At last, an African despot faces justice.

last updated 8 January 2015

Africa

Thank you, President Bush, said Liberia’s The Analyst in an editorial. Liberians are well aware that our former dictator, Charles Taylor, would not have been arrested last week without your intervention. Taylor had been living in Nigeria, where he was exiled in 2003 after stepping down to end Liberia’s civil war. He was supposed to be extradited to Liberia to face charges of war crimes. But just two days after Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo agreed to the handover, Taylor “was reported vanished in thin air.” Only after Bush applied severe pressure, threatening to cancel an audience with Obasanjo, was Taylor “miraculously” found. Taylor will now stand trial. It is a “victory for diplomacy”—and for the rule of law.

Let this be a lesson to all “African despots,” said Asuman Bisiika in Uganda’s The Monitor. It doesn’t matter “how popular you are at home”—you must still face international justice. Taylor got off the hook for his brutality against Liberians. They chose to deal with the crimes of their civil war through a truth and reconciliation commission rather than through criminal trials of the warlords. Many Liberians have forgiven him; many would even have voted for him again. But Taylor committed crimes in other West African countries that aren’t so forgiving. He must now answer for the support he gave to the Revolutionary United Front, the rebel group in Sierra Leone that turned young children into ruthless killers. Such offenses “are quite commonplace in Africa. Many leaders on the continent have supported rebel groups, most of them thuggish and murderous.”

And they’ve gotten away with it, said South Africa’s Business Day in an editorial. African dictators “have plundered the continent with impunity” for half a century. Even the ones that were deposed weren’t punished. “Idi Amin’s ludicrous administration and homicidal rule in Uganda” earned him a posh exile in Saudi Arabia. Haile Mengistu Mariam, whose purges in Ethiopia killed 1 million of his people, “still lives happily in Zimbabwe.” The trial of Charles Taylor will be a turning point. It will mean that the world finally takes the suffering of Africans seriously enough to punish the perpetrators.