Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, who is on trial in The Hague for war crimes, took the stand yesterday and dismissed the testimony of ninety-one witnesses, brushing off charges of rape, torture, and murder as “lies.” Taylor became Liberia’s President in 1997, after a bloody seven-year civil war. In 2003, the U.N. issued a warrant for his arrest; he was accused of, among other things, conscripting children as soldiers and funnelling weapons to rebels in Sierra Leone in exchange for diamonds.

Jon Lee Anderson, who lived in Liberia as teen-ager, visited the country in 1998, at the beginning of Taylor’s Presidency, when the new leader still had wide international support. Anderson put Taylor’s rise in context:

During the multi-sided civil war…sadistic teen-age killers sporting names like General Fuck Me Quick, Babykiller, and Dead Body Bones arbitrarily executed civilians and decorated checkpoints on the roads with human heads and entrails. Often on drugs, wearing fetishes they believed made them impervious to bullets, and garbed in costumes ranging from novelty-store fright masks to wigs and women’s bathrobes, these murderous adolescents raped, pillaged, and slaughtered at will. Many engaged in cannibalism, eating the hearts and genitals of their slain enemies in order to enhance their “power.” Charles Taylor’s fighters perpetrated some of the worst atrocities of the war, and it is a commonplace that Taylor was elected President last year not because he was popular but because people thought that if he didn’t win he would continue the violence. Nevertheless, he is now a spokesman for peace, and to celebrate the first anniversary of his Presidency he is hosting a three-week “national conference on Liberia’s future,” beginning this week. He invited his domestic political opponents, several African heads of state, hundreds of prominent Liberians living abroad, and, of course, Americans like Ramsey Clark and Jesse Jackson.

In 2006, when Anderson went back to Liberia, Taylor was living in exile in Nigeria, about to be released into the hands of the U.N. Anderson’s article in the March 27, 2006, issue, “After the Warlords,” captured a country still grappling with a traumatic history. (The article is available online to subscribers; Anderson also spoke to Amy Davidson about his reporting.)

In a recent post on The New Yorker's Book Club blog, Anderson described the contrast between Taylor’s personal charm and his political actions:

When we met, he was President of the country, and he was very solicitous toward me, perfectly charming. He even employed some of Liberia’s wonderful old-fashioned niceties, calling me “my dear,” for instance. At that moment in time, Taylor was probably responsible for the murders of several tens of thousands of his own countrymen, almost all of them civilians, many of them women and children. And he was, by all accounts, aiding and abetting—in exchange for diamonds—Sierra Leone’s R.U.F. guerrillas, who were just beginning their limb-chopping frenzies through their own country. Taylor is a prime example of someone who, to my eye, is nice but not “good.”

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