LIBERIA/NETHERLANDS: History was made this week when Charles Taylor was flown to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes, writes Chris Stephen in Freetown
Sahrbona Tombudu stands on the high grassy banks of a small river whose muddy waters run by the village of Komadu in the heart of Sierra Leone's diamond country. Jungle-clad hills rise on both sides in a scene that could have come from a tourist postcard.
Sahrbona (45) points down to a spot in the swirling waters where, eight years ago, he was forced to sift what became known as "blood diamonds" for the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
These soldiers spent the day lounging on the bluffs overlooking the river and operated a simple rule: Those too tired to work the dawn-to-dusk shifts would be shot.
"They would flog us, beat us, shoot us," he explains. Sahrbona, a mechanic by trade, escaped one day by running into the bush and surviving long enough to find UN forces.
He smiles when I ask what he would have thought of the idea that Charles Taylor, the man accused of being the RUF's boss, would one day go on trial for war crimes. "I would not believe it."
Believe it Sahrbona. Last Tuesday, Charles Taylor, the man whose exploitation of Sierra Leone's diamond fields was responsible for the current conflict diamond laws, was flown to a prison cell in The Hague to await trial.
For more than a decade, since seizing control of neighbouring Liberia in 1989, Taylor brought terror and death to Sierra Leone.
To control the diamond fields, home to the world's second purest gems, Taylor is accused of sending battalions of drugged child soldiers into battle.
Women were herded into camps and kept as sexual slaves. Murder, beatings and mutilation were common and up to 200,000 are reckoned to have been killed in a decade of slaughter.
The struggle to put Taylor on trial began in earnest in 2003 when he escaped civil war in Liberia for political asylum in Nigeria.
His indictment for war crimes by the Special Court of Sierra Leone raised the hopes of people across Africa that, in a continent where the 'Big Man' usually gets away with anything, the warlord could be made to answer for his actions.
The campaign caught the imagination of young Africans across the continent, and more than 300 organisations joined together in a huge effort.
While rights groups in Nigeria threatened legal action against their own government to force them to hand Taylor over, others petitioned Western governments.
"The object of this campaign was a deterrent," says Voke Ighorodje of the Nigerian Coalition for an International Criminal Court. "We wanted leaders to see that a man like Taylor can be tried."
Three years of campaigning paid off in January when Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, asked Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo to hand Taylor over.
The European Union then added its voice and in March, so did the United States.
"There was a lot of pressure form everywhere and Obasanjo knew it," says Ighorodje "Bush and Blair were hearing what the NGOs were saying."
At that point Nigeria announced that Taylor had absconded. The United States said that unless he was found, it would scrub an imminent visit by Obasanjo to Washington.
Hours later, Charles Taylor was magically found and arrested. In fact, Nigeria knew where he was all along.
"We were tracking Taylor through his mobile phone as he moved across the country," one source told The Irish Times.
But the Special Court worried that Taylor was too big a man for the court to try in Sierra Leone, and requested the trial be moved to The Hague.
America and Britain backed the move, and the International Criminal Court, newly created in The Hague, offered to rent out one of its courtrooms.
This split the ranks of civil rights groups, with many wanting Taylor tried in Sierra Leone to show that Africa could administer its own justice.
Then came a new problem. Holland refused to sanction the trial on its territory unless someone else agreed to take Charles Taylor if he was found guilty.
Nobody volunteered. Approaches to Austria, Denmark and then Sweden fell flat. Other UN states asked why, if Britain and the US were so keen to have the trial in The Hague, they did not offer to jail him themselves.
Meanwhile, the court was wrestling with a new crisis. It is jointly controlled by the UN and the Sierra Leone government, and money comes from pledges by UN states.
This year, just nine of the €24 million budget has been pledged and accountants warned that the court may run out of money this summer.
In May, Taylor's defence lawyer, Karim Khan, petitioned the court to keep the trial in Sierra Leone, and this month civil rights groups wrote to the UN demanding that Taylor stay in Africa.
With the crisis deepening, London last week broke the deadlock, offering to hold Taylor in its maximum security Belmarsh prison.
On Friday, June 16th, the UN Security Council made the move official and four days later Taylor was flown out of Africa, possibly for the last time. If found guilty, the 58-year-old faces at least 20 years in jail.
"We worked hard for two years to get him here; a lot of behind the scenes diplomacy went on," said the Special Court's retiring chief prosecutor, Desmond de Silva.
"The world is moving from impunity to accountability."
A long and difficult trial still lies ahead, but if it works, supporters of international justice say dictators across Africa will be put on notice that human rights violations will no longer go unpunished.
Meanwhile, back in Sierra Leone, arrangements are being made to beam pictures of the trial to the few TV sets operating in cafes and bars in Kono province.
Sahrbona intends to reserve a front row seat. "It will be good to see him tried," he said. "He brought all these problems on us."