Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor started the Liberian civil war with a hundred men on Christmas Eve 1989, won the presidency in 1997 on the slogan that he had killed people's parents and they would vote for him anyway, and became the first head of state since Nuremberg to be convicted by an international court. He was the son of an Americo-Liberian father and a Gola mother, studied economics in Massachusetts, and served Samuel Doe's government as head of procurement until he was accused of embezzling nearly a million dollars and fled to the United States, where he was arrested for extradition and, in 1985, escaped from a Massachusetts jail through a window - with, he later said in court, the connivance of American intelligence. He trained in Libya, and his National Patriotic Front crossed from Ivory Coast into Nimba County in December 1989 among a people Doe had massacred. Within a year he held most of the country and had recruited an army of boys, the Small Boys Unit among them, and within two he had split with Prince Johnson, who took Monrovia and Doe. The war ran seven years, killed perhaps two hundred thousand people in a country of three million, and ended with an election he won with three quarters of the vote from an electorate that believed, correctly, that he would resume it if he lost. As president he ran Liberia as a concession, and he ran the war next door: the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, which cut off hands and mined diamonds, was his creature, paid in diamonds for arms. That is what he was tried for. A second civil war drove him from Monrovia in 2003, Nigeria took him under a deal, and in 2006 it handed him to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which sat in The Hague for safety and in 2012 convicted him on eleven counts of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is serving fifty years in a British prison. His son Chuckie is serving ninety-seven in an American one, for torture.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: head_of_state, warlord, war_criminal
