The court heard from three witnesses including French photographer Patrick Robert whose photographs took the war to the world stage.
Day three of the war crimes trial of Liberian Kunti Kamara was all about setting the scene of Liberia’s civil war and the history that led up to it for the jury of six French citizens and three judges who will decide this case.
As a journalist during the war Mr Stewart had experienced much of it firsthand. He told the court that two out of every three Liberians had been forced to leave their homes. A million had fled the country. The TRC’s only really controversial ruling had been to recommend Mrs Sirleaf be barred from holding office for thirty years for her support of Charles Taylor’s 1989 invasion.
“A culture of impunity continues in so many areas,” Mr Stewart said. “We failed to break this culture of impunity and fear. Because in Liberia human rights are violated with impunity. Journalists go to jail. Free expression is stifled. So for a combination of all these reasons we made these recommendations and because the Liberian people know that these acts will be repeated in the future if there is not accountability.
Mr Robert covered many of the other conflicts roiling the world at the time – the Kuwait war, the fall of the Soviet Union – but in the dozens of trips he took to Liberia nothing seemed to change, he said. The other conflicts were moving fast but this one was not. It was no longer soldier to soldier, said Robert. Anyone from an opposing ethnicity was now someone you could kill. Everyone was the opposition. “Once you can die because of your ethnicity why won’t you fight for it instead of waiting to be killed?” he asked rhetorically.
A 1996 documentary by French filmmaker Christophe Naigen detailed Liberia’s history and the failures of the Americo Liberian elite that settled the country in 1822.The film claimed the Americo Liberians subjugated the Indigenous population for the next 160 years until they were overthrown in a violent coup by an illiterate Indigenous army sergeant Samuel K. Doe.