From US Prisoner to the Monster of Liberia.

[00:00:00]When Charles Taylor found himself before an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, it was the end of a long and tumultuous journey both for himself and for his home country of Liberia. Taylor had been the president of Liberia, but he'd been brought down by a combination of his own shortcomings as a leader and sustained international condemnation of the many atrocities he was responsible for both in his own country and in neighboring Sierra Leone. It was an unlikely rise and fall for Taylor who had once been trained as a teacher. His journey to power in the Liberian capital Monrovia would wind through the halls of an American university to a high-ranking position in the Liberian government to being locked up in a Massachusetts jail cell which he made a daring escape from.

[00:00:40]His quest for power would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Liberians as well as the wholesale looting and destruction of a nation that had once been among Africa's most prosperous. In order to properly understand the story of Charles Taylor, it's first necessary to understand the country he hailed from. Liberia's unique history began in the United States with the founding of an organization called the American Colonization Society in the 1820s. You see, many well-meaning American whites believed that former black slaves could not successfully be integrated into American society and that the best shot they had at prosperity was to, quote, go back to Africa and start new lives there. This is, of course, despite the rather obvious fact that almost none of the African-Americans living in the US at the time had even been born in Africa, much less had any social or familial ties there. Beginning in 1822, the ACS and other similar organizations began sending shiploads of African-Americans to a region of West Africa known as the Pepper Coast where they set up colonies.

[00:01:39]In 1847, these colonies would join together in the Republic of Liberia. The descendants of the colonists, known as Americo-Liberians, had almost nothing in common with the indigenous people who already lived there. They wore Western-style dress, belonged to Christian churches, and took their cultural cues from the United States.

[00:01:55]They also held a stranglehold on political and economic power for 150 years after the country's founding considering every other Liberian a second class. In essence, the Americo-Liberians ran the country the way the European powers ran their African colonies. This had both positives and negatives. Liberia was the only country on the entire continent not to be colonized during the scramble for Africa. Ethiopia wasn't colonized but it was invaded and occupied by fascist Italy from 1936 to 1941 and the Americo-Liberians connections with the Western financial world allowed for trade with multinational corporations.

[00:02:27]Particularly notable was the Firestone Tire Company which built the world's largest rubber plantation in Liberia, most of which was shipped to the United States for use in automobile tires.

[00:02:37]However, whatever wealth came into Liberia from rubber, timber, and mining industries was almost entirely hoarded by the Americo-Liberians. Despite being a small minority of the country's population, they controlled most of the land, businesses, and schools.

[00:02:50]Indigenous Liberians were usually not permitted to join the True Whig Party which dominated elections at the local and national level for decades and were routinely forced off their traditional homes and farms through a predatory system of taxation designed to make them wage laborers for the big multinational companies that made up the majority of Liberia's economy in the mid-20th century. It was into this environment that Charles MacArthur Taylor was born on January the 28th, 1948 in the small town of Arthington, just north of Liberia's capital of Monrovia. Charles was the son of an Americo-Liberian father and a native Liberian mother who had become a domestic servant in the Taylor household prompting quite the local scandal despite the fact that Taylor's parents got married before he was born. It was decided that the best path forward for baby Charles was to adopt him into a local prominent Americo-Liberian family, the Ciscos, at the age of 8 months. Now, there wasn't a lot of money to go around for Taylor's family back then but Charles was still able to attend school graduating from a teacher's academy and beginning work teaching minors from the rural hinterlands of Liberia who had never received formal schooling before. But village life was too provincial for Charles Taylor's taste, so he moved to Monrovia and took a correspondence course in accounting. He parlayed this into a job with the Ministry of Finance, but his ambition stretched further. The one certain way to earn respect in Liberia, you see, was to get a college degree from an American university. So, in the early 1970s, Taylor moved to Boston hoping to study at the prestigious Harvard University. Well, Taylor didn't get into Harvard. His grades weren't good enough, so he had to settle for Bentley College located just outside of Boston in the city of Waltham. Initially studying accounting, he soon found the subject boring and switched to economics. Charles Taylor really liked living in America. Despite the fact that he had to work multiple jobs to pay his way through school, he felt that studying was less important than the fun he could have. He spent his rent money on new suits to wear to parties, a flashy sports car, and nights out in Boston or New York. He also liked women and had a number of girlfriends, one of whom gave birth to his first son, who was known as Chucky Taylor. After graduating from Bentley, Taylor became involved in a number of business interests in America, most of which involved importing things into Liberia.

