Why warlord Charles Taylor is on trial

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor has taken a back seat in recent days at his own trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague.

But long after the media have moved on from Naomi Campbell, Mia Farrow and Carole White's courtroom "bitch fight", the world Taylor will remember the testimonies of his alleged victims - the people of Sierra Leone, Liberia's neighbour, who suffered rape, enslavement and worse during the country's 1991-2000 civil war.

Taylor was born in Liberia in 1948. In the 1970s he studied economics at university in the US, where he was politically active against the then Liberian president, William Tolbert.

In 1980 he returned to Liberia, where he supported a coup led by Samuel Doe, during which Tolbert was executed. Doe put Taylor in charge of purchasing for the Liberian government, but sacked him in 1983 after accusing him of embezzlement. Taylor fled to the US, where he was arrested and held pending extradition to Liberia.

In 1985 Taylor apparently escaped and is thought to have fled to Libya, where he underwent training in guerrilla warfare. Taylor himself claims that he was actually released by the US government, which wanted him to overthrow Doe.

In 1989, Taylor's Libyan-funded National Patriotic Front of Liberia army launched a civil war against Samuel Doe. Doe's death by torture in 1990 at the hands of a breakaway faction of Taylor's army plunged Liberia into a civil war that lasted until 1996.

Taylor won by a landslide at the 1997 presidential election, under the infamous slogan: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll vote for ya".
The war crimes charges against him date from this period, when he was allegedly involved in the civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Taylor is accused of aiding - and, possibly, personally directing - many of the crimes committed by Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front, using arms supplied by Taylor in exchange for uncut diamonds mined by the rebels in Sierra Leone.

Naomi Campbell, Mia Farrow and Carole White's testimony at The Hague is intended to help the prosecution prove that Taylor received there illegally mined gemstones - so-called 'blood diamonds' - from the RUF.

In all, Taylor faces an 11-count indictment, including acts of terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, conscripting child soldiers, enslavement and pillage.

Taylor resigned as president in 2003 after another civil war and was exiled to Nigeria. He was arrested in 2006 as he attempted to cross from Nigeria to Cameroon in a Range Rover with diplomatic plates, three years after the first indictment was issued against him by the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

If found guilty by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Taylor will serve his sentence in a British prison. ·