‘The Al Capone of West Africa’
Charles Taylor “masterminded the civil war in Sierra Leone because of greed and corruption—he was responsible for the death, maiming, or mutilation of over 1.2 million people,” says Dr. Alan W. White, who earned his Ph.D. in Administration/Management (now Applied Management and Decision Sciences) from Walden in 1995.
At the end of 1989, warlord Taylor and his revolutionary group instigated a civil war in Liberia that lasted, with brief respites, until he fled to Nigeria in 2003. Driven by a desire to destabilize neighboring Sierra Leone—and profit from its diamonds—Taylor fomented civil war there in 1991. He also backed the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), with whom he hoped to form a sympathetic government. The 10-year conflict resulted in human-rights violations on a massive scale.
To hold Taylor accountable for his crimes against humanity, the United Nations and the government of Sierra Leone created the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)—a hybrid international war crimes tribunal that blended international and national law—in 2002. White, formerly the director of investigative operations for the U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General, was brought on board as chief of investigations by David Crane, the SCSL prosecutor appointed by Kofi Annan, then the UN Secretary-General.
Leaving his wife and children behind, White arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in mid-2002. Dangerous and disease-ridden, Freetown was ranked one of the worst places in the world to live, and the government of Sierra Leone had nothing to offer the office of the prosecutor in terms of facilities— nowhere to live, nowhere to work. White found a house in a walled compound that served as both home and office for the six members of the prosecutorial team for the first year: “The basement of our house was the control center,” he says. Finally, he had to pick four men from the Sierra Leone police whom he hoped he could trust to help with the investigation and with security.
White’s mission: “retributive justice,” the mechanism by which criminals are brought to trial, prosecuted, convicted, and punished. The team started criminal investigations in August of 2002, and within two weeks White had enough evidence to not only open the case against Taylor, but to indict him and 12 others for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the case had to be airtight, so White would spend three more years based in Freetown, building up evidence of conspiracy.
Taylor’s 12 co-defendants included senior leaders of the Civil Defense Force, a state militia, who “started as the defenders of the nation and became the offenders,” White says. Unlike in many other civil war situations, he points out, Sierra Leone’s was unrelated to tribal or ethnic conflicts: “It was nothing more than an organized criminal conspiracy, and the evidence took us straight to Charles Taylor immediately—he was the Al Capone of West Africa.”
‘We Are—That Is Why You Are’
In early 2003, while White pursued his case, Lydia Apori-Nkansah, a former human rights adjudicator at the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice of Ghana, arrived in Sierra Leone to serve as the head of the Research Unit for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC, established by the UN and the government of Sierra Leone after the end of the civil war, gave the Research Unit a mandate: facilitate restorative justice by documenting the human rights violations that had occurred during the civil war.
Restorative justice “allows both the victim and the perpetrator to come together, to have an exchange, and for the victim to have the truth about what happened and why the perpetrator did what he or she did,” says Apori- Nkansah, who earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Walden in 2008 while working with the TRC. Apori-Nkansah and her team were to gather evidence “from every nook and corner of Sierra Leone” about the human rights abuses that took place during the conflict and to document in formal hearings the experiences of victims and perpetrators—and of the forcibly conscripted child soldiers who were both.
“My heart still goes out to them,” says Apori- Nkansah. “We didn’t call them perpetrators, we called them witnesses. By UN [rules], children are entitled to privacy, so we had closed hearings for them, and they would break down, because they simply cannot contend with the sort of things that they were made to do.” In restorative justice, the goal of gathering testimony is to give each party a voice so that healing can begin and victims’ needs can be addressed, rather than to convict the perpetrator.
Her task required an extraordinary amount of empathy. “If you don’t make the people the center, the process will not work at all,” Apori-Nkansah says. “They need to have faith in you.”
As an example, she cites her experience with amputees in Sierra Leone: “A lot of people—civilians— had their hands and their legs chopped off [during the civil war],” she explains. Rebel forces would raid a village and ask people if they wanted “short sleeves”—i.e., to have their arms cut off above the elbow—or “long sleeves”—to have their hands cut off. Collecting the testimony of these victims was critical, but the association of amputees issued a press release saying that they didn’t want to be part of the TRC process, and they refused Apori- Nkansah’s invitation to visit her office.
So she went to their camp, where she encountered a teenage amputee. Apori-Nkansah sat down next to the young woman, introduced herself, and told her about the TRC. She recounts the woman’s response: “You want to hear my story? For what? Look at me! My two legs have been cut off! My mother was beheaded in my presence. I was raped by seven men. I have no idea where the next meal is coming from. If I come and tell my story, would that give me food to eat?”
