NAOMI CAMPBELL received a gift of several “dirty-looking stones” after first meeting former Liberian president Charles Taylor, she told a war crimes tribunal yesterday, in a testimony that prosecutors hope will lend weight to allegations that the former warlord traded in conflict diamonds.
Giving evidence before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the international tribunal set up in The Hague to put Taylor in the dock, Campbell confirmed that she had accepted the stones, believed to be diamonds, in September 1997.
Prior to the hearing when asked about the alleged gift, the supermodel was tight-lipped, storming off a TV set and telling journalists she had no desire to be associated with a man she considered to have done “some terrible things”.
Yesterday, appearing as a reluctant witness under subpoena, Campbell told the court she had been visited late at night by two men she had never met, who delivered a pouch of what are believed to be jewels to her room while she had been a guest in Nelson Mandela’s house in South Africa. She had been attending a charity dinner with guests including her former agent Carole White, actor Mia Farrow and Taylor.
During a 90-minute court session that veered between farce and forensic inquisition, the 40-year-old insisted she had not had a private conversation with the then-president. Not only had she not known about his reputation, she said, she had never heard of Liberia, and had never heard the term “blood diamond”.
The gifts arrived at her bedroom, she told the court, with “no explanation, no note”. She did not look in the package, she added, until the next morning. If she was blase about it, she said, it was because she often received gifts from unknown fans.
Over breakfast the next morning with Farrow and White, she said she was given the first clue as to their origin. “One of them said: ‘That’s Charles Taylor,’ and I said: ‘Yeah, I guess it was,’” she told the court. She said she remembered handing them over to a friend, Jeremy Ratcliffe, the then director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, that day.
“They were in my possession for, I don’t know, about six hours,” she testified, adding: “Once I’d given them over it was out of my hands . . . and I didn’t really care about it anymore.” Mr Ratcliffe, she said, had held on to the assumed diamonds ever since.
A statement from the NMCF said acceptance of gems would have been “improper and illegal”.
According to Brenda Hollis, chief prosecutor for the court, the episode could be crucial in attempts to prove that Taylor, despite his denials, traded weapons to Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in Sierra Leone in exchange for uncut diamonds, which he then allegedly sold on “in mayonnaise jars” for huge profit. In doing so, the prosecution says, he fomented a conflict that claimed over 100,000 lives.
While he has not yet been prosecuted in his own country, the erstwhile “big man” of west Africa faces 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone. He denies them all, with the bombast of a man who once reportedly compared himself to Jesus Christ.
“Never, ever did I receive, whether it is mayonnaise or coffee or whatever jar, any diamonds from the RUF,” he told the court last year. “It is a lie, a diabolical lie.”
Yesterday, as the 62-year-old sat quietly in court making notes, British defence lawyer Courtenay Griffiths denied any suggestion that Campbell’s testimony was detrimental to his client. By calling a witness who was incapable of confirming that Taylor was without doubt the giver of the diamonds, he said, the prosecution had plunged the trial into “total confusion”.
“You don’t deal with speculation and probabilities in a court of law . . . Where is the proof?” he asked after the hearing.
In his cross-examination of Campbell, Mr Griffiths sought to demolish the credibility of Farrow and Ms White, whose versions of that night’s events, he argued, differed not only from each other’s, but also from the supermodel’s.
While Ms White claimed in her declaration to have witnessed the handover of the gems, Campbell told the court that “she may have been around the corner but she wasn’t in front of my face”.
And while Ms White said that Campbell had sat next to Taylor at the dinner and that she had overheard him talking of giving her diamonds, the model responded, tetchily: “That’s not true at all. I was sat next to Mr Mandela and if there was a conversation about diamonds it wasn’t to me.”
Alleging that Ms White, who is involved in legal conflict with her former employer, is “a woman with a powerful motive to lie” about Campbell, Mr Griffiths later told journalists: “Our view is that the prosecution scored a spectacular own goal by calling Naomi Campbell.” – (Guardian service)