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Tired of Taylor, Liberia leader focuses on rebuilding

Posted on: Friday, 27 January 2006, 12:19 CST

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.

Source: REUTERS

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