THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Former Liberian President Charles Taylor, on trial for war crimes, wants to set the record straight about his role in a savage civil war that tore apart Sierra Leone and left hundreds of thousands dead or mutilated, his lawyer said Monday.
Opening Taylor's defense, British lawyer Courtenay Griffiths said Taylor would take the stand Tuesday at the Special Court for Sierra Leone for what is expected to be several weeks of testimony.
He urged the judges to give Taylor a fair hearing, and not to be overwhelmed by the parade of misery presented by the prosecution since the trial opened 18 months ago.
"No one who has seen the procession through this courtroom of hurt human beings reliving the most grotesque trauma would have been unmoved," Griffiths told the three-judge panel. "We are human too, even while we declare this accused man to be not guilty of the charges he faces."
Taylor, 61, the first African head of state to be tried by an international court, is charged with 11 counts of murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, using child soldiers and spreading terror.
His trial has been hailed as a groundbreaking example of denying impunity to autocrats who have always evaded responsibility for mass murders and human rights outrages that occurred under their regimes.
The relevance of the case appears heightened by the refusal of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, to answer a summons by the International Criminal Court, which is based in The Hague, to respond to charges of crimes against humanity in Darfur. Most African leaders have supported al-Bashir in his defiance and refuse to arrest him.
Taylor completed an economics degree in the United States and military training in Libya before rising to power as a rebel warlord in Liberia and being elected president in 1997.
Prosecutors at the UN-backed court say he backed Sierra Leone rebels to help gain control of the neighboring country and strip it of its vast mineral wealth. Some of the 91 witnesses they called claimed he shipped weapons to rebels in rice sacks in contravention of an arms embargo and in return got so-called "blood diamonds" mined by slave labor.
One prosecution witness took the stand with stumps where his hands had been hacked off. A woman testified that she was forced to carry a sack full of severed heads including those of her children. One of Taylor's former aides told judges he was with Taylor when the president ate a human liver.
Such an image is a far cry from the debonair former president who sat impassively in court Monday wearing a brown double-breasted suit, brown tie and dark glasses.
Griffiths cast Taylor as a peacemaker who was too busy defending democracy in Liberia to "micromanage" atrocities committed by rebels during the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone.
Since his arrest in 2003, Taylor "has not said a word in his own defense ... ," Griffiths said. "Now he takes the opportunity to put forward his defense, not because in law he has to, but because he feels it is important to set the historical record straight."
In an emotional opening statement Griffiths referred to Liberia's roots as home to freed slaves from the United States and contrasted it with the image of Taylor being flown to the Netherlands "in chains" in June 2006.
Chief Prosecutor Stephen Rapp criticized Griffiths' comments as introducing a racial element to the case. He pointed out that all the victims of crimes in Sierra Leone were Africans.
"This effort by the alleged perpetrator to play a sort of race card is in our view highly inappropriate," he said.
Taylor is being tried in a courtroom rented from the International Criminal Court in The Hague because of fears that trying him in Sierra Leone could spark renewed violence.
In an address that appeared aimed more at Sierra Leone and Liberia than at the judges, Griffiths said the case should be about Taylor's "strenuous efforts to bring peace in Sierra Leone" not the atrocities there.
In Liberia, civil rights advocate Boakai Jalieba said the case is being closely followed by locals.
"We in Liberia have to take keen interest in the trial because the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone had too many similarities; they had some common identities; Liberians were recruited to go to Sierra Leone and Sierra Leoneans fought here," he said.
About 500,000 people are estimated to be victims of killings, systematic mutilation and other atrocities in Sierra Leone's civil war. Some of the worst crimes were carried out by gangs of child soldiers, who were fed drugs to desensitize them to the horror of their actions.
But Griffiths said Taylor was not behind the use of children in conflict.
"Child soldiers were not a Charles Taylor invention," he said.
After Taylor, the defense team has a list of more than 200 witnesses, though not all are expected to testify. Among them are former African heads of state and high-ranking U.N. officials who will testify on his behalf, according to a list that does not name them.
