Hilarity at The Hague: Charles Taylor, blood diamonds, and Naomi Campbell

My latest post on David Horowitz’ Newsreal Blog.

Until lately, there hasn’t been much interest in the war crimes trial of former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, which has been grinding along for three years now. However, ears did prick up earlier this month when the otherwise ho-hum story-line of mass murder, mutilation and beyond-savage child exploitation was jazzed up by testimony that British super-model, Naomi Campbell, met Taylor at a charity dinner in 1997 and charmed him out of some honest-to-goodness souvenir Sierra Leone blood diamonds.

Go figure. I guess if he was from Wisconsin, it would have been cheese.

It’s pathetic that only blood-drenched bling and a fabulously rich world-class beauty can tick up public interest in Taylor’s fate; because those things don’t distinguish his crimes. The civil war in Sierra Leone is defined by the children — not swanky charity events and spoiled super-models. And I warn you, it will shatter your heart if you look into it too deeply.

 Innocents always suffer during war, but the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone took it far beyond that. They viewed youngsters as military equipment, pure and simple. An exploitable harvest of innocent minds to be scalded in a vicious mental acid of shock, grief, loss, terror, torture and then marinated in cocaine and marijuana until they become pliable murdering robots for the RUF and a conduit of more riches for Taylor. 

As the Times of London put it:

In their quest for power and control of the country’s diamond wealth, the Liberian-backed rebel group terrorized a reluctant civilian population with mass amputations, mutilations, rape and sexual abuse, looting, murder and the use of child soldiers.

According to the Times, during that trial, a young woman testified about her lost childhood at the hands of the RUF:

Gloria Bonda, who was seven years old when she was captured by the rebels, knows her tormentor will never be brought to justice. At 11, she became a “bodyguard” to Sam Bockarie, the notoriously sadistic RUF commander nicknamed “Mosquito” for a killing style supposedly more deadly than malaria. […]

It was Bockarie who lined five villagers up against a blood-stained wall and ordered 11-year-old Gloria to shoot them dead. “I refused, but they said if I refused, they would kill me. I did that, just so they wouldn’t kill me.”

Gloria shows me where she carried out the killings. Blood still stains the walls of the dank, dungeon-like room, in a bombed-out building known as the Slaughterhouse. As she tells me of the atrocities she witnessed there, the murders she was forced to commit, her jaw hardens, her stare becomes stony and faraway.

“At the Slaughterhouse, so many people were killed by him,” she says. The rebels would take groups of captured villagers there, line them up in front of a pit and shoot them so their bodies would fall in. At other times, they would be more inventive.  […]

Now Gloria lives alone. Her father dead, her mother killed in front of her eyes long ago, she has no one to help her survive. Shunned by many in her community for the rapes she endured and the killings she committed, she struggles to earn the money for her school fees from selling jungle fruits. With some help from Plan, who provide counseling sessions and educational support, she has just taken her West Africa school-leaving certificate. She hopes to become a nurse to help those injured in the war, but she does not know how she will pay for the course.

“They say we are rebels, that we are thieves, killers, sometimes they run away from us. There is so much stigma, forcing us to live alone without anyone. There are so many girls like us. We need help.” 

It’s obvious that Campbell was unaware of children like Bonda, and the evil surrounding Taylor’s gift of “small dirty-looking stones,” as she described the uncut diamonds. Cold inanimate objects can’t express the anguish of their progeny. Unlike Jeremy Ratcliffe, the former head of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, who received the diamonds after Campbell learned she couldn’t keep them, Campbell didn’t know about the children of Sierra Leone, so she couldn’t hear their screams echo through the stones that purchased their torment. Ratcliffe, on the other hand appeared “shocked” and “horrified” and had to be coaxed into accepting them, according to witnesses. 

At any rate, Campbell testified that she didn’t know of Charles Taylor prior to meeting him and had never even heard of Liberia. Which is possible. Maybe geography isn’t her strong suit. And she met Taylor at a charity function hosted by none other than Nelson Mandela. Clearly she wouldn’t expect that the genial gentleman eating, flirting, and posing for pictures with her was a savage monster who could go a long way toward filling Josef Stalin’s jackboots. 

Nevertheless, Campbell’s attitude in the face of ultimate sadism and greed has morphed her into a human emblem of the cold, hard mineral at the heart of a historic horror story. Because Campbell has since learned what Liberia is. She now knows all about the civil war in Sierra Leone, the diamond trade, and the children.  And she still doesn’t care.

 Campbell had vital testimony that placed Taylor in South Africa in 1997 with blood diamonds in his possession – very likely to purchase more arms to torment Bonda and other innocent civilians — but she was petulant and unwilling to help the prosecution deliver vindication and peace of mind to a terrorized populace. She had to be forced to testify, but not without haughtily berating the judge for the “big inconvenience” and insulting the court with self-serving lies which were exposed by other witnesses: her former manager Carole White, and actress and human rights activist, Mia Farrow. 

Her cold complacency adds another dimension to a tragic saga. A pampered, tantrum-prone brat who once punched an actress who was wearing an identical dress, has been added to the character list next to the likes of Bonda, a young woman whose childhood came to a brutal end at age seven, but who can still muster the compassion and optimism to dream of a future as a nurse – even as she struggles through life as a prisoner of her past, orphaned, despised, feared, and rejected.