-Former TRC Commissioner, John H.T. Stewart explains
By William Selmah- wselmah@gmail.com
For the first time, a former Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been explaining why TRC did not take statement from ex-President Charles Taylor or why he did not testify before the body about his role in the Lberian civil war.
The former Liberian leader led the rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) that launched the Christmas Eve invasion of Liberia from neighbouring Ivory Coast on December 24, 1989.
Mr. Taylor’s defunct NPFL) rebel movement started the war in desperate attempts to unseat then President Samuel Doe and government.
A former member of the TRC, Mr. John H. T. Stewart said they made frantic efforts to have the ex-President appear before the commission when it began hearing testimonies in 2007, but to no avail.
The TRC came into being through a Legislative enactment and was mandated to investigate between 1979 and 2003, gross human rights violations and systematic abuses of power in Liberia and to identify individuals or groups responsible for the violations, where possible, ensure accountability and advance recommendations.
Mr. Stewart recalled that at the time, the TRC wrote Judges at the then UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) where Taylor was in pre-trial detention, to seek their permission to take statements from him.
But the court replied saying, this could only be made possible based on Taylor’s approval and an understanding that “any statement made by him that would be of interest to the SCSL could be used against him during his trial.”
This made it impossible to take any statement from Taylor, Stewart told journalists attending the West African Justice Project organized by New Narratives.
He used the occasion to comment on the unfavorable condition under which the commission did its work. Among them, he said were death threats, economic strangulation and leaking of sensitive TRC documents to some of those the commission had mentioned as perpetrators.
Mr. Stewart also revealed that even after the expiration of their mandate, the livelihood of some of the TRC’s ex-commissioners became targets of the government, referencing their Chairman Cllr. Jerome Verdier in particular.
“President Sirleaf did all to stifle us,” he told journalists taking part in the New Narratives reporting project. At the time, President Sirleaf and her Unity Party government denied ever targeting Verdier and others.
Mr. Stewart also used the occasion to disclose that there are still huge volumes of unpublished reports of the TRC.
Asked as to why the commission failed to publish all of its work before the expiration of its mandate in 2010, he said the UNDP which funded the publication told them that it could only finance the publication of limited copies, and not the entire report.
The former TRC Commissioner said that all of the commission’s documents are currently archived at the Georgia Tech University in the United States.
The TRC collected 22,000 statements in total during its hearing of testimonies in both Liberia and the Diaspora.
A UN Observation Report on Liberia released in July 2018, condemned the fact that that “none of the alleged perpetrators of gross human rights violations and war crimes mentioned in the TRC report, has been brought to justice, and that some of those individuals are or have been holding official executive positions, including in the government.”