[00:04:51]He also became actively involved in the Liberian diaspora community in America, which was becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to the regime of President William Tolbert. Tolbert was caught between opposing forces who wanted to either liberalize Liberia and allow greater participation by non-Americo-Liberians or to maintain control by any means necessary, including the use of violence. In 1979, a protest by Liberians against increased taxes on rice imports ended in violence when Tolbert's troops opened fire on the crowd, starting a riot which ended with over 200 people dead and 700 injured.

[00:05:23]Even though Tolbert soon after repealed the rice tax, more and more people, both within and outside Liberia, believed it was time for change, that the old order just had to go. Charles Taylor was one of these young radicals who advocated for change from America, beyond the reach of Liberian government sanction or censorship. He joined the Union of Liberian Associations in America, or ULAA, and just a heads-up, there are a lot more acronyms coming. And he rose to the leadership of the Boston chapter of the organization, oh which was increasingly dedicated to political activism against the Tolbert regime.

[00:05:55]However, he found himself struggling to get elected to national leadership positions in the organization because despite his mixed parentage, he was viewed by his peers as essentially being an Americo-Liberian and therefore not plugged in to native Liberians grievances with the government in Monrovia. Still, he was part of a group of ULAA delegates that was invited to return to Liberia in February 1980 by President Tolbert to advise him on how to make further reforms. Taylor was still in Monrovia when the situation changed dramatically. On the night of April the 12th, a military coup led by 28-year-old Master Sergeant Samuel Doe stormed the executive mansion and broke into President Tolbert's bedroom. The 66-year-old Tolbert was shot to death in front of his wife, then was ritualistically disemboweled and his body tossed into a mass grave along with 27 other people killed in the coup, including two of his children. Samuel Doe, a native Liberian from the Krahn tribe, quickly consolidated his rise to power by forming the People's Redemption Council or PRC, of which he was the head, and he would govern the country.

[00:06:54]13 other high-ranking officials of Tolbert's administration were put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to death for crimes against the people of Liberia without being permitted to even offer a defense. 10 days after the coup, they were tied to poles on Barclay Beach and executed by firing squad. It was not a clean execution. Most of the soldiers assigned to the firing squad were drunk and had difficulty hitting their targets. Nobody realized at the time, but these deaths were only the first of many that would follow over the course of the next 25 years, a nearly unending cycle of violence that Charles Taylor would become intimately involved in.

[00:07:24]Amidst a brain drain of Americo-Liberians who fled the country fearing reprisals now that their rule in Liberia was at an end, Charles Taylor was one of the only people left in the capital with any kind of education or government experience. Samuel Doe and many of his ministers were illiterate.

