Questions were raised in Canberra about Abbott’s obvious conflicts-of-interest in having intimate knowledge of the current Australian Liberal Party government’s trade secrets and his new role as the United Kingdom’s trade adviser. In Britain, there were also concerns about Abbott’s dual loyalties.

Australian shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus of the Labor Party was one of the politicians to raise the loyalty issue. In questioning Abbott’s new job in London, Dreyfus said, “It’s up to the [Scott] Morrison government to explain how a former Liberal PM can now work for a foreign power advising on matters potentially in direct conflict with Australia’s commercial interest.” British shadow Trade Minister Emily Thornberry of the Labor Party also voiced opposition to Abbott’s appointment, saying that Abbott had “never been involved in detailed trade negotiations, he thinks that issues like climate change and workers’ rights are just not important, and during the two years that he was prime minister of Australia he was personally responsible for killing off Australia’s car industry.” British Liberal Democratic party leader Sir Ed Davey said that Abbott had “no place in any British government.” Echoing opposition to Abbott, Kirsten Oswald, the Scottish National Party’s deputy leader in the House of Commons, called Abbott’s appointment “beyond indefensible.”

Abbott is not the only right-winger who has taken an official job with another government, something that is anathema to the nationalist policies of the political right. Valdas Adamkus, born Voldemaras Adamkavičius in Kaunas, Lithuania, later became a U.S. citizen. He served as a non-commissioned officer in the U.S. 5th Army Reserve’s military intelligence unit and later was a regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Adamkus moved back to Lithuania, where he served as president from 1998 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2009. He renounced his U.S. citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Vilnius prior to becoming Lithuania’s president.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves was a U.S. citizen who worked for Radio Free Europe, which was financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, from 1984 to 1993. Upon Estonia’s restoration of independence, Ilves, after renouncing his U.S. citizenship, became Estonia’s ambassador to the United States, Foreign Minister, and president of Estonia for a decade, between 2006 and 2016.

Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, served two terms, from 2004 to 2007 and 2008 to 2013. After leaving Georgia, Saakashvili served as the governor of Odessa Oblast in Ukraine from 2015 to 2016. His Georgian citizenship was stripped from him by the government in Tbilisi in 2015. Saakashvili acquired Ukrainian citizenship in 2015. In 2017, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko stripped Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship and he became a stateless person while living in the United States. In 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky restored Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship. Saakashvili, by far, has become a classic case of a leader-for-hire in any country that will have him.

The global political right becomes apoplectic when people advance the concept of “world citizens.” However, around the world there have been cases of right-wing governments pushing such a notion by hiring foreigners as their government officials. This has especially been pronounced in Israel, but succeeding governments argue that it is simply adhering to the “aliya< the right of Jews anywhere in the world to emigrate to Israel.

The United States has seen a number of its citizens renouncing their American citizenship in order to acquire high offices in other countries. Among them are President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, Afghan ambassador to China and the United States Eklil Ahmad Hakimi, Afghan ambassador to the United States Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghan ambassador to the United States Ishaq Shahryar, Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian of Armenia, Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian of Armenia, Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson of Great Britain, Latvian ambassador to the United States Ojars Kalnins, Premier of New South Wales Kristina Keneally, Director of the Central Bank of Taiwan and Minister Without Portfolio Kuan Chung-ming, President of Peru Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Member of the Executive Council of Hong Kong Lawrence Lau, Deputy Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands Akierra Missick, Prime Minister Keith Mitchell of Grenada, Colombian ambassador to the United States Luis Alberto Moreno, President of Somalia Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Tien Hung-mao, and Ukrainian First Lady Kateryna Yushchenko.

