By Monrovia, Liberia – Although the president of Liberia is taking steps to establish the much-needed war crimes court, he has already come under fire for his selection for a crucial position inside the court.
The controversy serves as a stark reminder that victims of the nation’s civil conflicts will likely never receive justice. On May 2, President Joseph Boakai, in response to years of local and international pressure, signed an executive order establishing an office tasked with establishing the court to try war crimes. However, he designated attorney Jonathan Massaquoi to oversee the procedure in late June. Massaquoi defended the ex-wife of former president Charles Taylor against charges of war crimes.
Additionally, he represented Agnes Reeves Taylor when she filed a slander lawsuit against Defenders of the Victims of War Crimes. Additionally, Massaquoi represented former rebel commander Gibril Massaquoi, a non-related Sierra Leonean who was imprisoned for 20 years in 2023 by a Swiss court for a series of rapes, torture, and murders that he and other Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels committed in Liberia between 1999 and 2003.
Between 1989 and 2003, the West African nation saw two civil conflicts that claimed an estimated 250,000 lives and ended in rape, cannibalism, mutilation, and killings. In 2017, Reeves Taylor was taken into custody in her own country of Britain. She was accused of participating in crimes carried out by Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) during the country’s first civil war, leading to charges of torture.
However, in 2019, she was freed after a judge dismissed the accusations against her. Director of the non-governmental organization Global Justice and Research Hassan Bility was one of the rights advocates whom Reeves Taylor attacked in her slander lawsuit.
He informed AFP that the matter was still open. When asked if he was pleased that Massaquoi had been appointed to the tribunal, he responded, “We do not think that the victims’ suffering should be commercialized in any way.” The leader of the Liberian Massacre Survivors Association, Peterson Sonyah, was not pleased either. “It hurts me to see those who fought against us war victims in court going to spearhead a position at the war crimes special court of Liberia,” he stated. “We feel hurt.” It was blatantly disrespectful to the activists who had worked so hard over the years to establish the tribunal. When AFP asked Massaquoi for comment, he did not reply.
The procedure will provide “justice and closure to the scars and memories” left by the “senseless” battles, according to President Boakai. However, human rights organizations have emphasized in a report to the UN that there is still more work to be done, even as they applaud recent efforts to establish the tribunal. For instance, they have emphasized that Boakai has not yet included any provisions for providing victims with compensation. Numerous convictions have been obtained outside of Liberia, despite the fact that no trials have occurred there.
Charles Taylor is currently serving a 50-year jail sentence in the United Kingdom for war crimes and crimes against humanity he committed in neighboring Sierra Leone.
Yet, he has not faced legal consequences for his deeds in Liberia. Many of the alleged warlords still have a lot of power in their local areas. Among the most well-known of them is Senator Prince Johnson, who was famously captured on camera drinking beer while his men executed former President Samuel Doe in a torture chamber in 1990.
Prince Johnson is well-known to have an ally in Jeremiah Koung, the vice president of the nation. Johnson had previously rejected a legislative motion in favor of a court, but in April he supported it. He swiftly changed his mind, saying that imposing the creation of this kind of court would be tantamount to “looking for trouble in the country”.
By: Alphanso G. Kalama
