Charles Taylor's ex-wife: 'He's not responsible for Sierra Leone war crimes' - video

After a five-year prosecution, the international criminal court reaches a verdict this week in the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who is accused of war crimes in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Jewel Taylor, his former wife, now a Liberian state senator, says the peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia need to move on from their pasts.  To watch this video, please go to the Guardian website.

Charles Taylor verdict: 'He should taste the bitterness of the law'

The start of the rainy season in Freetown doesn't dampen the vibrancy of the city. Blue, pink and green houses line its narrow winding roads. Street sellers wrapped in brightly printed cloth swarm through the neverending traffic. People are trying to move on from the horrors of Sierra Leone's civil war. Some can even forgive, but very few can forget, the death and devastation of one of the most brutal conflicts in Africa.

"I wasn't a beggar before. Now I have come to be a beggar. Just to get food for my children, to send them to school," says Kadiatu Fofana, who lives with a constant reminder of the atrocities committed in the war. She sits outside her concrete shack in a wheelchair, having lost both her legs after an attack by the notorious Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels.

They came to her village in 1999. As she ran, they started hacking at her legs with machetes. Both legs had to be amputated in hospital.

Between 1991 and 2002, at least 50,000 people were killed across the country, thousands more were mutilated and 2 million displaced from their homes – close to half the population.

For many, there is one man they hold responsible – Charles Taylor, former president of neighbouring Liberia. The first African head of state to be tried in an international court, Taylor will on Thursday hear the verdict of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in his five-year trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, sexual slavery and using child soldiers.

Edward Conteh, another of Sierra Leone's amputees who lost his left arm just below the elbow to an RUF axe, wants Taylor punished. "He should never be free to breathe the free air that we breathe again. He once told Sierra Leoneans that we are going to taste the bitterness of war, so Charles Taylor should taste the bitterness of the law."

To read more, please visit the Guardian website

Charles Taylor faces verdict from brutal African war

A court in the Netherlands is set to deliver a verdict Thursday in a case involving a former head of state charged with international war crimes.

Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, is on trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, Netherlands. He is charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity — including murder, rape, sexual slavery and the use of child soldiers — in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Tens of thousands died during Sierra Leone's vicious civil war, one that was infamous for the brutal hacking off of limbs.

Today, survivors of these atrocities make up the members of a soccer team in Makeni, a city in central Sierra Leone.  To listen to Tamasin Ford's radio report on All Things Considered, please go to the NPR wesbite.

After decades away, tourists return to Liberia

Liberia has been better known for conflict than tourism over the past couple of decades.  But in April 2012, 150 passengers aboard the National Geographic Explorer cruise ship arrived in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. It was the largest group of tourists to visit the country since the 1970s.

To listen to Tamasin Ford's radio report on All Things Consirered, go to the NPR website

Liberian LGBT rights under spotlight

Anti-gay sentiment in Liberia has been growing since the U.S. announced plans, last year, to promote LGBT rights overseas. New legislation in Liberia calls for punishing homosexuality with longer jail time, and one group has been handing out fliers targeting gay-rights supporters. To listen to host Michel Martin talking with freelance journalist Tamasin Ford, please click on this link.

How do you put a price on nature?

That's exactly what the British government has just decided to do: they've set up a Natural Capital Committee to assess the economic value of every tree and butterfly in the land.

This week, One Planet speaks to the chair of the Committee, economist Dieter Helm. We ask him what natural capital is, why he wants to put a value on it - and Mike puts some of London's trees at risk by asking the public how much they'd pay him not to cut them down.

Also on the show, an investigation from award-winning photographer Toby Smith - are journalists reporting on environmental issues increasingly vulnerable to attacks and intimidation?

And we hear from Liberia, where foreign investment is finally starting to flood in after years of civil war. Big international companies are arriving and taking over vast areas of the country - in a move some local farmers and activists describe as a land grab

To listen to this programme, please click on this link

Nobel peace prize winner defends law criminalising homosexuality in Liberia

Click here to watch the video of Tony Blair discussing anti-gay law with Liberia's president.

The Nobel peace prize winner and president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has defended a law that criminalises homosexual acts, saying: "We like ourselves just the way we are."


In a joint interview with Tony Blair, who was left looking visibly uncomfortable by her remarks, Sirleaf told the Guardian: "We've got certain traditional values in our society that we would like to preserve."