U.S. citizen Natalie Jaresko served as Ukrainian Finance Minister from 2014 to 2016. She was conveyed Ukrainian citizenship but under U.S. law was not required to relinquish her American citizenship. She currently serves as the executive director of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. Jaresko was not the only foreigner to serve in the government of President Poroshenko. Others included Lithuanian citizen Aivaras Abromavicius, who served as the Economy Minister and Georgian national Aleksandre Kvitashvili, who served as Health Minister. From 2004 to 2005, French citizen Salome Zurabishvili served as the Foreign Minister of Georgia in Saakashvili’s administration.

There were always suspicions about the U.S. citizenship status of Cook Islands Prime Minister Tom Davis, a Harvard graduate who conducted “medical research” for the U.S. armed forces and the NASA space agency.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was also a citizen of Germany. Right-wing 2016 U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, belatedly renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2015 after it became a campaign issue. California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger retained his Austrian citizenship while serving in office. The current leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Andrew Scheer, is also a U.S. citizen. The former Governor General Michaëlle Jean, whose represented Queen Elizabeth as head of state, was also a citizen of France. While the head of Canada’s New Democratic Party, Thomas Mulcair also held French citizenship.

Australian Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing National Party Barnaby Joyce was forced to resign his post in 2017 after a court discovered that he was, in fact, a citizen of New Zealand. Joyce’s election to the Parliament was invalidated. Australian law does not permit foreign citizens to hold office. Joyce renounced his New Zealand citizenship and he successfully ran again for Parliament. After his election, he was allowed to resume the post of deputy prime minister.

The nationality that Ivory Coast president Alassane Ouattara was not eligible to serve as either prime minister or president resulted in a 2002 judicial decision that conferred Ivorian citizenship on Ouattara and permitted him to run for president of the Ivory Coast. Ouattara was eventually successful in being elected president but his opponents maintain that he still is ineligible to be president because he was born in Burkina Faso and held Burkinabe citizenship. The complaints about Ouattara being a Burkinabe Muslim immigrant has resulted in sectarian violence between the Muslims of the north and Christians of the south.

As so-called “populist” leaders of the right call for enhanced immigration controls and tighter border security, it is both ironic and hypocritical that so many of them are willing to hold high political office in foreign countries while maintaining dual or multiple passports.

On October 23, the first confirmed case was also reported in Mali. The Ebola phenomenon has medical and political aspects that deserve to be taken into consideration. 

It all started in March 2014 when the world media started to report new cases of Ebola deadly contamination. By the end of summer world organizations and leaders were involved in collecting and making available the information about the virus. 

In late August the World Health Organization declared the state of emergency. 

Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of World Health Organization, went on international tours to be received like a head of state. On September 18, the United Nations Security Council adopted an unprecedented resolution saying «…that the «unprecedented extent» of the Ebola outbreak in Africa constituted a threat to international peace and security». The wording allows the United Nations Security Council to take any compelling measures according to Article VII of UN Charter. The main thing is that for the first time in the United Nations history a virus is recognized as a threat to international peace. What is the ground for saying so? Let’s take note that it was the United States who was the author of the resolution. Addressing the 60^th session of the United Nations General Assembly US President Obama emphasized that Ebola was high on the world community agenda. 

The virus issue was referred to the United Nations General as an emergency matter. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made an address and submited for consideration the draft resolution offered by the World Health Organization's emergency committee on Ebola. This was also an unprecedented step. The resolution was adopted unanimously and practically without deliberations. It was a really speedy process: the UN Secretary General’s letter with the proposal to establish such a mission is dated September 17. It means that the decision was taken in a day! 

How can such a reaction be explained? Many strange things happen as one is looking for an answer. First, it’s not the first time an Ebola outbreak takes place, simply the virus had not attracted so much international attention before. Ebola is known since the mid-1070s, it took 280 lives in Zaire in 1976. Since then the outbreaks became routine: there were large-scale outbreaks in the United States and the Philippines in 1989-1990s, the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995 (254 dead), in Uganda in 2000-2001 (224 dead), in Gabon in 2002 (53 dead). But only now that the problem has come into focus. It makes one wonder why? 