“Of course, [I couldn’t] give her the food she was looking for—that was not our mandate,” says Apori-Nkansah, “but I had to let her understand that I knew what she was going through. I pleaded with her to just give me the opportunity so we could talk about it, in order to address their needs.” Finally, after being won over by Apori-Nkansah’s empathy and patience, the woman agreed to give her testimony and also to convince the other amputees to share their stories.
“And the first person who testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an amputee,” Apori-Nkansah concludes.
Key to the restorative justice process is, when possible, reconciling the victims and the perpetrators so that the community can become whole again. In African culture, Apori-Nkansah says, the worldview is, “We are—that is why you are.” If one person commits an abuse, “the community is no longer intact,” and so that person needs to be reconciled with the community, if possible. She explains that, after each side gave their testimony around a given situation, and the perpetrator had asked for forgiveness, the commission would consult with the community elders and traditional religious leaders, asking them, “What does it take, within your culture, your own beliefs, for you to say that now the community can come together?”
There might be a cleansing ceremony for a woman who had been raped or a reconciliation ceremony at the site of a murder. Whether or not the perpetrator would be forgiven “all depended on whether the community felt that a person has spoken the truth and that he has shown remorse,” Apori- Nkansah says. “Then they were prepared to forgive.”
Finally, her work with the TRC of Sierra Leone included focusing on the future as well as the past, through the development of measures for institutional reforms. The TRC “engaged the whole Sierra Leonean community, [asking] ‘What do you want to see in Sierra Leone?’” she says. “We even engaged children and wrote a child-friendly report for them. And we put all of that together for the reforms.”
Apori-Nkansah believes that “with or without prosecution, it is always necessary to find out about the causes of a conflict, address the needs of victims, get the version of perpetrators, and put institutional measures in place to avoid reoccurrence.” Amnesia—pretending that nothing happened—is unacceptable, she says. “Even if it is difficult to open the wound, let’s open it and dress it properly so that when it heals, it heals.”
In Pursuit of Justice
Although his path never crossed with Apori- Nkansah’s, White was also dedicated to collecting testimony about abuses, though to a different end. He pursued his investigation of Taylor and his cohorts like an organized criminal conspiracy case—traveling to Europe, the United States, and throughout Africa to gather testimony and intelligence information. “We were also trying to trace the money, which literally took us around the world,” says White. “Nobody knew what we were doing because we were very independent.”
The SCSL indicted Taylor in the spring of 2003. His challenge was overruled by the appeals chamber and, under pressure from the international community and besieged by rebel groups, Taylor finally stepped down as president and accepted asylum in Nigeria. There, “he continued his criminal conspiracy by money-laundering and harassing witnesses,” White says. After the indictment, White continued to work “nonstop,” collecting evidence to shore up the case and seeking the support of authorities in Europe and in the United States, as well as informing the people of Sierra Leone of the SCSL’s mandate to prosecute those who bore the greatest responsibility for the war in Sierra Leone.
White and his team traveled to the 13 states of Sierra Leone, holding town hall meetings to tell the people what they were doing. “We made it clear that we did not intend to prosecute any children for their crimes, period,” says White. A notable aspect of the case was that, for the first time, forced marriage and child conscription were charged as war crimes. “This was international jurisprudence, so these are binding for other tribunals as well,” explains White.
Three years of investigation took their toll on White. He got typhoid and almost died from cerebral malaria. And periodic trips back to the United States didn’t make up for the time away from his wife and daughters. But he has no question that it was worth it: “It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a difference, to reestablish the rule of law,” White says. “You can’t have peace without justice; you can’t have stability without accountability.”
Finally, in early 2006, the new Liberian president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and President George W. Bush prevailed upon Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo to give Taylor up. Taylor tried to escape to Cameroon, but was apprehended and taken by helicopter first to the SCSL, and then to The Hague to await trial. White, who had “lived and breathed [the case] 24/7” for three years, went home. Back in the United States, although he was officially retired, he continued to develop the sources and report the information to the authorities. “I did it on my own,” he says. “I was obsessed with doing this—had we not brought Taylor to justice, the court would not have been a success.”
White’s work on the Taylor case was a highlight of his career directing major law enforcement operations. He credits his experience at Walden with helping equip him to work in Sierra Leone— his first time in Africa—by giving him flexibility, and, through the residencies, exposing him to a broad international community.
