Word: ruffing
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...Taylor took the stand on July 14 at the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone for the first time since his trial began 18 months ago. He is accused of arming, training and controlling Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, who rampaged across the country during its brutal 1991-2001 civil war. Prosecutors allege that Taylor targeted Sierra Leone so he could strip it of its vast mineral wealth, in particular its diamonds. Earlier in the trial, chief prosecutor Stephen Rapp insisted that Taylor was "an exceptional violator of human rights" who steadily provided weapons and support...
...people were killed in the blood-soaked conflict that embroiled Sierra Leone and Liberia, even spreading into Ivory Coast and Guinea. During the course of the trial, the court - sitting in the Hague for fear of stirring up fresh unrest in Sierra Leone and Liberia - was told about how RUF rebels enslaved and mutilated thousands of civilians, who had their hands and arms severed. Some of the worst crimes were carried out by gangs of child soldiers, who were fed drugs to desensitize them to the horror of their actions. (See pictures of life and death in Sierra Leone...
...they went free. As Sierra Leone's civil war wound down in 2002 after 11 years of fighting marked by some of the most brutal human-rights abuses in history, much of that fueled by competition over the country's diamond fields, the leaders of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and other militias, as well as their sponsor, Liberian President Charles Taylor, negotiated themselves an amnesty...
...Wednesday, the court convicted two surviving RUF leaders, Issa Hassan Sesay and Morris Kallon, of 16 out of 18 counts of war crimes, and a third commander, Augustine Gbao, of 14 counts. The charges included "acts of terrorism" against the civilian population, the use of forced marriage and, for Sesay and Kallon, the use of child soldiers...
Smillie testified that Sierra Leone has far more "and better quality" diamonds than Liberia. He said that when he met with Taylor in October 2000 as part of the U.N. investigation, Taylor told him that diamonds obtained by the Sierra Leone RUF militia, which Taylor is accused of supporting, probably came through Liberia, but that the President claimed to have had "no control" over the flow of illegal gems. Smillie said Taylor also told him that that "Liberia's name was misused" by diamond-smugglers. In the late 1990s, large numbers of diamonds sold in Antwerp, Belgium, were certified...