Word: nigeria
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Charles Taylor was impatient. For five hours the exiled former Liberian President had been sitting in the remote town of Gamboru, Nigeria, waiting for the right moment to slip across the border into Cameroon. Finally, as dawn cracked last Wednesday, Taylor decided to make his escape. A light-colored Land Rover carrying him and four companions--believed to be his wife, son, driver and an aide--drove past an unmanned immigration checkpoint before encountering a final gate across a narrow bridge. Witnesses say the driver and aide got out of the vehicle and started fiddling with the gate's lock...
...once among the most feared in Africa, it was an unceremonious end. As Liberia's ruler from 1997 to 2003, when a rebel revolt and international pressure forced him to resign and go into exile in Nigeria, Taylor, 58, had brutalized his country and the region, fomenting wars in three countries that left as many as 300,000 people dead and thousands more raped and maimed. Following the likes of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, Taylor is the latest strongman to face a reckoning in a court of law: after his capture in Nigeria, he was delivered...
That may be true--but Taylor's capture had as much to do with realpolitik as with justice. For years, although under indictment by the war-crimes tribunal and confined to a tin-roofed villa in Calabar, in Nigeria's steamy southeast, Taylor retained the support in Liberia of thousands of his ex-soldiers. In an effort to placate Taylor's loyalists, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia's new President, said on taking office in January that prosecuting Taylor was less a concern than reconstruction. But international donors, including the U.S. and the European Union, demanded as a condition...
...they hastily decided that ECOWAS should go into the peacekeeping business. To achieve a cease-fire in Liberia and supervise free elections, they created a West African force, the Economic Community Monitoring Group. Yet when the time came to pass out white ECOMOG helmets, only five countries sent troops: Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Gambia...
...exhale?after having been oppressed, shackled, silenced and placed in the dark. The unfortunate thing is that terrorists and enemies of the free world have now seized on Iraq as a base from which to operate. The world must hope that the Iraqis resist them. Cosmas Uzoma Odoemena Sokoto, Nigeria...