Liberia’s President Joseph Boakai signed a decree Thursday marking a major step toward the creation of a tribunal that would try civil war crimes that victims have been demanding since the atrocities ended more than two decades ago.
Around 250,000 people lost their lives during the two civil wars which tore apart this English-speaking West African country between 1989 and 2003.
Despite pressure from civil society and the international community, Liberia has yet to hold any trial during this period marked by a litany of abuses attributable to all parties: massacres of civilians, acts of cannibalism, torture, rape, mutilations, enlistment of child soldiers.
The executive order establishes “the Office of the War Crimes and Economic Crimes Tribunal.” He is charged with creating the future tribunal “in accordance with international models that have been used for similar war crimes trials.”
The office will also ensure “cooperation with international partners” to find funds for the court.
Before signing the decree in Monrovia, President Boakai affirmed that his action aims to “do justice and heal the scars and memories” of this “tragic and violent misadventure”.
“We must act, and act now,” he added.
After the lower house, Liberia’s Senate voted in April for the creation of a special tribunal supported by the UN “to judge those who bear the greatest responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity” and a national tribunal to try economic crimes.
Before President Boakai came to power in January, the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2009, including the establishment of a war crimes tribunal, largely went unheeded. Particularly in the name of maintaining peace, some of the incriminated warlords having remained very influential in their community.
However, convictions have been handed down by foreign courts. Former rebel commander Kunti Kamara was sentenced on appeal on March 27 by the French courts in the name of the principle of universal jurisdiction to 30 years of criminal imprisonment for acts of barbarity and complicity in crimes against humanity during the first war. civil.
Civil wars brought the country, one of the poorest on the planet, to its knees, ravaged ten years later by the Ebola epidemic.