[00:07:39]Taylor quickly took advantage of this and made himself an indispensable advisor to Doe's regime. He was probably equally motivated by the chance to make a new Liberia, as well as the opportunity to personally advance himself. Taylor was appointed director general of the General Services Agency or GSA, which was responsible for government procurement, meaning large amounts of cash funnelled through it on a regular basis. The new Liberian regime was flush with money, particularly after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States. Seeking to build a new coalition of allies against communism, Reagan authorized large amounts of foreign aid to countries in the Western orbit, which included Liberia. Now, for most of Liberia's ruling class, however, this foreign aid was a golden opportunity to enrich themselves at the country's expense, rather than make meaningful attempts to improve the lives of most Liberian citizens. Out of around $500 million in foreign aid sent to Liberia during the 1980s, an estimated $300 million was siphoned off by Samuel Doe's government for personal use. While Taylor was in charge of the GSA, a large percentage of this money ran through his office. Initially, it seemed that Taylor made at least some effort to run his department responsibly and keep proper accounts, unlike his colleagues who were openly and flagrantly corrupt. But, in a government that was little better than a kleptocracy, Taylor could not resist the opportunity to dip into public office himself, which was eventually to bring about his downfall. Now, you might be forgiven for believing that the corruption charges levied against Taylor, which caused his resignation in 1983, were a touch on the ironic side, considering that corruption and graft were so endemic in the regime. In reality, the allegation that Taylor siphoned off almost a million dollars in government money was more about Taylor's enemies within the government moving to get rid of him than about any wrongdoing on his part, although he probably did steal the money in question, but that wasn't really the point, was it? Taylor had made a lot of enemies in his time running the GSA, centralizing much of government procurement so that it ran through his office, denying other ministers their own gravy trains that they could use to enrich themselves and buy the loyalty of allies. There was also, once again, the question of his parentage. Taylor was still widely seen as a holdover of the Americo-Liberian establishment with little in common with most of the members of Doe's government, who were increasingly members of Doe's own Krahn tribe. Taylor made an attempt to defend himself, but soon realized he'd been outmaneuvered and made plans to get out of the country. He knew full well that falling out of favor with Samuel Doe's government usually meant ending up in front of a firing squad.

[00:10:03]So, Taylor went back to America in October 1983, pursued by a Liberian arrest warrant that the FBI acted on in May 1984, arresting him in Boston and locking him up in prison in nearby Plymouth. There, he would remain for over a year, stuck in a kind of legal limbo while US authorities tried to figure out what the hell to do with him.

[00:10:21]Taylor used his American connections as well. He retained as his legal counsel former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who argued that extraditing Taylor back to Liberia would likely result in his execution by the Doe regime, which was probably true, and that he was innocent of the charges against him anyway, which was probably not true. US authorities were conflicted. They wanted to appease their African ally, but at the same time, they were growing more and more uncomfortable with the authoritarian bent that Samuel Doe was taking, particularly his anti-terrorism operations that seemed much more based on ethnic identities than any actual wrongdoing. They also knew that if they put Taylor on a plane back to Liberia and he ended up being murdered when he got there, it would cause a huge international outcry against them. The situation resolved itself on September 15th, 1985, when Taylor and four other inmates broke out of the Plymouth County House of Correction by sawing through the bars on a window and then lowering themselves to the ground via dotted bed sheets. Holy [ __ ] you did the movie escape. There have been allegations for decades that US authorities were involved in Taylor's escape, that they let him get away so as to no longer have to deal with the thorny issue of extradition. Evidence in favor of that hypothesis includes the fact that no one had ever successfully broken out of Plymouth in the facility's 75-year history, and that while the four inmates who escaped with Taylor were quickly recaptured, authorities didn't seem to look particularly hard for Taylor himself. He remained in America for weeks after his escape before crossing the border to Mexico and then going back to Africa. Taylor ended up in Ghana, where he began plotting his revenge against Samuel Doe and his government.

[00:11:52]Taylor was far from the only Liberian persecuted by Doe. His regime was running the country's economy into the ground and stealing everything it could from the treasury. It won an election that was widely considered by international authorities to have been fraudulent and who was using the army to systematically murder members of the Gio and Mano tribes for no concrete reason other than just ethnic hatred. There were plenty of people who wanted Doe removed from power by any means necessary, and Taylor believed that he should be the leader of that movement.

