By Colin M. Waugh
Campaigner, rebel, fugitive, insurgent commander, commodity kingpin, elected president, exile and at last prisoner, Charles Taylor sought to steer his state to alter yet as an alternative ignited a clash which destroyed Liberia in over a decade of violence, greed and private ambition. Taylor's takeover threw a lot of the neigbouring zone into turmoil, till he was once eventually dropped at face justice within the Hague for his position in Sierra Leone's civil war.
In this striking and eye-opening ebook, Colin Waugh attracts on a number of assets, stories and unique interviews — together with with Taylor himself — to recount the tale of what particularly occurred in the course of those turbulent years. In doing so, he examines either the lifetime of Charles Taylor, in addition to the customarily self-interested efforts of the overseas neighborhood to first store Liberia from catastrophe, then, having did not achieve this, to carry to justice the guy it deems so much guilty for its disintegration.
Read or Download Charles Taylor and Liberia: Ambition and Atrocity in Liberia's Lone Star State PDF
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Extra info for Charles Taylor and Liberia: Ambition and Atrocity in Liberia's Lone Star State
Example text
This guy came back boasting he had a Master s and he comes and takes this girl from me , Taylor remembers. I said, oh my God, this is just too much for me. I have to go to school I m just going to have to speed up the trip to America. 4 That was difficult because of his work commitments in Liberia at the time, and in fact it would have been impossible for him to go to university right then. But Charles had a friend who put him in touch with a junior college in Boston and he soon started the college application process.
5 Somehow, it helped being known as an African rather than a black American, and Taylor played the part to take advantage of people s attitudes. Already some American blacks, especially in the South, were adopting African dress and vocabulary in an attempt both to emphasize their cultural roots and to avoid discrimination, so being a natural African made it all the easier, and Charles Taylor milked it to the full. He later said: The people of South Boston formed a kind of cult around me. As soon as whites realized I was African, they changed their attitude about me.
8 A century ago in the villages of rural Liberia, designated human instruments of leopard societies were believed to be involved in sacrificial abductions of victims, often children, inflicting nocturnal mutilations and carrying out brutal ritual murders to assuage the animal spirits by providing them with their necessary human offering. An adult male of a village, living as a farmer or tradesman by day but as a leopard society member and clandestine leopard man by night, would steal off after dark and later return fully clad in his animal guise, then abduct a young child from his own or a neighbouring village into the bush for ritual tattooing, entailing the carving of symbols or marks into the skin of the victim with a knife, resulting in permanent scars, sexual mutilation or even their sacrifice.