Blood Diamonds: The Controversial History of Mining Operations in Africa that Subsidize Conflicts across the Continent
ISBN: 9781981953592
$6.99
Sometime early in November 1985, a clandestine prison escape took place at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts. With the usual prop of knotted together sheets, Charles Taylor an ex-Liberian government official, alumni student of Bentley College, Massachusetts, and fugitive from Liberian justice, scaled the wall and climbed into the rear passenger's seat of a car waiting to take him to New York. There, he was collected by his wife, Jewel Taylor, and spirited away. Thereafter, Charles Taylor slipped out of sight.
The event attracted a few lines in the local press and a desultory police investigation but nothing more. Within a few weeks, the matter was closed and Charles Taylor was forgotten. Then, on Boxing Day 1989, BBC's Focus on Africa program aired an interview with Charles Taylor as he was somewhere in West Africa, announcing the commencement of a war. He spoke by satellite telephone, which at the time was the acme of modern communications, speaking with an identifiably American accent. His message was simply that his organization, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia—or the NPFL—had launched an invasion of Liberia with the purpose of overthrowing the current head of state, Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe.
Thus began an improbable decade of anarchic and self-consuming violence that overwhelmed the tiny nation of Liberia and spread to neighboring Sierra Leone in one of the signature African civil conflicts of the late 20th century. It was during the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars that the phenomenon of drug-addled and heavily-armed youth, many of them just children, were recruited and mobilized by local warlords against each other and the institutions of state and economy. It marked the beginning of television warfare, with the press following the conflict at every stage, documenting in excruciating detail the horror and violence of a thoroughly modern, budget revolution.
The event attracted a few lines in the local press and a desultory police investigation but nothing more. Within a few weeks, the matter was closed and Charles Taylor was forgotten. Then, on Boxing Day 1989, BBC's Focus on Africa program aired an interview with Charles Taylor as he was somewhere in West Africa, announcing the commencement of a war. He spoke by satellite telephone, which at the time was the acme of modern communications, speaking with an identifiably American accent. His message was simply that his organization, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia—or the NPFL—had launched an invasion of Liberia with the purpose of overthrowing the current head of state, Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe.
Thus began an improbable decade of anarchic and self-consuming violence that overwhelmed the tiny nation of Liberia and spread to neighboring Sierra Leone in one of the signature African civil conflicts of the late 20th century. It was during the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars that the phenomenon of drug-addled and heavily-armed youth, many of them just children, were recruited and mobilized by local warlords against each other and the institutions of state and economy. It marked the beginning of television warfare, with the press following the conflict at every stage, documenting in excruciating detail the horror and violence of a thoroughly modern, budget revolution.