By Anthony Stephens and New Narratives staff
After nearly a year of hearings, including five months in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the ground-breaking trial of Gibril Massaquoi, a Sierra Leonean rebel charged with committing war crimes in Liberia, looks set to end this month. From there the fate of the 51-year-old former commander of the Revolutionary United Front will be in the hands of four judges of the District Court of Tampere, Finland’s second largest city.
Since the trial resumed in Tampere in October, after a second, unexpected set of hearings in Liberia, there have been just four sessions. The prosecution and defense teams have wrestled with new evidence, including notes, Finnish police say were illegally obtained, from an interrogator of the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone after the interrogation of a Liberian witness who has accused Massaquoi of torturing him.
The court has also sought to have two key officials from the Special Court appear. Alan White, the former Chief Investigator of the Special Court, and Saleem Vahidy, the former chief of the court’s Witness and Victims Unit, are seen as key to answering a central, explosive question of this trial: did Massaquoi escape the Special Court witness protection program in Sierra Leone where he was giving evidence against Liberian President Charles Taylor and others about their crimes in Sierra Leone, to travel to Liberia between June and August 2003 to commit war crimes on behalf of Taylor?
After months of negotiations, both men have declined to appear according to Presiding Judge Juhani Paiho. White “was not willing to testify” said the judge by email and Vahidy is “not able to testify due to personal reasons not related to the case.”
The idea the Special Court would have a protection system in place that allowed their star witness to leave the safehouse to travel to Liberia at the risk of murder by Taylor (who, according to testimony in the trial, had already killed others he suspected of informing to the Special Court including RUF general Sam Bockarie) or to inform Taylor what was happening inside the investigation, would seem preposterous.
Massaquoi took the stand himself to tell the court as much. Under questioning by defense lawyer Kaarle Gummerus, Massaquoi systematically rejected the prosecution’s accusations.
“No one in their right mind would do something that the prosecutor and the witness has said,” Massaquoi told the court. “It does not make sense.”
Gibril Massaquoi
A Finnish researcher, who has appeared in the trial previously, returned to repeat his assertions that travel on main routes between Monrovia and Freetown at that time would have been nearly impossible because of the heavy presence of LURD, the opposing rebel group that would go on to overwhelm Taylor’s forces and force the president into exile in August.
And yet dozens of Liberian witnesses in the Liberia hearings were adamant that they had seen Massaquoi, whom they knew by the name “Angel Gabriel”, murdering civilians and directing the murder, rape and torture of civilians in Bo Waterside in Monrovia and in villages in Lofa County between June and August 2003 as the forces of the LURD rebel movement closed in on President Taylor’s last strongholds.
In earlier testimony former Massaquoi allies had described the Special Court security as lax, saying people came and went from the safe houses where Massaquoi and his family were held. In the final hearing of 2021 the court heard from a former guard of the safe houses in which Massaquoi and his family lived from 2004 until they were relocated to Finland in 2008 in a widely criticized immunity deal with the Special Court. The witness, whose identity is being withheld by the court for his security, did not guard Massaquoi during the 2003 period in question. He described a witness protection program that gave Massaquoi surprising freedom given his admissions of violence, the threats to his life and the importance of his testimony. He testified that the security would not have been any better during the June to August 2003 period in question.
New Narratives was unable to travel to the court because of Covid restrictions but relied on court transcripts provided by Civitas Maxima, the Swiss-based justice advocates that helped gather evidence for the investigation of Massaquoi that are regarded as accurate by court watchers. They record the witness saying Massaquoi was protected by just one guard, who was not armed, in the first years of his detention which began in March 2003. Only later, after an attack on the safehouse that the witness believed was staged, did the Special Court move Massaquoi and his family to a more secure house and assign an armed guard around the clock.
“[Special Court] knows that the safe house was not protected well enough,” the witness said.
Under prosecution questioning the former guard said there was definitely a possibility for Massaquoi to leave the houses that the witness guarded without the protection officers knowing.
Prosecutor Laitinen: “Did Massaquoi have the possibility to leave without the security becoming aware of it?
Witness: “Sometimes the protection officer was present, sometimes not.”
Laitinen: “How did you make sure that whether Massaquoi was present in the Kington safe house or not?”
Witness: “When he came downstairs, or I went upstairs. There were no cameras in the safe house and no device on Massaquoi to monitor if he went out or not.”
Laitinen: “Did Massaqoui have an obligation to let you know that he was there?”
Witness: “No. We have a notebook in which we sign when a protection officer comes to work.”
