Monday 30 April 2012

Charles Taylor found guilty by the Special Court for Sierra Leone

On Friday Charles Taylor was found guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes and of crimes against humanity by the Special Court for Sierre Leone. Outside of Africa, the media is generally heralding this as a victory for international law and suggesting that the days when heads of state could shelter from international justice are over. In Africa and in other more realist quarters, not so much (see the Atlantic's coverage at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/victors-justice-whats-wrong-with-warlord-charles-taylors-conviction/256522/ and Spiked's coverage at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/12393/). The sentencing of Taylor, who will serve his sentence in the UK, maybe some kind of minor justice for the terror that the RUF waged in Sierra Leone during the civil war but it is unlikely that other heads of state (current or former) involved in formenting terror or ignoring the rule of law will now be in fear for their liberty. Outside of West Africa many people's knowledge of the Sierra Leone civil war comes from the hollywood film, Blood Diamonds. For a more complex picture of what brought Sierra Leone to civil war and of the tactics of terror deployed by the RUF, including rape and amputation by teenage soldiers, two books are essential: William Reno's Corruption and state politics in Sierra Leone (CUP, 1995) and Mariane Ferme's The underneath of things : violence, history, and the everyday in Sierra Leone (University of California Press, 2001). Reno's book is necessary for understanding how structural adjustment undermined patronage politics with the result that the state seized to be the primary goal of rebel forces. Ferme is an anthropologist and her account of how esoteric practices were transformed in the context of civil war I found useful for trying to understand the cultural politics of violence in the civil war. The invovlement of young soldiers in the civil war and their demobilisation has attracted a lot of commentary See e.g. Susan Shepler's "Globalizing Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone," in Youthscapes: The Popular, The National, The Global, December 2004, Denov, M. (2010), Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Daniel Hoffman, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Cultures and Practice of Violence)(Duke UP, 2011).

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