WASHINGTON — When I heard the news Thursday that Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia, had been found guilty of war crimes in Sierra Leone, I immediately telephoned one of the people whose life had been ripped apart by his soldiers: my sister Eunice, back home in Liberia.

Before Mr. Taylor unleashed the tsunami of rape, murder, torture and dismemberment that would engulf Sierra Leone, killing more than 50,000 people and causing hundreds of thousands to flee, there was Liberia.

It was in Liberia that Mr. Taylor’s rebels arrived in June 1990 at the Firestone rubber plantation (they still called it “plantation”) outside Monrovia, where Eunice was working. The fighters were intent on the revenge killings that would claim hundreds of thousands of civilians from Liberia’s rival ethnic groups. Eunice, then 27, ran outside in time to see about 20 men grabbing her co-worker Harris Brown and dragging him outside.

Why? He happened to be Krahn, the same ethnic group as that of the country’s hated president at the time, Mr. Taylor’s predecessor.