Amputees seek to have Taylor tried for war crimes

Two Nigerians whose arms were cut off by rebels during Sierra Leone’s civil war, have filed a joint suit in an Abuja court seeking former Liberian President Charles Taylor’s trial for war crimes before a United Nations-backed court in Sierra Leone. Emmanuel Egbuna and David Anyaele, in a court case which opened on Monday, are challenging Nigeria’s decision to grant Taylor political asylum. Both men want him extradited to Sierra Leone to face charges of crimes against humanity for backing the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel movement responsible for brutal atrocities that included hacking off the limbs of innocent civilians. “They suffered physical and psychological tortures and had their limbs chopped off by RUF rebels in 1999 when they were in Sierra Leone,” Maxwell Kadiri, their lawyer, told reporters. Their case came to court in Nigeria as the UN-backed special court in Sierra Leone began the first of a series of trials of 11 people accused of bearing the greatest responsibility for war crimes committed during the 1991-2001 conflict. Egbuna and Anyaele, who were businessmen based in Freetown, argue in their suit that by granting Taylor asylum the Nigerian government was in violation of international treaties on war crimes. They want Taylor delivered to the Special Court in Freetown. This has already indicted the former Liberian president for war crimes and has issued an international warrant for his arrest. In his affidavit, Anyaele said RUF rebels captured hundreds of civilians in Freetown and deliberately picked out Nigerians for punishment because Nigeria had sent troops to defend the elected government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah which the rebels were seeking to topple. “After amputating me the rebels told me to go and deliver their message [that Nigerians will suffer for intervening] to the Nigerian government,” Anyaele told the court. When the case was called before judge Stephen Jonah Adah, there was no attorney present to represent Taylor. The judge ordered that Taylor be served a court summons through the Cross River State government which has jurisdiction over the city of Calabar in southeastern Nigeria where Taylor currently lives. Adah fixed a new hearing for 1 July. Taylor resigned as president of Liberia in August 2003 while rebel forces which had been fighting for four years to topple his government besieged the capital Monrovia. The former warlord, who led a 1989 rebellion that started Liberia's 14-year civil war, has since been living in Nigeria where President Olusegun Obasanjo granted him political asylum. Obasanjo has repeatedly rejected suggestions that he hand Taylor over for trial in Sierra Leone. Obasanjo insists that he obtained the consensus of the international community to grant Taylor exile in Nigeria as part of the process that brought fourteen years of Liberian conflict to an end.