Liberian President Charles Taylor left Ghana after attending the opening of peace talks for his war-ravaged country, heading for home only hours after a UN prosecutor in Sierra Leone indicted him for crimes against humanity.
Taylor was seen off by the Ghanaian Foreign Minister Addo Akufo-Addo and Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the secretary general of a west African grouping organising the Liberian peace talks along with a UN-backed group.
The Liberian leader took a Ghana Airways flight to his capital Monrovia, accompanied by his 52-member entourage.
Earlier Wednesday, a special court probing excesses during a brutal civil war in Sierra Leone indicted Taylor for “bearing the greatest responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violation of international humanitarian law in Sierra Leone until November 13, 1996.”
The Liberian president was already under UN sanctions for allegedly backing Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, notorious for recruiting child soldiers and hacking off people’s limbs in the brutal war, which raged from 1991 until January last year and claimed up to 200,000 lives.
Ghana’s foreign minister said he had not received the indictment.
“It was drawn up three months ago, the timing is unfortunate. It is an embarrassment for us and could destabilise the talks,” he said.
The peace talks were the first time that the Liberian belligerents were to sit face to face.
The opening ceremony of the parleys was attended by the rebels from the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel group but boycotted by the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), a new insurgent movement holding more than half of Liberia.
Taylor’s forces now control only three of Liberia’s 15 counties.
Liberia’s 18 registered political parties and civil society groups will also take part in the talks, set to be brokered by former Nigerian president Abdulsalami Abubakar, and which the parley’s Ghanaian hosts said could go on for two weeks.
Taylor, a warlord in Liberia’s civil war that raged throughout the early 1990s, came to power after winning elections in 1997, the year that the seven-year conflict ended.
Source: GhanaWeb