Theory into Practice
For Apori-Nkansah, her early work with the TRC of Sierra Leone intensified her desire for a framework to understand and resolve the issues she was handling. A Ph.D. was the next step, but as a wife and as a mother of two young daughters and busy with her work with the TRC, she needed to find a school that would allow her to maintain her other responsibilities. Inspired by Walden’s scholar-practitioner philosophy that combines academic theory with practical solutions, she enrolled in the Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration program in the fall of 2003.
“Everything I studied is relevant,” she says of her Walden experience. “I got grounded in the theoretical and conceptual bases of transitional justice, [and] I learned that the socioeconomic, cultural, and political dynamics dictated the kind of policy options employed by transitional democracies in pursuit of justice.”
In addition to using her Walden experiences to inform her practice, Apori-Nkansah was also able to draw from her TRC experiences for her Walden work: she received the 2008 Harold L. Hodgkinson Award, Walden’s outstanding dissertation honor, for her dissertation, Transitional Justice in Postconflict Contexts: The Case of Sierra Leone’s Dual Accountability Mechanisms, which examined the complementary role of the TRC and SCSL.
In April of 2005, after completing her work with the TRC of Sierra Leone, Apori-Nkansah went to Liberia to train members of the Transitional Legislative Assembly on legislative processes in anticipation of the elections (Taylor was by now in Nigeria, and a transitional government was in place in Liberia). However, she says, “I found the legislature engaged with a bill that sought to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I realized that unless the issues about the proposed bill were dealt with, the training I was to deliver would not be possible.”
Continuing the Walden mandate to be a change agent, Apori-Nkansah told the training coordinator of her expertise on the topic of TRCs, and offered her services. She was asked to speak off-the-cuff about the importance of passing the bill. In her speech—which was broadcast on national television and radio—she used metaphors, symbols, rituals, and stories to talk about the goals of the commission and of restorative justice: “I said, ‘Look, our children have been maimed. Our daughters have been raped. Even though the guns are silent, the trauma lingers on. We have to have a forum that would let us know what happened to our sons and to our daughters, and why those who took up arms against us did what they did.’”
After Apori-Nkansah’s speech—which helped turn the tide in favor of the bill—she was asked to serve as an international expert advisor to the Legislative Joint Committee on the TRC bill and the Committee on the Peace Process and National Reconciliation. In this role, she helped resolve issues raised by the public, revised the bill, and carried out an awareness campaign through interviews and press releases. The bill was passed into law, Apori-Nkansah says, and “in the first week of January 2006, the newly elected members of the parliament of Liberia were brought to my institute—the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA)—for orientation, where I had the opportunity to train them in governance.”
Two Types of Justice
What determines whether retributive justice, restorative justice, or a combination of the two is appropriate in a given civil war situation? There are a number of factors that go into making that judgment, including the relative strength of the country’s government, the international political landscape, and whether or not the threat of international criminal courts may deter war criminals from ending the war. The motivation in choosing either type of justice, says Apori-Nkansah, is to have peace: “Is this the approach which will give us the peace we are looking for?”
The case of Sierra Leone represented the first time that a war crimes tribunal and a TRC operated in a country concurrently. Apori-Nkansah’s dissertation found that, in the case of Sierra Leone, because the two institutions for justice “were not planned and coordinated as different parts of the same tool, they were pitched against each other, undermining their respective mandates and creating tensions in their efforts to implement their plans.” The dissertation recommends that “the policy choice, design, and packaging of restorative and retributive mechanisms for post-conflict transitional justice should […] link seamlessly to the strategic goal of peace and stability.”
Epilogue
The trial of Charles Taylor is continuing, visit the SCSL site for the latest information. Alan White is optimistic about the outcome: “So far, everyone we indicted [whose] trial has been concluded has been found guilty.” White retained his development consulting business, Alan White Associates, LLC, and now works as the director of international business development—focused primarily on Africa—for L-3 Communications, a government services company. Lydia Apori-Nkansah teaches at the Graduate School of Governance at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) in Accra. She is working on a book about her experiences in Sierra Leone and intends to continue her work in restorative justice. “I believe that a nation that has suffered civil conflicts can be rebuilt, no matter the devastation that they may have endured,” she says. “I believe that there can be genuine healing for the victims as well as the perpetrators. My sub-region is engulfed in pockets of civil conflicts and my passion is to be prepared to offer a hand in rehabilitation as and when the occasion demands.”