[00:12:21]Charles Taylor was one of the founders of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, or the NPFL, I warned you about those acronyms, whose stated aim was the deposition of Samuel Doe. Over the course of the next four years, Taylor moved around West Africa, spending time in Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire, also known in English as the Ivory Coast, recruiting allies and gathering resources. He also spent time in Libya receiving training and support from Muammar Gaddafi, who was always happy to make trouble for allies of the United States. Taylor showed early on that he had no qualms about using violence to achieve his aims. NPFL troops are alleged to have participated in a coup in Burkina Faso in 1987, murdering President Thomas Sankara in order to replace him with Blaise Compaoré, who was an ally of the organization. Taylor and the NPFL could also count on the friendship of Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who had sworn revenge against Samuel Doe after his son-in-law was murdered in the early days of the Liberian regime. These connections not only allowed Taylor to build a coalition against Doe, but also allowed him to outmaneuver for rivals for undisputed leadership of the NPFL. By Christmas Eve 1989, Taylor was ready to launch his revolution. He and 168 NPFL fighters crossed the border into Liberia alongside hundreds of troops from Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. They scored a series of quick victories against surprised and unprepared Liberian border guards, advancing deeper into the country and attracting more and more followers to their banner as they went. They had chosen their invasion point well. Nimba County was the home of the Gio and Mano tribes who had been persecuted and attacked by Samuel Doe's Krahn-dominated troops for years, and there were plenty of men and indeed some women who were eager to fight against him. Doe only made this animosity worse when his troops retaliated against the civilian population of Nimba County rather than attacking the rebels head-on. Liberian army troops massacred entire villages, burning them to the ground after stealing everything of [music] value.

[00:14:14]The death toll quickly rose into the thousands while tens of thousands more fled the combat zone, many leaving Liberia entirely. Charles Taylor supplied the world with his own status updates on the conflict. He had possession of a satellite phone, allegedly given to him by the US government, that he used to call the BBC's Africa service and tell them what the NPFL was doing. In the early months of the conflict, that meant reporting gains on the ground and a growing force.

[00:14:36]Samuel Doe, meanwhile, was reacting badly to the growing crisis. He instigated massacres in Monrovia of alleged NPFL collaborators, causing Liberian army troops who were at Krahn's to defect, depleting his own ranks and swelling those of the NPFL. The NPFL fought just as dirty as Doe's troops did. Many of their new recruits were children, orphans who volunteered or were forced to join to get revenge on the people who had killed their families because they were starving and had no other way to feed themselves or simply because they thought it would be a bit of an adventure. These youths received little if any formal military training and were routinely given drugs before going into battle to make them more aggressive and less fearful. As the NPFL advanced through eastern Liberia, they moved into the homelands of the Krahn tribe, and the violence visited upon the Gio and Mano by Doe's troops was now repaid in kind. More civilian massacres and pillaging took place this time with the INPFL as the perpetrators. Tens of thousands more civilians fled Liberia to escape the rampaging armies. Samuel Doe was rapidly losing control of his country. In May 1990, Taylor captured Buchanan, Liberia's second largest port, and rebel troops now controlled most of Liberia except for Monrovia and its suburbs, Doe's final stronghold. This was despite the fact that the rebel army had split into two factions following a falling out between Taylor and another rebel leader, Prince Johnson, who formed his own group, the INPFL, to separately advance on the capital. International diplomatic efforts now kicked in attempting to prevent more bloodshed by convincing Samuel Doe to step down and go into exile. The embattled president refused to go and the war went on.

[00:16:07]Charles Taylor, meanwhile, increasingly seemed to have lost control of his own army. Rampaging bands of INPFL fighters were burning and looting with impunity through the countryside, mostly targeting civilians rather than government troops. One of the major problems was that INPFL troops weren't staying. Instead, they were given looting rights to whatever they could plunder from enemy territory. In a classic example of perverse incentive, the INPFL suddenly found every village and town they came across to be enemy territory and responded accordingly.

[00:16:34]Taylor was also distracted by internal rivals for the post-war leadership of Liberia both within and from outside [music] the INPFL. Several high-profile political leaders died under suspicious circumstances with most people pointing the finger right at Taylor. Whatever the reason for the INPFL's stalled advance on the outskirts of Monrovia, it was to prove a fatal mistake. The INPFL troops under Prince Johnson arrived in the capital first in mid-July. With his army largely composed of professional soldiers, Johnson was viewed as a better alternative by many Liberians and by the international community. Better than Taylor's INPFL as any rate, which enraged Taylor. He made plain from the start his ambition to rule Liberia himself once Doe was deposed. Outside intervention then came in. The Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, decided to send a force of peacekeepers to Liberia to restore order. This intervention force called ECOMOG was composed primarily of troops from Nigeria who had a vested interest in the conflict. Nigeria had long enjoyed good relations with Liberia since both were English-speaking West African nations and Charles Taylor's primary allies, Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso, who were Francophone nations that could potentially supersede the Nigerians when it came to influence and trade in the embattled country.

[00:17:46]Taylor made another mistake at this point, declaring ECOWAS to be his enemy and attacking them when they landed troops in Liberia, meaning that almost immediately the peacekeeping force was now in active combat. In a stunning turn of events, the INPFL and the Liberian army signed a ceasefire agreement, agreeing to turn their combined firepower on Taylor and the NPFL. Samuel Doe believed that this pact, together with ECOMOG, was potentially the last chance to save his presidency. But, Prince Johnson double-crossed him, arresting him in the ECOMOG commander's office on September the 9th, 1990. In one of the conflict's most brutal episodes, Doe was tortured to death in front of Prince Johnson, who had the whole thing videotaped and released to the international news media. With Doe gone, there were now two opposing sides in the civil war. The NPFL controlled most of the country, but were unable to fully capture Monrovia once ECOMOG arrived on the scene. And the official government of Liberia, called the IGNU, was propped up by ECOMOG and in actuality controlled almost nothing except for the capital city itself.

[00:18:46]Unable to break the stalemate, Taylor decided to form his own government based in Liberia's second largest city, Bong.

[00:18:51]His government, officially called the NPRAG, but normally known as Greater Liberia, had control over most of the economic output of the country, including the Firestone rubber plantation, Harbel, and diamond mines.

[00:19:03]The proceeds from exports of these resources paid for arms for Taylor's army, which in turn allowed him to recruit more troops. In addition to his continuing fight against ECOMOG, Taylor expanded the war by providing arms, financing, training, and even soldiers to the Revolutionary United Front or RUFF, a rebel group which invaded Sierra Leone across the Liberian border in March 1991. The RUFF were, if possible, even more brutal than the NPFL, not only killing and pillaging, but also mutilating thousands of civilians by cutting off hands and arms with machetes. They would taunt their victims by asking if they preferred short sleeve, cutting off a hand at the wrist, or long sleeve, cutting off the entire arm at the elbow or even higher. After 2 years of fighting and failed peace negotiations, Liberia was still locked in a deadly stalemate between the forces of Charles Taylor and his opponents.

[00:19:52]Those opponents were primarily ECOMOG, but now also included another faction called ULIMO, composed of Liberians opposed to Taylor, who had formed in Sierra Leone, crossed into Liberia after doing battle with the RUFF, and captured two western provinces from Taylor.

[00:20:06]Wanting to retake the initiative, Taylor ordered an all-out assault on Monrovia in October 1992 in a campaign called Operation Octopus. In one of the conflict's most appalling scenes, the vanguard of the attacking force was the small boys unit or SBU, composed of children as young as eight, who were given rudimentary combat training, hopped up on drugs like brown brown, that's uh cocaine mixed with gunpowder because what the [ __ ] or bubbles, amphetamines, and then thrown into battle as cannon fodder. This had a devastating effect on the morale of the ECOMOG troops, particularly when efforts to get the child soldiers to lay down their arms and defect failed, and they were forced to fire upon them to protect themselves. Operation Octopus failed to capture Monrovia, and ECOMOG pursued the NPFL out of the city, retaking ground that had been lost Taylor back in 1990.

