Who is the former African president imprisoned for crimes against humanity who sues his country for not paying his retirement

On Tuesday, the former president of Liberia Charles Ghankay Taylor, who is serving a 50-year sentence in a British jail for crimes against humanity, filed a lawsuit against his country demanding that his retirement be paid.

The lawsuit accusing Liberia of violating its rights was filed before the court of justice of the Economic Community of West African States, the AFP agency said.

Adama Dempster, secretary of the Civil Society Platform for the Defense of Civil Rights in Liberia, explained to AFP that Taylor “was not convicted of crimes committed in Liberia, so this does not affect his rights here (…) I think he would have to receive what the law has provided for him ”.

Who is this former warlord who started the armed conflict in Sierra Leone and why did he end up in a British jail.

ARRIVAL TO POWER

The stories about the early years of Charles Ghankay Taylor are diverse and contradictory. It can be said that he was born 73 years ago in the county of Montserrado, northwest of Liberia, and since then different versions have been presented.

In one, he was the third of 15 children as a result of a marriage between a domestic worker and an American-Liberian teacher. In another, it is presumed that he grew up in Trinidad and Tobago before returning to his country and ended up being imprisoned for political reasons.

His life story, in any case, begins to take light from the late 70s. Taylor lived for a time in Massachusetts, United States, where he studied economics at Bently College, worked in a couple of factories and began political activism in the Union of Liberian Associations.

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By 1979, said group would have entered the Liberian offices at the UN headquarters in New York, demanding that the ambassador of the African country disseminate a proclamation calling for the fall of the William Tolbert regime.

After his return to Liberia, invited by Tolbert himself to head a student delegation, there was a coup led by Sergeant Samuel Doe, who later recruited Taylor, even appointing him Vice Minister of Commerce.

In 1983, Taylor unexpectedly fled the country to the United States, prompting Doe to accuse him of stealing nearly a million dollars from state coffers. The following year, the US authorities arrested Taylor and ordered his extradition in 1985. Before this, however, he starred in a cinematic prison escape, traveling through Mexico, Spain and France before arriving in Ghana.

Four years later, in 1989, he appeared as head of the Forces Nacionales Patrióticas de Liberia (FPNL), a resistance group that sought to overthrow the Doe government, sparking the country’s first civil war.

During this conflict, the FPNL recruited young people and children as combatants. In addition, the following year a part of the guerrillas separated and created the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL), who finally ended up capturing Doe after an ambush.

Despite the fall of the regime, the conflict lasted five more years, during which Taylor recruited around 25,000 militiamen, mainly from western Liberian tribes. After a peace agreement in the country, the 1997 elections took place in which Taylor would end up winning the presidency with his newly founded National Patriotic Party (NPP).

WARLORD

During the Taylor regime, blood continued to flow in Liberia. A year after coming to power, he tried to assassinate Roosevelt Johson, his former ally and leader of the INPFL, who ended up fleeing the country.

This, added to other internal factors, mainly the tribal conflicts in the country and the innumerable human rights violations denounced by organizations such as Amnesty International, plunged the country into a new spiral of violence and international isolation.

At the same time, Taylor began supplying weapons and training militants from the Revolutionary United Front (FRU) of neighboring Sierra Leone in exchange for blood diamonds.

Taylor’s support for the RUF, which sought to overthrow the Sierra Leonean government, extended from 1997 to 2000. That year, the United States launched a UN mission to investigate Taylor’s connections with the RUF, also supported by the United Kingdom.

The investigations were followed by packages of sanctions against both the Government of Liberia and Taylor, preventing, among other things, from exporting diamonds and the then president from traveling abroad.

In parallel, the revolutionary group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) began to gain strength and ground in the country. It was made up of former members of other militias, Ghanaians who accused Liberia of altering the turbulent situation in their country, and tribal members, who had a common interest in rejecting Taylor.

The conflict ended up adding the UN peacekeepers and an African military alliance that ended up forcing Taylor to resign in 2003 and take refuge in Nigeria.

BEFORE INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

On March 29, 2006, Taylor was arrested while trying to flee Nigeria after learning that the Nigerian government had agreed to deport him to Liberia to face trial for war crimes.

Given the instability prevailing in Liberian territory, the Government of the Netherlands accepted that the trial against Taylor be held at the international court in The Hague and the United Kingdom, for its part, made its prisons available for the former president to serve his sentence imposed on him.

Three months later, Taylor arrived in The Hague charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity that included murdering civilians, using women and girls as sex slaves, recruiting child soldiers and supplying weapons to the RUF during the war. Sierra Leonean civilian, which lasted from 1991 to 2002 and caused around 50,000 deaths.

The process began in June 2007, 110 witnesses were summoned, and it lasted until March 2011. In April 2013, the Special Court for Sierra Leone installed in The Hague found him guilty of the charges against him. The ruling was upheld in September of that year and Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison.