The war itself is the American war crime. America may evade justice but, in our eyes, you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of people and mass destruction of properties across the world whose future you stole.
I now start with Liberia. Isaac was 12 when he was taken. He and his 18-year-old sister Marie had been living in the Liberian bush for about a month, having left Kakata, a town just beyond the perimeter of the U.S.-owned Firestone rubber plantation, when Charles Taylor's forces launched an attack on the nearby city of Monrovia in October 1992.
That November day, like most Fridays, Isaac and Marie carried fruits and cassava into Konola village to sell at the market. They put the items down for people to inspect. Suddenly, a swarm of armed men and boys closed in. People began running in all directions. Marie clasped Isaac in her arms, but the rebels snatched him from her grip and tossed him into the back of a pickup truck with other able-bodied men and boys.
Marie and others ran after the vehicles. Someone told them Taylor's defense minister, "Chief Woewiyu," was in town. Perhaps he could release their boys.
Liberia's back-to-back civil wars, from 1989-2003, devastated the country and killed an estimated 250,000 people. Some well-known warlords have since been promoted to the highest levels of government in Liberia; others fled to the United States, building families and businesses. One cruel side effect of this migration has been the unexpected stateside reunion of perpetrators with their erstwhile victims. Authorities estimate that as many as two-thousand human rights violators and war criminals have sought refuge in U.S. diaspora communities.
In May 2014, 73-year-old Philadelphia resident Jucontee Thomas Woewiyu-the articulate, well-dressed spokesperson, co-founder, and for several years defense minister of Charles Taylor's infamous National Patriotic Front of Liberia became one of the few Liberian leaders to be arrested in the United States and charged with multiple counts of immigration fraud and perjury.
After a trial last June featuring testimony from Liberian victims, including Marie and Isaac, who had never before testified in a criminal proceeding about the NPFL's crimes, he was convicted in July 2018 on eleven counts of immigration-related perjury and fraud related to lying about his violent past. His sentencing has been postponed multiple times.
Prosecutors in the U.S. and human rights groups in Liberia have celebrated the case as a victory. But the nature of the charges-immigration fraud rather than rape, murder, child-soldier conscription, or other war crimes; and nearly three decades after the offenses rather than one or two years-have also highlighted the U.S. government's inadequate legal tools in cases like these, allowing human rights violators to live freely in the U.S. for years, even decades.
Between under-resourced departments for identifying and tracking perpetrators, and the absence of robust laws permitting prosecutors to charge individuals with human rights abuses committed abroad, the United States has become, ironically, one of the more attractive locations for fleeing war criminals, who, depending on their offense, may only face prosecution on a technicality of having lied on their immigration forms-a so-called Al Capone prosecution or deportation, rather than a prison sentence.
The United States has become, ironically, one of the more attractive locations for fleeing war criminals. In recent years, efforts to introduce or amend legislation that would make it easier to prosecute or remove war criminals for their original crimes have become politically divisive, caught between a Republican Party wary of international human rights law, and a Democratic Party that's grown increasingly receptive to calls to abolish the agency largely responsible for investigating and prosecuting such cases: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In the past few decades, perpetrators from conflicts in Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Vietnam have been identified in the U.S., sometimes by the very people they victimized, in everyday settings-a café, a church, or a mom-and-pop convenience store. In the early 1990s, Ethiopian immigrant Edgegayehu Taye, who worked as a waitress at an Atlanta hotel, was riding the service elevator when the doors opened to reveal a bellhop, whom she recognized as a former Ethiopian government official.
The man, she claimed, had supervised her interrogation and torture in an Addis Ababa jail in the late 1970s during the country's Red Terror when she was bound, gagged, and hung upside-down. Taye and two other women successfully sued the man, named Kelbessa Negewo, in a civil suit.
July 12, 1990, civilian refugees are forced to evacuate Paynesville, Liberia when it fell to Charles Taylor's insurgent force, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). Woewiyu's defense team hasn't denied his leadership in a notoriously ruthless rebel group. Instead, they argued at trial that the U.S. government knew about Woewiyu's past: While he marked "no" on his primary immigration form (Form N-400) in response to questions about membership in an organization, participation in violent rebellion, and persecution of minorities, he did mention the NPFL elsewhere in his application process, alongside membership in church groups.
And he had previously been contacted by American officials about a separate matter while acting as spokesperson for the NPFL. "Our government knew who he was," his attorney told the jury. Long before Isaac was born, the U.S. and Liberia had a complex, closely intertwined relationship.
In 1821, with the support of the American Colonization Society (ACS)-whose main supporter was the U.S. government-freed American slaves began migrating across the ocean to West Africa, to the area that now encompasses Liberia. Until 1847, when Liberia declared independence, the ACS ruled Liberia with an iron fist as animosity between settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, and Indigenous Liberians grew.
Post-independence, Americo-Liberians ruled over a 95 percent native Liberian population for over a century, creating a system by which to subjugate the sixteen ethnolinguistic groups, whom they saw as inferior and uncivilized.
The constitution for this segregated state was drafted at Harvard, and the republic's national flag was a near-replica of America's. English was widely spoken, and people adopted American names.
American companies began to exploit the country's natural resources, starting with the Firestone Tire and Rubber plantation in 1926. By the mid-twentieth century, Liberia had become a strategic base through which the U.S. could fight the spread of communism in Africa: establishing military bases, training facilities, and the largest U.S. embassy on the continent.
Commercial partnerships continued as well, the Firestone site becoming one of the world's largest rubber plantations, fueling the civil war and propping up Taylor's war efforts. A 2014 report by ProPublica and Frontline exposed the American corporation's complicity in Taylor's murderous rule.
Taylor's rise came in response to an unlikely Liberian uprising nearly forty years ago. On the morning of April 12, 1980, an indigenous man named Samuel Doe, of the Krahn peoples, led a ragtag group of armed men in a coup, killing then-president William R. Tolbert Jr., a member of the Americo-Liberian elite, and announcing on national radio that a military junta, named the People's Redemption Council, had taken power.
The U.S. recognized Doe, funneling millions of dollars to Liberia that accounted for roughly one-third of his government's spending until 1985. That year, as Doe became more oppressive and corrupt, pocketing foreign aid and turning his birthday into a national holiday, the U.S. government funded an election it hoped would produce a civilian government. In what was widely considered to be a rigged election, Doe became president, and the U.S. government publicly supported the results.
Meanwhile, in 1969, Woewiyu travelled to America on a student visa and became a lawful permanent resident in 1972, according to court documents. In 1987, Woewiyu and Charles Taylor met and founded the NPFL in Ivory Coast, with the stated intent of getting rid of Doe.
They began looking for training and arms support. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi provided training bases for NPFL rebels and hundreds of thousands of dollars in financing; Burkina Faso facilitated weapons transfers; and Ivory Coast supported the NPFL's incursion into Nimba County on Christmas Eve, 1989-the day that would officially spark the civil war.
August 10th, 1990, a member of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) points a gun at a portrait of President Samuel Doe after raiding the home of Jackson Doe, the president's brother.
In response, Doe's forces conducted a vicious counterinsurgency campaign, indiscriminately killing, torching villages, raping women, and looting, according to a 1994 Human Rights Watch report. Doe's forces targeted the Mano and Gio peoples; the NPFL in turn targeted ethnic Mandingo and Khran people, whom they suspected supported Doe.
The NFPL slaughtered civilians and plundered villages. With no prospect of a U.N. or U.S. intervention, in August 1990, a peacekeeping force known as the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, ECOMOG arrived with a mandate to impose a ceasefire and install an interim government. But there was no peace to be found, and ECOMOG was propelled to fight against the NPFL.
The writer is an independent political observer who writes on politics, political and human-centered figures, current and international affairs
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