[00:20:53]The tide of the battle was now turning against Taylor as another faction opposed him, the LPC, attacked his forces from the southeast. In addition to the attacks from ECOMOG and ULIMO, Buchanan was successfully captured by ECOMOG in 1993, and in September 1994, they took Bonga, Taylor's capital. Even Taylor's close allies began to desert him calling for a negotiated ceasefire to end the bloodshed since it was now obvious a military victory was unlikely.

[00:21:17]ECOWAS was also exhausted with the political crisis in Nigeria making it even more untenable to keep large numbers of Nigerian troops fighting in Liberia. More and more armed factions were springing up each jockeying for position and fighting each other for power and influence at the negotiating table. Finally in August 1995 the principal combatants agreed to a ceasefire at a conference in Ghana.

[00:21:37]Charles Taylor made a triumphal entrance into Monrovia one of six ruling council members that would oversee Liberia's governance until elections could be called in 1996. These elections were postponed however when fighting broke out again in Monrovia in April 1996 as Taylor's forces fought one of his rivals Roosevelt Johnson's ULIMOJ faction in bloody clashes that destroyed much of what was left standing in the capital.

[00:22:00]International citizens caught in the crossfire fled to the US Embassy pursued by the NPFL who engaged in a brief shootout with American Marines guarding the Embassy when they attempted to break in. Charles Taylor having been unable to achieve power in Liberia through force now attempted to do so at the ballot box. He formed his own political party the National Patriotic Party or NPP to contest the election and began an extensive public relations campaign to remake his image tarnished as it was by the NPFL's conduct during the war. In an effort to make himself appear more native he changed his middle name from MacArthur to Gankay a Gola word meaning strong one. He also made attempts to integrate himself into the tribal societies and hierarchies that had traditionally formed the power structure of the various Liberian ethnic groups of the interior. However he took a shortcut rather than embark on a years long process of ascending to the top of the tribal pyramid the traditional way he created an association of officials of traditional societies throughout Liberia and then declared himself the leader of this organization the Dokpannah or supreme chief. The result of the election on July the 19th 1997. Surprised outside observers, Taylor was overwhelmingly elected president of Liberia with over 75% of the vote, his party capturing huge majorities in the National Assembly. Initial suspicions that the election had been rigged were dispelled as international observers could find few faults with the way the election was conducted. Explaining why the Liberian people chose one of the country's most notorious warlords to lead them voluntarily is pretty difficult to answer. The best answer anyone can provide besides the people who voted for Taylor because they had supported him throughout the war was pragmatism.

[00:23:33]Taylor was the one best positioned to end the bloodshed and bring stability [music] back to Liberia after seven years of civil war if for no other reason than he was one of the chief facilitators of that conflict. On the other hand, there were fears that if Taylor wasn't elected, he would simply refuse to recognize the result and return to the battlefield. Perhaps one quoted voter put it best when he said, "He spoiled Liberia, so let him fix it."

[00:23:56]It seemed like the conflict was finally over. other factions acknowledged the result of the election. Taylor took power in Monrovia peacefully inviting members of opposition groups into his cabinet in a show of national unity. The various armed groups began disarming overseen by the United Nations and it seemed like Liberia could begin the arduous process of rebuilding itself.

[00:24:15]This was complicated by the fact that Liberia was now broke. It had a national debt of over $3 billion against annual revenues of $41 billion, the result of nearly two decades of war and looting of the treasury and Liberia's resources to fund it and its leaders own personal greed. Few businesses from outside the country were willing to risk investing in such an unstable nation and bank loans were hard to come by. To raise money, Taylor resorted to the same shady business deals he'd done while based Bonga, chiefly trading weapons for diamonds with the RUF who were still tearing apart Sierra Leone and then selling the diamonds to whoever was willing to buy them. It was this trade in so-called conflict diamonds, better known as blood diamonds, that would end up causing Charles Taylor's undoing.