Liberian legislation classes "voluntary sodomy" as a misdemeanour punishable by up to one year in prison, but two new bills have been proposed that would target homosexuality with much tougher sentences. The normally charismatic and eloquent Nobel laureate, when questioned, was brusque, "I won't sign any law that has to do with that area. None whatsoever," she said impatiently.

Blair, on a visit to Liberia in his capacity as the founder of the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), a charity that aims to strengthen African governments, refused to comment on Sirleaf's remarks.

When asked whether good governance and human rights went hand in hand, the British former prime minister said: "I'm not giving you an answer on it."

"One of the advantages of doing what I do now is I can choose the issues I get into and the issues I don't. For us, the priorities are around power, roads, jobs delivery," he said.

Over his 10 years as prime minister, Blair became a champion for the legal equality of gay people, pushing through laws on civil partnerships, lifting a ban on gay people in the armed forces and lowering the age of consent for gay people to 16.

A Catholic convert, he called on the pope to rethink his "entrenched" views and offer equal rights to gay people. But gay rights, he said, were not something he was prepared to get involved in as an adviser to African leaders.

With Sirleaf sitting to his left, Blair refused to give any advice on gay rights reforms. He let out a stifled chuckle after Sirleaf interrupted him to make it clear that Blair and his staff were only allowed to do what she said they could. "AGI Liberia has specific terms of reference … that's all we require of them," she said, crossing her arms and leaning back.

To read the full article please visit the Guardian website

Food security in Liberia

Fifteen million tonnes of bananas are shipped around the globe every year. Consumers in the developed world have become use to exotic fruit and vegtables at all times - but the UN believes the best way to ensure nine billion people are fed and watered by 2050, is to produce and consume a significantly larger proportion of locally grown food.

On this week's One Planet we consider how resilient our global food chain is. We visit Europe's largest banana ripening warehouse; we hear from the community who are trying to bypass the food chain by growing everything themselves, plus we hear from Liberia - a country that is struggling to rebuild its agricultural sector after years of civil unrest.

To listen to this programme, please go to the BBC World Service website

Liberia land deals with foreign firms 'could sow seeds of conflict'

Pa Sando, the town chief of Konja, in Grand Cape Mount county in Liberia, looks out across the farmland. "I used to pick cocoa on this farm for more than 30 years. My grandfather planted it for us," he says. "All this area here was mine, and now it's all gone."

The land has been leased by Sime Darby Plantation (Liberia) Inc, owned by the Malaysian-based multinational Sime Darby, to grow trees for palm oil. Sando said he was never asked whether he wanted to give up his land – only that he saw the bulldozers in the bush and then his land was taken.

Much of rural Liberia's population lives on land that has been in the family for generations. Most people don't have the money to go through the costly and complicated process of acquiring deeds, so under Liberian law the government is the owner of all public land. Sando's land was not registered, therefore it belonged to the government.

Sime Darby has signed a 63-year agreement with the government to develop 220,000 hectares of land for palm oil. The company's website says it is "the world's premier producer of sustainable palm oil". It boasts of its aspiration of "making sustainable futures real for everyone". The word "sustainable" is mentioned repeatedly.

However, a report (pdf) from the Centre for International Conflict Resolution (CICR), at Columbia University in the US, raises doubts about whether the future is quite so bright for the communities affected by the company's actions.

To read more, please visit the Guardian website

Wronged women of Liberia reluctant to revisit human rights abuses

The women sat on plastic chairs arranged in a circle, some breast feeding, others with small children at their feet. This is their centre in Ganta, the dusty, vibrant commercial capital of Nimba county in north-east Liberia.

"Most of the women here were raped [during the war]," says Yarih Geebah, the speaker for Ganta Concerned Women. "But if you don't have money, nothing happens. [For] we, the poor people, we who don't know book … justice don't prevail."

Liberia went through a 14-year civil war in which people were forced to perform the most debased and cruel acts imaginable. Initial findings from a United Nations Development Programme/World Vision survey in 2004 estimated 40% of the country's women were subjected to sexual violence, although other estimates suggest the figure is higher.

One woman from the group spoke of how she was taken as a "rebel wife" and raped repeatedly. Eight years later, the boy she was "married to" – now a man, and also the father of her daughter – sells petrol in Ganta. She sees him every day.

In August 2003, when the Accra peace accord was signed, it was decided the best chance for Liberia to get some form of justice was through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as had been set up in countries such as South Africa and Rwanda. The commission's mandate was to document and investigate human rights abuses committed between January 1979 and October 2003 and then make recommendations to the Liberian government.

To read more please visit the Guardian website