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Any
hint about underwriting Taylor's legal fees is
nauseating
Monday,
April 17, 2006
By Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh
President
Sirleaf couldn't have said it. If she did, why did she
say it, and why will her government want to do it,
anyway? Is her administration in the business of
paying the legal fees for an indicted war criminal?
Why
will a president who claims to be working for a
peaceful Liberia ignite a political firestorm by
alienating a cross section of the population in a
desperate attempt to underwrite the legal fees of the
former president who is facing war crimes charges?
I don’t get it, and I am quite sure others are more
than confused about this revelation because it
doesn’t make any sense, except that it insults the
memories of the dead, their living relatives and the
Liberian people, in an administration that talks tough
about respecting democracy but is close to being
unilateral in reaching a key decision that affects the
entire population.
Why
will a president who claims to be working for a
peaceful Liberia ignite a political firestorm by
alienating a cross section of the population in a
desperate attempt to underwrite the legal fees of the
former president who is facing war crimes charges?
However,
a statement from Morris Dukuly, who is Minister for
Presidential Affairs, acknowledged the issue was
discussed amongst African Union leaders meeting in
Abuja, but the Liberian government made no commitment
“The
Liberian government was only interested in a speedy
trial in an environment not hostile to the accused,”
he said.
This
kind of inconsistency challenges Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf’s credibility as a leader, and puts her in
the bull eye’s of her political critics who see her
now as untrustworthy in the handling of the Taylor
matter, especially when she slyly defends him and
asserts that her government is only interested in a
speedy trial.
If
the president is not part and parcel of Charles
Taylor’s civil war as she claimed all along, then
why is she so obsessed about him getting a speedy
trial in a non-hostile environment?
It
is hard defending Ms. Sirleaf like some of us have
done, and wants to do for the love of country when she
seems to be doing the opposite and not seeking the
interests of the people who elected her.
It
is also difficult to support the president when she
appears to be playing games with the emotions of a
nation after she wept and apologized publicly for her
war-time comments about destroying Monrovia and
rebuilding it during the campaign, only to later
change gears, flip-flopped and danced around the issue
after she became president when it became obvious that
Mr. Taylor would be arrested eventually and prosecuted
for crimes against humanity.
President
Sirleaf is behaving as if the former president is a
poster child for innocence; a guy who's so hated and
wrongly accused that the citizens he violently chased
out of the country, whose national treasury he emptied
and whose relatives he slaughtered must foot his legal
fees to defend him against them.
This
is naked arrogance, and it shows how much this
president seriously values the suffering of the
Liberian people at a time when they are still healing
from the pain and disruption this guy and others
caused them.
I
am quite sure the Sirleaf administration did say what
has been reported by the press that the government
wants to underwrite the legal fees of Mr. Taylor, else
it wouldn’t have been reported at all. And once the
idiotic suggestion leaked, the government backtracked
and said the opposite that no commitment was made to
engage in what seems to be a public relations fiasco.
However,
why would the Sirleaf administration want to pay the
legal fees of an indicted former president who
reportedly bankrupted the country before he was exiled
in 2003?
Is
this the same former president, who, after he fled
from his hideout in Calabar on March 27, and was
arrested by the Nigerian security authorities two days
later, was found with bags full of money in the trunk
of his get away vehicle? Where did he get all that
money from, and what happen to the bags of money?
President
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf once again misread the aching
hearts of the citizenry and her political critics, and
miscalculated their reactions as is evidenced by the
government’s contradictory explanations since the
media broke the news.
It
is true that the Executive Mansion is nervous about
the impending Taylor war crimes trial. That trial
could drag the president before the international
tribunal as a witness to explain what she knew then,
and whether she is doing everything possible to help
her friend (not the Liberian people) by trying to
influence the trial.
This
does not bode well for a president who is riding a
wave of popularity, but needs the entire windfall from
that popularity to push her ambitious nation-building
agenda and other programs perhaps in the first year or
the entire six years of her presidency.
The
president is vulnerable on the Taylor issue. It is a
crucial weakness for her young administration, and it
is not helping her image, either.
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