Note: there are various types of the virus that have been recorded in Zaire, Reston (US, the state of Virginia), Bundibugio (East Africa) and Cote D’Ivoire (West Africa). In 2014 the outbreak originated from Zaire. 

It strikes an eye that flagrant disinformation on the virus lethality is disseminated in media. There were cases of 100% mortality and the cases with no indicative statistics (for instance, one lethal case per one victim). There is more reliable data related to the cases with 75-80% death rate. The ratio is very high but the affected countries have low standards of medical care. Talking about the current Ebola outbreak – it’s either non-existent at all or the information is distorted. Media outlets often say the lethality is 90% but the fact has no confirmation. The United Nations World Health Organization official information says Ebola death toll rises to 4,877 out of 9,936 cases up to Oct. 19. It means the lethality rate is around 50%. It’s a bit lower than in previous cases that had not attracted the world public attention. It is corroborated by the example of individual states: Liberia (4, 665 cases of contamination, 2705 dead, around 50% – lethal cases), Sierra-Leone (3706 contaminated victims, 1259 dead, the death rate – around 35%), Guiney (1540 victims, 904 dead, around 60% dead). What is the reason for exaggerating the mortality rates? 

With no vaccine available the death rate is around 50 %. It means in half of cases a victim can acquire immunity and recover without medicine. The people who have made it through now can be involved in medical care activities without any risk of contamination. Still some vaccines are used. That’s what is suspicious. On the one hand, the scale of the disaster looks like an experiment of exploring ways to acquire natural immunity, on the other hand, it is similar to mass probe of certain types of vaccines. 

As media reported, in some cases medical personnel were harshly treated allegedly because of «arrogance» of local population. There may be more serious reasons behind such behavior. What really drives the attacks against medical personnel on the part of those who appear to be most interested in receiving medical care? 

Third, the declared emergency situation looks a bit grotesque against the background of so many lethally dangerous deceases going on a rampage in the contemporary world. An impartial assessment of the Ebola threat is possible only taking into consideration the global epidemiological evidence in general. For instance, malaria results in annual death toll of 700 thousand people. It takes place in the very same Ebola-stricken West African nations. Some forms of malaria lead to death in a few days or even hours, it makes one die much faster in comparison to Ebola. No urgent measures are taken on account of ubiquitous tuberculosis. According to the official data of World Health Organization, only in 2013 nine million people fell victims to the decease. In 2014 tuberculosis made 1, 5 million people lose their lives. The global tuberculosis-caused mortality rate has gone down 45% but in the case of the recently appeared multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) the death rate is comparable to Ebola. 

Note: In 2013 around half a million people fell victims to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis or around 5% of all cases.

What makes Ebola get into the spotlight of world attention at the time there are other, much more dangerous deceases, that produce greater death rate around the entire planet? 

There are questions concerning the source of funds for producing the vaccine in the United States. The money goes not to medical researchers but the Department of Defense along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH – a biomedical research facility primarily located in Bethesda, Maryland, the USA). This very fact is not an evidence of biological weapons productions by itself as the contemporary medical care in the United States makes vaccine funding unprofitable. On the one hand, it’s a small portion of «market» – until the recent outbreak there had been only 2200 cases of contamination. On the other hand, the financial profitability is very limited. Even if the virus were massively spread across Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, there would be too few people, practically no one, who could pay for the vaccine. 

All these question-raising issues along with the recent Ebola outbreak make one guess that the virus spread may have other than medical causes. 

No matter of the virus is of natural origin or artificially produced, there are reasons to surmise that some states and the international organizations they control, as well as obedient media outlets, act in the capacity of pharmaceutical companies’ agents. The ballyhoo raised around Ebola is viewed as an attempt to expand the market for vaccine to make it profitable or even super profitable in case a number of countries become dependent on it. If the anti-Ebola vaccine trade expands, it’ll become an issue of the state policy agenda. But the right term to use will be racket, not trade. Or a special operation. Something like this happened in case of South Africa when the entire country became dependent on a concrete medicine allegedly produced to fight AIDS. 