[00:24:57]Unfortunately, for Liberia, its reprieve from violence was short-lived. Once in power, Taylor created two new paramilitary organizations that were loyal only to him, the Anti-Terrorist Unit or ATU, which was commanded by Taylor's American-born son, Chucky, and the Special Security Service or SSS, commanded by Benjamin Yeaton, who had been a loyal subordinate of Taylor's since he was 14. These two units served as Taylor's personal bodyguard and private army, and they were notorious for their criminal activities, including beatings, torture, looting, and murder.

[00:25:26]Worse still was another spate of violence in September 1998 when Monrovia was again the scene of an intense gun battle between Taylor's loyalists and the troops of Roosevelt Johnson, who had previously clashed in 1996. After his compound in the city was attacked by Chucky Taylor and Benjamin Yeaton, Johnson ran for the US Embassy attempting to seek asylum. Taylor's troops fired on Johnson's party while they were speaking to embassy officials, wounding two Americans and causing a brief exchange of gunfire between American Marines and the Liberians. In the end, Johnson was successfully evacuated by helicopter, his faction permanently out of the game with more than 300 of them killed. But for Charles Taylor, it came at the cost of further strained relations with the US, who were already unimpressed with Liberia's new president. There were a number of reasons for the souring of what had been a special relationship between the two countries. Taylor's record of human rights abuses, his increasingly dictatorial leadership style, the fact that he was still technically a fugitive in the United States dating back to 1985. But it was the trade in blood diamonds with Sierra Leone's RUF that drew the most negative attention.

[00:26:30]Taylor, like many autocrats, became paranoid that someone, somewhere was plotting to overthrow him. So, he began an extensive crackdown on internal dissent. Anyone suspected of harboring any negative opinions towards Taylor's government risked arrest or execution.

[00:26:44]Meanwhile, Taylor not only continued his clandestine support for the RUF, he also sponsored another insurgency in Guinea, which drew the ire of that country's government. Guinea retaliated by sponsoring another new rebel group, LURD, which was composed of anti-Taylor Liberians. They invaded Liberia in April 1999, touching off the second Liberian Civil War. Taylor was now in a three-way conflict with the governments of Sierra Leone and Guinea, as well as the assorted proxy groups, and he was running out of friends to support him.

[00:27:13]In 2000, Liberia was slapped with international sanctions designed to force Taylor to abandon his support for the RUF, hamstringing his ability to fund any troops, including his own. In Sierra Leone, a 1,200-strong British intervention force helped to turn the tide of the civil war against the RUF, finally ending the conflict in 2002 after 11 years. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, the American government was even more hostile to Charles Taylor when it came out that Al-Qaeda was purchasing diamonds in Liberia so as to make their monetary assets more portable, leading the Bush administration to accuse the Liberians of sponsoring terrorism. By 2002, LURD was less than 50 km from Monrovia, staging hit-and-run raids in Taylor strongholds all over the western half of the country. Then, in 2003, another rebel group, MODEL, sponsored by the Ivorian government, who at this point had also turned against Taylor, attacked from the south. By the summer of 2003, Monrovia was once again under siege, only this time Charles Taylor was the one trapped inside the capital. For a while, it seemed like Taylor was determined to fight to the bitter end rather than surrender. He knew that a special international tribunal in Sierra Leone had indicted him for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his actions in that country's civil war, and many wondered [music] if the warlord would prefer to go down fighting rather than end up in prison.

[00:28:28]But then Nigeria, which for so long had been a Taylor opponent, broke the impasse. They offered him asylum in their country if he agreed to step down.

