Ten years after the war ended, Sierra Leone is still struggling to rebuild. An estimated 50,000 people died, while countless others fled the country or took refuge in camps. A large portion of the nation’s young missed their educations. Unemployment, particularly among the young men who emerged from the war with few skills, is crushing. Electricity is scant, even in the capital. The country has returned to democracy, but many educated Sierra Leoneans remain abroad, literacy is low and some industries, like mining iron ore, are just starting up again.

Image Credit... The New York Times

“He is the one who started this,” Osman Turay, one of several amputees playing soccer on crutches in the concrete shell of an unfinished building in Freetown, said of Mr. Taylor after the verdict.

Prosecutors said Mr. Taylor’s part in the devastation was motivated not by ideology, but by a quest for power and money — “pure avarice,” in the words of David M. Crane, the American prosecutor who indicted him in 2003. Rebels provided Mr. Taylor with “a continuous supply” of diamonds, often in exchange for arms and ammunition, the court found. The war, and the money siphoned off from his own government, allowed him to send millions of dollars to offshore companies, prosecutors said.

Yet investigators never unraveled the web hiding this presumed fortune, and Mr. Taylor pleaded penury, leaving the court to foot the bill for his defense, which cost $100,000 per month in lawyers, staff and rent.

Still, the trial has brought “a sense of relief,” said Ibrahim Tommy, who leads the Center for Accountability and Rule of Law, a human rights group in Freetown. “I’m not sure it will bring closure to the victims,” Mr. Tommy said, but the trial was “a genuine effort to ensure accountability for the crimes in Sierra Leone.”