The sad thing about it is that the ongoing special operation is really merciless – no one can refuse the service offered. It cannot be excluded that the Ebola virus is an element of policy aimed at world destabilization, something the United States is doing today and, at the same time, a new form of unleashing a multi-level crisis when the medicine would be available only for the «chosen». 

Dr. Cyril Broderick, A Liberian scientist and a former professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Liberia’s College of Agriculture and Forestry says the West, particularly the U.S. is responsible for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Dr. Broderick claims the following in an exclusive article published in the Daily Observer based in Monrovia, Liberia. He wrote the following:

The US Department of Defense (DoD) is funding Ebola trials on humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research. This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus. Hence, the DoD is listed as a collaborator in a “First in Human” Ebola clinical trial (NCT02041715, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March.

Is it possible that the United States Department of Defense (DOD) and other Western countries are directly responsible for infecting Africans with the Ebola virus? Dr. Broderick claims that the U.S. government has a research laboratory located in a town called Kenema in Sierra Leone that studies what he calls “viral fever bioterrorism”, It is also the town where he acknowledges that is the “epicentre of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.” Is it a fact? Is Dr. Broderick a conspiracy theorist? He says that “there is urgent need for affirmative action in protecting the less affluent of poorer countries, especially African citizens, whose countries are not as scientifically and industrially endowed as the United States and most Western countries, sources of most viral or bacterial GMOs that are strategically designed as biological weapons.” He also asks an important question when he says “It is most disturbing that the U. S. Government has been operating a viral hemorrhagic fever bioterrorism research laboratory in Sierra Leone. Are there others?”

Well, Mr. Broderick’s claims seem to be true. After all, the U.S. government has been experimenting with deadly diseases on human beings for a long time, history tells us so. One example is Guatemala. Between 1946 and 1948, the United States government under President Harry S. Truman in collaboration with Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo and his health officials deliberately infected more than 1500 soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and even mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and chancroid (a bacterial sexual infection) out of more than 5500 Guatemalan people who participated in the experiments. The worst part of it is that none of the test subjects infected with the diseases ever gave informed consent. The Boston Globe published the discovery made by Medical historian and professor at Wellesley College, Susan M. Reverby in 2010 called ‘Wellesley professor unearths a horror: Syphilis experiments in Guatemala.’ It stated how she came across her discovery:

Picking through musty files in a Pennsylvania archive, a Wellesley College professor made a heart-stopping discovery: US government scientists in the 1940s deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea in experiments conducted without the subjects’ permission. Medical historian Susan M. Reverby happened upon the documents four or five years ago while researching the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study and later shared her findings with US government officials.

The unethical research was not publicly disclosed until yesterday, when President Obama and two Cabinet secretaries apologized to Guatemala’s government and people and pledged to never repeat the mistakes of the past — an era when it was not uncommon for doctors to experiment on patients without their consent.

After Reverby’s discovery, the Obama administration apparently gave an apology to then-President Alvaro Colom according to the Boston Globe:

Yesterday, Obama called President Álvaro Colom Caballeros of Guatemala to apologize, and Obama’s spokesman told reporters the experiment was “tragic, and the United States by all means apologizes to all those who were impacted by this.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had called Colom Thursday night to break the news to him. In her conversation with the Guatemalan president, Clinton expressed “her personal outrage and deep regret that such reprehensible research could occur,’’ said Arturo Valenzuela, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.

The study in Guatemala was led by John Cutler, a US health service physician who also took part in the controversial Tuskegee Syphilis experiments which began in the 1930’s. Researchers wanted to study the effects of a group of antibiotics called penicillin on affected individuals. The prevention and treatment of syphilis and other venereal diseases were also included in the experimentation. Although they were treated with antibiotics, more than 83 people had died according to BBC news in 2011 following a statement issued by Dr Amy Gutmann, head of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues:

The Commission said some 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in all the research that took place between 1946 and 1948. Of these, some 1,300 were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea or another sexually transmitted disease, chancroid. And of that group only about 700 received some sort of treatment. According to documents the commission had studied, at least 83 of the 5,500 subjects had died by the end of 1953.

