Top rebel claims 20 000 deaths
2008-01-21 09:11
Monrovia - One of Liberia's most notorious rebel commanders, known as General Butt Naked, has returned to the nation his troops terrorised to confess, saying he is responsible for 20 000 deaths.
Joshua Milton Blahyi, who now lives in Ghana, returned this week to face his homeland's truth and reconciliation commission, this time wearing a suit and tie.
His nom de guerre was derived from his platoon's practice of charging naked into battle, a technique meant to terrify the enemy.
Other warlords, though, had refused to ask forgiveness, dismissing a commission many in Liberia saw as toothless. Blahyi was urging other former killers to come forward as the country founded by freed American slaves in 1847 struggled to recover from past horrors.
'I could be hanged'
The 37-year-old Blahyi in a weekend interview after his truth commission appearance last week, said: "I could be electrocuted. I could be hanged. I could be given any other punishment. But I think forgiveness and reconciliation is the right way to go.
"I have been looking for an opportunity to tell the true story about my life - and every time I tell people my story, I feel relieved," he said.
The civil war, which killed an estimated 250 000 people in this nation of three million, was characterised by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls.
Drugged fighters waltzing into battle wearing women's wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.
Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.
The sacrifice was typically "the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart, which was divided into pieces for us to eat," he said. He appeared before the commission January 15.
Liberia needs war crimes court
Between the time he made a pact with the devil circa 1980 and began his rampage and the time he stopped fighting in 1996, he said "more than 20 000 people fell victim (to me and my men). They were killed."
Some said Blahyi's confession was proof that Liberia needed a war crimes court, not a commission.
The commission, modelled on post-apartheid South Africa's commission, had been taking testimony from victims as well as former rebels for the last two years, urging a full accounting of wartime atrocities. While the truth commission could not charge killers with a crime, it could recommend charges be brought.
That's combined with the fact that several notorious killers had refashioned themselves as influential politicians in Liberia.
"If you have an individual admitting that he and his group killed more than 20 000 people, certainly there should be a mechanism put in place for such people to face justice," Mulbah Morlue, who heads the Forum for the Establishment of a War Crimes Court in Liberia, said in response to Blahyi's confession.
- AP