Africa's
most wanted man
Global law v local warlord
May 12th 2005 | LAGOS
The Economist
Nigeria is under pressure to extradite Charles Taylor
HE IS perhaps the vilest living African, but Nigeria had good cause to
grant Charles Taylor sanctuary in 2003. In August that year, Mr Taylor
was still the president of Liberia, but besieged in his capital by two
separate rebel armies. To avoid a bloodbath, Nigeria's president,
Olusegun Obasanjo, offered him refuge on condition that he came quietly
and ceased to involve himself in politics.
Liberia, a small West African state with a long history of
carnage, is now relatively calm, thanks to 15,000 UN peacekeepers. Its
transitional government, though corrupt, is nowhere near as bad as Mr
Taylor's crooked and murderous regime was. Elections are due in
October. Mr Taylor now lives in a luxurious villa in the eastern
Nigerian city of Calabar. But for how long?
Mr Taylor faces 17 charges of crimes against humanity and similar
offences, not for what he did to his homeland, but for the horrors he
inflicted on its neighbour, Sierra Leone. A UN-backed tribunal there
accuses him of fomenting Sierra Leone's brutal civil war in order to
loot its diamonds, thereby causing tens of thousands of deaths. It
wants Nigeria to extradite him.
Mr Obasanjo, understandably, does not want to be seen to break
his word. But the court's chief prosecutor, David Crane, argues that
his obligation to Mr Taylor is over because Mr Taylor has broken the
terms of his asylum. Last month Mr Crane accused Mr Taylor of having
been behind an attempt to assassinate Guinea's president, Lansana
Conté (an old enemy) in January. Confidential court documents
also concluded that Mr Taylor is plotting to topple the government of
Côte d'Ivoire, whose president is another of his enemies, and
that he slipped past his guards to meet collaborators in Burkina Faso
in February.
Nigeria has so far said that it will only surrender Mr Taylor to
an elected Liberian government. But on May 10th, the United States
Senate backed a resolution urging the Nigerians to hand him promptly
over to the court in Sierra Leone. The American government dislikes Mr
Taylor not only for the obvious reasons, but also because he trained as
a guerrilla in Libya and is believed to have laundered Sierra Leonean
diamonds through al-Qaeda. Nigeria is keen not to annoy America, since
it is lobbying for debt relief. Nigerian papers report that security
has been stepped up around Mr Taylor's villa.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist
Group. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/world/africa/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3968512