Washington’s reaction to the report is a farce. The apology made to Guatemala’s government was for the sake of public relations. Washington knows about its human experimentations in the past with deadly diseases conducted by government-funded laboratories that are known to be harmful to the public. The U.S. government is guilty in conducting numerous medical experiments on people not only in Guatemala but in other countries and on its own territory. As the Boston Globe report mentioned, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study occurred between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the “natural progression” of untreated syphilis in the African American population. The U.S. Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute collaborated in 1932 and enrolled 600 poor sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama to study the syphilis infection. However, it was documented that at least 400 of those had the disease (they were never informed that they actually had syphilis) while the remaining 200 did not. They received free medical care, food and even free burial insurance for participating in the study. Documents revealed that they were told that they had “bad blood” which meant that they had various medical conditions besides syphilis. The Tuskegee scientists continued to study the participants without treating their illnesses and they also withheld much-needed information from the participants about penicillin, which proved to be effective in treating Syphilis and other venereal diseases. The test subjects were under the impression that they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government while they were deliberately being lied to by the same administrators who were conducting the tests. Washington is fully aware of its human experimentations with deadly diseases. The government of Guatemala also knew about the Syphilis experiments according to the Boston Globe:

A representative of the Guatemalan government said his nation will investigate, too — looking in part at the culpability of officials in that country. The records of the experiment suggest that Guatemalan government officials were fully aware of the tests, sanctioned them, and may have done so in exchange for stockpiles of penicillin.

However, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published the study ‘Fact Sheet on the 1946-1948 U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD) Inoculation Study’ and was forced to admit what happened in Guatemala during the syphilis experiments:

While conducting historical research on the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, Professor Susan Reverby of Wellesley College recently discovered the archived papers of the late Dr. John Cutler, a U.S. Public Health Service medical officer and a Tuskegee investigator. The papers described another unethical study supported by the U.S. government in which highly vulnerable populations in Guatemala were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The study, conducted between 1946 and 1948, was done with the knowledge of Dr. Cutler’s superiors and was funded by a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (which became the Pan American Health Organization) to several Guatemalan government ministries. The study had never been published.

The U.S. government admitted to its wrongdoing, 62 years too late. What Dr. Broderick wrote is not conspiratorial in any sense. The U.S. government has been involved in bioterrorism; Guatemala is a case in point. Dr. Broderick summarized what average people can do to prevent governments, especially those from the West from creating and exposing populations from diseases they experiment with in laboratories:

The challenge is global, and we request assistance from everywhere, including China, Japan, Australia, India, Germany, Italy, and even kind-hearted people in the U.S., France, the U.K., Russia, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and anywhere else whose desire is to help. The situation is bleaker than we on the outside can imagine, and we must provide assistance however we can. To ensure a future that has less of this kind of drama, it is important that we now demand that our leaders and governments be honest, transparent, fair, and productively engaged. They must answer to the people. Please stand up to stop Ebola testing and the spread of this dastardly disease.

After Guatemala’s ordeal with the U.S. government who deliberately infected people with syphilis, West African nations should be extremely skeptical about the U.S. government’s actions combating Ebola. Professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, College of Law questions the Obama administration’s actions in West Africa. RIA Novosti recently interviewed Boyle and he said the following:

US government agencies have a long history of carrying out allegedly defensive biological warfare research at labs in Liberia and Sierra Leone. This includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is now the point agency for managing the Ebola spill-over into the US,” Prof. Francis Boyle said.

Why has the Obama administration dispatched troops to Liberia when they have no training to provide medical treatment to dying Africans? How did Zaire/Ebola get to West Africa from about 3,500km away from where it was first identified in 1976?”

