Charles Taylor: Warlord, President, and Convicted War Criminal

Charles Taylor’s path to power began under the government of Samuel Doe, whom Taylor initially supported after Doe’s 1980 coup. Taylor headed a Liberian government procurement agency before fleeing to the United States in 1983 amid embezzlement allegations; he was arrested in Massachusetts in 1984 and jailed pending extradition, then escaped from a Plymouth County facility in 1985. After a period organizing in West Africa, he returned to Liberia’s border on December 24, 1989, leading roughly 100 to 150 fighters of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) across from Ivory Coast to attack the town of Butuo. That incursion is generally treated by historians as the opening of Liberia’s First Civil War, a conflict that grew directly out of the ethnic and political grievances Doe’s decade of rule had left unresolved.

The war that followed was chaotic and brutal, drawing in a West African peacekeeping force, rival Liberian factions, and eventually Doe’s own killing in 1990 at the hands of a breakaway rebel group. By the early 1990s Taylor’s NPFL controlled much of the Liberian countryside, financing itself through control of timber, diamonds, and other resources in territory researchers have since studied as an early model of predatory rebel governance. Years of on-and-off fighting and failed peace agreements followed before Taylor won a 1997 presidential election, in which many Liberians reportedly voted for him out of fear that he would resume the war if he lost.

As president from 1997 to 2003, Taylor was accused of continuing to fuel regional conflict, most significantly by arming and supporting the Revolutionary United Front rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone’s civil war in exchange for diamonds. In 2003, with a renewed civil war closing in on Monrovia and a UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone having indicted him for war crimes, Taylor resigned the presidency and went into exile in Nigeria.

Nigeria handed Taylor over in 2006, and his trial before the Special Court, held in The Hague for security reasons, concluded in April 2012 with convictions on eleven counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations, including terrorism, murder, and the use of child soldiers, for aiding and abetting the Sierra Leone conflict rather than for direct combat crimes on Liberian soil. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison on May 30, 2012. On September 26, 2013, the Special Court’s Appeals Chamber upheld both the conviction and the sentence in full, making Taylor the first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials after World War II. He is serving his sentence in a British prison.