MONROVIA, Liberia - Liberian authorities have quietly released on bail a mercenary known as “Bob Marley,’’ who is accused of leading massacres in neighboring Ivory Coast last year that killed about 120 people.
The man, whose real name is Isaac Chegbo, has been implicated by both the United Nations and Human Rights Watch in several attacks, including one with machetes and rocket-propelled grenades that killed at least 37.
Chegbo, 39, who is known for his voluminous dreadlocks, is prohibited from leaving Liberia while on bail pending his trial on charges of “mercenarism.’’ The first-degree felony can carry the death penalty or life imprisonment if the defendant is convicted.
However, Daku Mulbah, the government attorney responsible for trying the case, said he was unaware of Chegbo’s whereabouts since his release on $1,000 bail in February.
“We had no knowledge of it,’’ said Mulbah, who said he still hoped to try the case next month against Chegbo.
Matt Wells, West Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch and the author of a report on the postelection violence in Ivory Coast, said Liberian authorities needed to monitor Chegbo vigilantly.
“Instead, it seems like relevant legal officials scarcely know his current whereabouts, or even that he was released,’’ Wells said.
The attacks came toward the end of a five-month conflict that erupted after Ivory Coast’s former president Laurent Gbagbo lost a runoff presidential election in November 2010 but tried to cling to power through force of arms.
The United Nations estimates at least 3,000 people died during the power struggle between Gbagbo and the current president, Alassane Ouattara, a conflict that experts say was exacerbated by violence from mercenaries recruited in neighboring Liberia.
Chegbo’s charge sheet says he and his colleagues were recruited to fight for Gbagbo in early 2011 and were promised free rein to loot.
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Related: World Court Whitewashes Ivory Coast War Crimes
When it happens installing their own man it's okay.
One who was not as lucky:
"Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, guilty of war crimes; Taylor conviction is 1st since WWII; linked to horrors in Sierra Leone" by Marlise Simons | New York Times, April 27, 2012
THE HAGUE - Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and once a powerful warlord, was convicted by an international tribunal Thursday of arming, supporting, and guiding a brutal rebel movement that committed mass atrocities in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s. He is the first head of state to be convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
Not that I'm trying to be flip about things Chuckie did while on CIA payroll; however, I don't pay attention to the court of world war criminals trying war crimes because I've never even seen an indictment for Bush, Bliar, Rumsfeld, et al.
Given the number of tin-pot Africans they haul in one could almost conclude that the globalist construct that forever excuses Israel is racist.
After 13 months of deliberation, a panel of three judges from Ireland, Samoa, and Uganda found Taylor guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, rape, slavery, and the use of child soldiers. But the judges said the prosecution failed to prove that Taylor directly commanded the rebels responsible.
Related: Soccer Match Monday: Somalia's Kid Soldiers
Well, there are child soldiers and then there are child soldiers.
The conflict in Sierra Leone became notorious for its gruesome
tactics, including the calculated mutilation of thousands of civilians,
the widespread use of drugged child soldiers, and the mining of diamonds
to pay for guns and ammunition. A new, sinister rebel vocabulary
pointed to the horrors: applying “a smile’’ meant cutting off the upper
and lower lips of a victim; giving “long sleeves’’ meant hacking off the
hands; and giving “short sleeves’’ meant cutting the arm above the
elbow.
Prosecutors said Taylor’s part in the devastation was motivated not by ideology, but by a quest for power and money - “pure avarice,’’ in the words of David M. Crane, the US prosecutor who indicted him in 2003. Rebels supplied Taylor with “a continuous supply’’ of diamonds, often in exchange for arms and ammunition, the court found, allowing him to send what prosecutors said amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars to offshore companies.
Yet investigators never unraveled the web hiding this presumed fortune and Taylor pleaded penury, leaving the court to foot the bill for a defense that cost $100,000 per month in lawyers, staff, and rent.
Still, the trial has brought “a sense of relief,’’ said Ibrahim Tommy, who leads the Center for Accountability and Rule of Law, a rights group in Freetown. “I’m not sure it will bring closure to the victims,’’ he said, but the trial was “a genuine effort to ensure accountability for the crimes in Sierra Leone.’’
The tribunal, called the Special Court for Sierra Leone, has already sentenced eight other leading members from different forces and rebel groups. Taylor, who has maintained his innocence, will be sentenced in the coming weeks. There is no death penalty in international criminal law and any jail term would be served in a British prison.
The fighting for control over one of the world’s poorest regions also involved Liberia, where many more died, and threatened to spill over into neighboring Guinea and Ivory Coast. But only crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002 are within the court’s mandate, and Taylor is the special court’s last defendant. His trial was moved here, to The Hague and a second court nearby, for fear of causing unrest in the region where he still has followers.
Not since Karl Doenitz, the German admiral who briefly succeeded Hitler upon his death, was tried and sentenced by the International Military Tribunal has a head of state been convicted by an international court.
Chuckie is in rare company.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, died in his cell before his war crimes trial ended.
Yes, is it not strange that Slobo died just as he was going to spill the beans about "Al-CIA-Duh?"
Slobo also the poor-white example regarding those who fail to go along with the globalist order.
Jean Kambanda, the first person sentenced for the crime of genocide, received a life sentence for his role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but he was a former prime minister, not the head of state. The former president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, has been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, but his trial has not yet begun.
Related: Hitler Alive in Africa
During Taylor’s lengthy trial, which began in 2006, the judges heard testimony from 115 witnesses.
To buttress their case, prosecutors used radio and telephone intercepts and brought in radio operators who had connected Taylor’s mansion in Monrovia to the rebels in Sierra Leone.
Taylor has ties to the Boston area. He arrived on a student visa in 1972 and studied economics at Chamberlayne Junior College in Newton and Bentley College in Waltham. He became a leading Liberian dissident, and in 1977 he returned to Liberia, joining Samuel Doe’s government after a coup in 1980.
Translation: He was recruited by the CIA and then deployed on a mission.
With CIA help.
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Related: Globe Backs Down on Liberian Dictator Story
It's why I'm not really into reading or analyzing their stuff much anymore.
Who needs to plow through more intelligence agency operation bulls*** to know that's what it is?
If it looks like it, smells like it, and tastes like it....