That’s a good question for Washington, but would the public get any answers? Not anytime soon, since it took more than 62 years for the  Guatemala syphilis experiments to be exposed to the public, not by the US government, by a medical historian.

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, globalresearch.ca

It had been clear he would be found guilty long before the sentence. It’s not thanks to the evidence provided but because of the Court’s stance. The reason is its tolerant attitude towards the prosecutor’s office and its false witnesses who changed their testimony a few times receiving money from the prosecutors and finding refuge in the Netherlands and other European countries. It’s also because of strictness towards defense whose arguments were taken lightly and dismissed in a too hasty manner, or even left without being taken into consideration at all. 

There was a surprise though. Right after the «guilty» verdict was handed down there was somebody’s voice heard. Everybody thought it was Taylor trying to say something. The microphone was swiftly disabled and the spectator’s aisle benches curtained off. Later it became known it was the voice of the fourth judge Sow who tried to express his disagreement over the decision of majority. But as soon as Sow started to speak the other three judges quickly got up and left the room. The Sow’s microphone was switched off immediately but he went on speaking: «The only moment where a Judge can express his opinion is during the deliberations or in the courtroom, and, pursuant to the Rules, when there are no serious deliberations, the only place left for me is the courtroom» He added: «For me under any mode of liability, under any accepted standard of proof, the guilt of the accused from the evidence provided in this trial is not proved beyond reasonable doubt by the Prosecution. And my only worry is that the whole system is not consistent with all the principles we know and love, and the system is not consistent with all the values of international criminal justice» (my extra bolds – A.M). 

The trial went on for five years but the evidence was surprisingly flimsy from the very start to the final end. Taylor was the main defendant of the Special Court (1) they could have tried to do better. «Supermodel» Naomi Campbell was called by the prosecutors to prove former President of Liberia Charles Taylor used illegal gems trade to finance the war in the neighboring Sierra Leone. She said Taylor tried to give her a diamond as a present. Then she had to change testimony and say it was not Taylor himself who did it but some other man, but she was «sure» it came from Taylor. A strong evidence, isn’t it? Actually there is nothing to be surprised at. International law has never been executed on the basis of solid evidence, from the very start it has been conceived as a show or a subsequent «consecration» of «demonization» process that that already taken place in relation to the leaders of some countries. 

The Taylor’s process has proved the Sierra Leone civil war was not an internal affair of the country. And Liberia was not the only state to be involved. It became known during trial deliberations that the USA and Nigeria (Olusegun Obasanjo) jointly conducted an operation to remove Taylor from political scene. He was promised asylum and immunity from prosecution in case he voluntarily resigned. He was arrested afterwards… President of Nigeria Obasanjo, who arrested him, had rendered help to Liberian insurgents who tried to overthrow Taylor. 

It also came to light at the trial deliberations that the Tribunal’s staff «leaked» information to the US embassy. The Court refused to conduct investigation concerning the matter. 

In the secret dispatches published by Wikileaks the US ambassador to Monrovia wrote: «The best we can do for Liberia is to see to it that Taylor is put away for a long time». She added: «All legal options should be studied to ensure that Taylor cannot return to destabilize Liberia.» It’s not an occasion that three out of four Sierra-Leone Special Court judges are Americans, the chief prosecutor in the Charles Taylor trial was an American, the presiding justice – British. The proceedings took place in Hague. Taylor will serve the sentence in the UK. That’s the kind of «Sierra Leone» Court we have! 

