before the country's truth and reconciliation commission.
Johnson told the hearing that the United States (US) released Taylor from jail in 1985 to engineer the overthrow of President Samuel Doe contrary to widespread report that Taylor escaped from a US jail to return to Liberia.
To Johnson's claim, Rapp said: "I don't know if what Prince Johnson said is true or not. I'm skeptical about that." Earlier, there have been reports that the US and United Kingdom, the major financiers of the Special Court, conspired to incarcerate and silence Taylor because he constituted a security threat to both nations.
In April over 50 journalists from Sierra Leone and Liberia, who gathered at a training programme in Monrovia on reporting the ongoing trial, had a lengthy debate on the issue of a conspiracy against Taylor.
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It sounds great but unbelievable. How then can Taylor be a threat to US and UK's security when he could not even defend himself against Prince Johnson, Roosvelt Johnson (ULIMO's J, Ecomog, LURD, etc?. I just ask question? My name oh...............................