[00:28:36]On August 11, 2003, Taylor officially resigned the presidency, yielding power to his vice president, Moses Blah, marking the first time one leader had been replaced by another in Liberia without the incumbent being murdered in over 20 years. Taylor flew to his exile at a palatial estate in Gbarnga, Nigeria, where he remained in legal limbo for the second time in his life while various governments in Africa, Europe, and North America debated what to do with him. Finally, in 2006, Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who had once been affiliated with the NPFL but had broken with him over his brutal tactics, formally asked Nigeria to extradite Charles Taylor so that he could face justice over the Sierra Leone charges. Over 20 years after his Massachusetts breakout, Taylor made one more attempt to run for it, but he was apprehended attempting to cross the border into Cameroon, and the Nigerians put him on a plane back to Liberia, who in turn handed him over to UN troops to be delivered to Sierra Leone. The Special Court for Sierra Leone decided that it was inadvisable to try Taylor in Freetown because of the possibility that the trial could spark a renewal of violence in the region. So, it was moved to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands.

[00:29:40]Taylor was charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including acts of terrorism, unlawful killings, cruel violence, torture, employing child soldiers, forced labor, and pillage. Strange as it may seem, all of these counts were for atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, not in Liberia, because that wasn't the Special Court's mandate. In fact, although a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would eventually recommend that Taylor and 96 other people from all sides should be indicted for crimes committed during the two Liberian civil wars, there would be no war crimes tribunal in Liberia. Too many of the major participants now held high-ranking positions in the Liberian government or were respected business or tribal leaders. Charles Taylor would be the only Liberian warlord or faction leader to face any kind of justice from 14 years of nearly continuous war and atrocities. Taylor's trial in The Hague dragged on for 5 years. Taylor's defense team tried every tactic in the book to stall things, but eventually, in April 2012, the court announced its verdict: guilty on all 11 counts, making him the first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since the end of World War II. He was sentenced to 50 years imprisonment, which since he was 64 years old at the time of the verdict was effectively a life sentence. Under the terms of a previous agreement, Taylor was sent to the UK to serve out his sentence being locked up in HM Prison Franklin in northern England.

[00:30:56]He's still there today age 78 and barring something unforeseen, he's going to remain there until 2062 when he'll be 114 years old or until he dies, which will probably come first. His son Chucky also ended up in jail. He was convicted in 2009 under a US federal law that prohibits American citizens from committing acts of torture abroad and sentenced to 97 years in prison.

[00:31:19]Liberia's two civil wars killed around a quarter million Liberians with another 50 to 70,000 deaths in the conflict in Sierra Leone. 700,000 Liberians fled the country during the conflict creating one of the world's largest refugee populations. Another 1.4 million were internally displaced meaning around 75% of Liberia's pre-war population of 2.8 million was forced from their homes and another 9% died. No one is sure of the number of people injured, maimed, or who ended up with mental health problems like PTSD though the numbers for all four are sure to be high. The conflicts also decimated Liberia's economy. Virtually every town and city in the country had been heavily damaged and Monrovia where at least six different battles had taken place was almost completely destroyed. Many Liberians lost everything they owned destroyed or stolen by one faction or another. Other countries bore financial costs too. Nigeria alone is alleged to have spent $8 billion on its intervention in Liberia with other nations spending billions or hundreds of millions more particularly on post-war relief efforts in the devastated country. It is quite the grim harvest for the once idealistic young students of Bentley College. Whatever ideals he once held for Liberia were eventually buried under an unceasing quest for personal power and wealth at the expense of his country. And now it's not fair to blame Charles Taylor for all the murder and mayhem that envelops Liberia during this troubled period. Every faction involved committed war crimes and atrocities, but Taylor not only was the instigator of the civil war, he commanded the largest, most unruly faction in it and kept it going long after his original target was out of the picture. Then of course he bears responsibility for fermenting the tragedies in Sierra Leone as well as the horrors of the second Liberian Civil War, which was itself instigated to stop his reign of terror. All in all, Charles Taylor is proof of the age-old adage, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And Liberia paid the ultimate price for that corruption.

[00:33:16]Thank you for watching.