They even tried to taint Russia during illegal arms sales deliberations. For instance, the witness for the prosecution called «Zigzag» mentioned Russian aircraft landing in Monrovia. The testimony given by this witness is really outstanding. First, he said the plane delivered 100 containers with arms, and then he said the number was 10. At cross-examination he said that by saying a hundred he meant «there were very many of them». At the same time, no matter the plane was Russian, the cargo was coming from the USA and…Libya. The Taylor’s lawyer paid attention to the fact that previously he had also mentioned Europe and Taiwan. The witness was quick on the draw and said – to his understanding Europe was part of America, «the land of whites», and he had never known the difference till the proceedings started. (2)

There was no proof found of any Russia’s, or at least, its pilots’ involvement in illegal gems sales that were the main sources of funds for the Sierra Leone war. Here’s an example of how the witness TFI-539 was cross-examined (a secret witness, his face was closed, voice changed):

«Def: Did you ever tell them that Bami had an office in Kono, Kenema and was dealing in diamonds with Russians?

Wit: Even right now, he is dealing in diamonds

Def: was he dealing with Russians?

Wit: Even right now, he is dealing in diamonds

Judge: Was he dealing with Russians?

Wit: That was after the war had come to an end.»

And further it goes: 

«Def: And you said it was flown by two Russian pilots right?

Wit: Yes, they were the crew

Def: Are they the two who flew the plane?

Wit: Yes

Def: And they were Russians right?

Wit: yes

Def: In what language did they speak to you?

Wit: The one I told you about who had beards, he spoke English a little bit. He was the one who asked me about Fonte kanu.

Def: Did you tell the investigators that the plane was flown by Ukrainians?

Wit: No, I told them they were Russians» (3) 

It’s a pity the lawyer didn’t lead the cross-examination to the logical end, he probably found the testimony to be discredited enough. Evidently the final stage of the cross-examination was not reached – that is no question asked about how the witness found out the men in question were Russian. It would be interesting to check the witness’s knowledge of Russian language, oral (a number of witnesses said the heard «Russian spoken») and in writing (other witnesses, in particular former Liberian vice president Moses Blah also testified about arms … «the boxes of ammunition and RPGs were covered in Russian lettering.» (4)). Otherwise we would be surprised to know Mr. Blah and other witnesses know Russian as well as Martin Pnishi, a witness in the Milosevic case. I remember this Albanian «peaceful civilian» affirm Russian soldiers were involved in killing Albanians in Kosovo. He said they said something that sounds strange to a Russian ear «Unisti Ga!» Judge Kwan questioned his knowledge of Russian language but the witness told him with cocksureness he knew it perfectly!». (5)

The date of sentence – April 27 is special, it’s the day of Sierra Leone’s Independence. Since a long time it has become an open secret that the international crime tribunals are not established to find the truth but to «make legal» the political decisions taken before. The condemnation of one party of the Sierra Leone conflict leaves unanswered the questions for those who held power those days and who, in a lot of cases, hold it today. The main culprits have happened to be persons of low prominence. Now they have found somebody of adequate standing. And his head is a holiday sacrifice. The only thing to know is will the Sierra Leone’s gods receive such an offering?

__________________

(1) Before that the Special Sierra Leone Court had conducted three trials and convicted nine men. Sierra Leone’s former minister of internal affairs Hinga Norman was not found guilty, he «suddenly» died in jail. The other potential major culprit Former Sierra Leone junta leader Johnny Paul Koroma never faced the Court for this leader of the military coup in 1997 «has disappeared without a trace». Besides two major defendants – former vice-president F. Sankoh and S. Bokari – ‘suddenly» passed away at the trial.

(2) Ref. Charles Taylor’s trial transcripts, March 13, 2008. 

(3) Ref. Charles Taylor’s trial transcripts, June 12, 2008. 

(4) Ref. Charles Taylor’s trial transcripts, May 14, 2008.

(5) «Unisti Ga!» means «Kill him!» in Serbian. That’s how the witness presents Serbian words as the Russian ones. Ref. The International Crime Court against Milosevic, trial transcripts, August 30, 2002. Ref. the commentary on the witness’s testimony, the book The Hague Tribunal tries Milosevic, The Trial Transcripts by A.Mezyaev, 2006, p.139-144.