Severing Liberia's sinews of war: the U.N. is preparing new sanctions against Liberia's strongman Charles Taylor, who seized that African country's profitable international shipping registry and is brokering `conflict diamonds' from guerrillas

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 19, 2001 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Emperors and warlords from Alexander the Great to Napoleon all understood that to wage war they needed both men and money. The French call it le nerf de la guerre -- the sinews of war. Without a constant source of finance, armies collapse like rag dolls, potentates fall like cards. It's one of the oldest lessons of warfare, but sometimes it takes new and horrible scenes of butchery for the world to wake up and do something about it.

With strong support from the Bush administration, the U.N. Sanctions Committee held "private consultations" starting on Oct. 22 to discuss further sanctions against the disputed regime of warlord Charles Taylor in Liberia. Sources at the U.S. delegation in New York City tell INSIGHT the new measures currently being crafted could make it illegal to buy timber from Liberia, a lucrative business now dominated by Russian arms dealers, a Chinese government front company and France.

The world body also is considering placing revenues from the Liberian International Ship and Corporate Registry (LISCR), the flag-of-convenience specialty shop, into a U.N.-controlled escrow account to prevent payments to arms dealers and other sanctions-busting operations as happened on four separate occasions last year. A decision could come as early as Nov. 5, when the United Nations holds a public review of the latest 174-page report from the U.N. Experts Panel and its recommendations in favor of tightening the noose on Taylor.

Taylor has become an international pariah after battling rival warlords in Liberia in a civil war that took the lives of more than 200,000 of Liberia's 3 million citizens. He also stands accused of directing armed insurrections in neighboring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire, financing a raucous lifestyle with hot diamonds and feeding crack cocaine to murderous gangs of child warriors.

Although Liberia has a basket-case economy and virtually no ships of its own, 1,734 vessels currently fly the Liberian flag. Selling the flag brings Taylor a minimum of $18 million per year, representing 25 percent of the cash sustaining the Taylor regime, according to the upcoming U.N. report, portions of which were obtained by INSIGHT.

Soon after becoming president in 1997, Taylor broke the existing contract with a U.S. firm, International Registries Inc. (IRI), which successfully had managed the ship and corporate registry for 50 years. In a lawsuit now under way in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, IRI claims the registry has become "a handy honey pot for lining the pockets of Liberia's current president, Charles Taylor."

To orchestrate the takeover, Taylor turned to American lawyer Lester Hyman, whom Taylor had known since the mid-1980s when Hyman helped him fend off an attempt by the Liberian government to extradite him to face charges of fraud and embezzlement. At the time Taylor was in jail in Plymouth, Mass., and Hyman was head of the Massachusetts State Democratic Party. Taylor ultimately escaped in 1985 and went to Libya where he received military training from Col. Muammar Qaddafi's intelligence service. Also championing Taylor while he was in jail was Donald Payne, a member of the Newark, N.J., Municipal Council. Shortly thereafter, Payne was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he is ranking member of the Africa subcommittee of the International Relations Committee. Payne has been one of Taylor's biggest supporters.

The U.N. experts note that Taylor wanted to put his own people in charge of LISCR after taking power in 1997 because "Taylor had failed to raise funds during the war from IRI and wished to replace them." According to the writ now pending in the New York State Supreme Court, "Taylor's oversight of LISCR is so tight that he acts in effect as one of LISCR's senior partners and is intimately involved in all aspects of its management, personnel assignments, distribution of funds, salaries and foreign offices. Moreover, Taylor reportedly received a substantial piece of LISCR's revenue -- up to one-third."

An attorney for LISCR dismissed those claims as "irrelevant." But the U.N. Experts report found that the Liberian commissioner of maritime affairs, to whom LISCR by contract remits payments destined for the government of Liberia, ordered payments for "arms and transportation in violation of the [U.N.] sanctions."

The ship and corporate registry serves another purpose than just feeding the Taylor regime in Liberia. When the U.N. Panel of Experts sent a team to Liberia last year to check the invoices of companies purporting to export Liberian diamonds to the world market, they found that virtually none of them had any physical presence in the country. Instead, "mail addressed to the companies in question has been forwarded to the newly established Liberian International Ship and Corporate Registry (LISCR) which now handles the Liberian maritime registry," the panel reported last December. "This means ... that there is an intimate Liberian connection with these deceptive diamond transactions."