Editorial: Blood diamond victims get some justice

Another sad chapter in Africa’s modern history has come to a close. The former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted by the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague of aiding and abetting war crimes in Sierra Leone, including murder, rape, enforced amputations, enslavement and use of children as soldiers.

It was the first conviction of a former head of state for war crimes since the Nuremburg trials in 1945–46. (Former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic died in his cell before his four-year genocide trial could reach a verdict.)

However, the more serious charges against Taylor did not stick, as the court could not be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that Taylor had “command and control” over the Revolutionary United Front’s (RUF) 10-year campaign of terror in Sierra Leone beginning in the mid-1990s. And of course, he and the government he led faced no charges for equally atrocious actions carried out in Liberia.

Taylor served as Liberian president from his election in August 1997 to his resignation in August 2003 — his exit had been one of the conditions of a ceasefire that ended the Second Liberian Civil War. Taylor was arrested in exile in Nigeria in 2006 and then jailed in the Netherlands awaiting trial.

Taylor picked up an economics degree at Bentley College in the U.S. in 1977, and returned to Liberia to work in Samuel Doe’s vicious government before being fired for embezzling US$900,000. He spent part of the mid-1980s detained in a Massachusetts jail in relation to the embezzling charges before apparently escaping.

He eventually wound up in Libya, where he undertook guerrilla training in order to head up the Libyan-backed, Côte d’Ivoire-based National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), which overthrew the Doe regime in the First Liberian Civil War in 1990, with Doe being tortured to death by the NPFL on video. Taylor’s thug army included a cast of characters with monikers such as General No-Mother-No-Father, General Housebreaker, Babykiller, General F%&-Me-Quick and the notorious General Butt-Naked, who went into battle dressed only in tennis shoes.

The nadir in Liberia was the mid-1990s, when up to 60,000 young men fighters and child soldiers terrorized the capital Monrovia and the countryside with rampant murder, rape, stealing and dismemberment, often carried out while drunk and stoned, dressed in masks, wigs and ballroom gowns. Some 150,000 of Liberia’s 3-million population were killed over eight years, and a third had become refugees.

Once settled into power as president, Taylor benefited from the mayhem that swept Sierra Leone, being a central player in the arms and natural resources trades, including the country’s infamous diamond mines — source of the term “blood diamond,” and prime driver of the creation of the now widely adopted Kimberley Process to certify the origin of diamonds and weed out those coming from war zones.

• The Indonesian government has slapped a 20% export tax beginning May 6 on 14 metal ores including copper, nickel and aluminum, and is hinting at instituting a similar tax on coal exports. The new rules apply to small- and medium-sized miners without existing contracts, affecting around a third of Indonesia’s metal exports.

Still, the move may be a precursor to a likely total ban of raw material exports by 2014 unless the miner has processing facilities in Indonesia, or firm plans to build them. Raw tin exports are already banned.

Tjahjono Imawan, president of the Indonesian Mining Services Association, told Reuters that, with these latest moves, the government “wants to kill a mouse in a rice field, but they’re burning the whole field.”

The government says it wants to encourage the development of a domestic, downstream mineral-processing industry that could export finished metals and other higher-level products. Mining already accounts for around 14% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product, and the country is the world’s largest exporter of thermal coal, and produces 15% of the world’s bauxite and nickel.

Metal markets mostly shrugged off the news in the face of a weakening global economy, though nickel prices in London were up over 1%.