ReliefWeb

Beyond Taylor, “Where is our justice?”

by Janet Anderson, The Hague

Sierra Leone and Liberia experimented with very different paths to justice – restorative with truth commissions and retributive with the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) trials. How do local communities see this, following the conviction against former Liberian president Charles Taylor two weeks ago?

Concepts of justice shift a lot, depending especially on the security situation. I was working in Sierra Leone close to and after the end of the war. At that time probably the most important concern was security rather than justice. Within communities, justice meant being able to send their children to school, being able to feed themselves. And so they were terrified of the courts provoking some kind of retaliation, some kind of revenge by relatives of those who were prosecuted. Justice was very much entangled with peace.

So people had a sense that the courts could perpetuate a cycle of punishment and revenge?

Exactly. People regarded court cases as potentially violent things that create winners and losers in which the winner takes all. People saw them as potentially dangerous. Foday Sankoh, the leader of the Revolutionary United Front rebels had been imprisoned in Pademba road jail in Freetown in the 1970s. He never forgot it. People now remember this. So when they hear talk about how prosecutions combat impunity and prevent the recurrence of violence, they think about Foday Sankoh, who died during his trial at the Special Court in 2003 and think, “well it didn’t happen then.”