Tired of Taylor, Liberia leader focuses on rebuilding

By Alphonso Toweh

MONROVIA (Reuters) – Liberians should concentrate on
rebuilding their wrecked country rather than chasing war
criminals, its new president said on Friday, adding she was
tired of talking about her exiled predecessor Charles Taylor.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-trained economist sworn in
as Africa’s first elected woman president on January 16, faces
foreign pressure to ask Nigeria to extradite Taylor to be tried
for war crimes before a U.N.-backed court in Sierra Leone.

Human rights campaigners insist Taylor must face trial for
killings, mutilations and rape committed during more than a
decade of conflict in Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone.

But some fear trying the former warlord could upset
Liberia’s fragile peace established since he left in 2003.

“When it comes to Mr. Taylor I am not embarrassed, I am
just tired of it,” Johnson-Sirleaf told reporters at the
Executive Mansion in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, a
war-shattered city lacking mains electricity and safe running
water.

“We just want to get on with our national development
agenda. We do not want Mr. Taylor’s issue to be the issue that
constrained us … to be (the) issue that causes us not to be
able to do what we have to do here for Liberian people.”

Even as Johnson-Sirleaf appealed for people to focus on
rebuilding the country, a coalition of local and international
human rights groups sent her a letter renewing their call for
her to ensure Taylor was brought to trial.

TWIN WARS

The 17 war crimes charges have been lodged against Taylor
in a special U.N.-backed court probing Sierra Leone’s brutal
war, which stemmed from Liberia’s own civil war that Taylor
started in 1989 and which killed an estimated 250,000 people.

Some 50,000 more died in Sierra Leone, where Taylor is
accused of supplying guns to rebel fighters in return for rough
diamonds dug from muddy pits near the border between the two
countries.

“While a request from you for Taylor’s surrender to the
Special Court should not be needed given his outstanding
indictment, it could prove determinative,” said the letter sent
to Johnson-Sirleaf by the “Campaign Against Impunity,” which
said it represented some 300 human rights and other groups.

Nigeria, which offered Taylor refuge in 2003 as part of an
internationally brokered deal to end another bout of fighting
in Liberia, has said it will only hand him over to an elected
Liberian government and will not send him to a third country.

Johnson-Sirleaf said she had discussed Taylor with Nigerian
President Olusegun Obasanjo at this week’s African Union summit
in Sudan but declined to give details of what was said.

The Campaign Against Impunity said the window of
opportunity to try Taylor in Sierra Leone was rapidly closing
as the Special Court would come under international pressure to
conclude its work. The group urged Johnson-Sirleaf to ensure
Taylor was brought to justice.

“We believe the victims of the crimes committed in Sierra
Leone — including murder, rape and other sexual violence,
mutilation and widespread use of child soldiers — deserve
nothing less,” it said in its letter.