This week the International Criminal Court found the Liberian warlord, Charles Taylor, guilty of crimes against humanity.

Justice of a kind.

It made me think of Evelyn again.

It’s thirty years since a cycle of violence and horror engulfed Liberia and Sierra Leone.

I remember her writing about the execution of former president Tolbert and his cabinet in 1980.

How Samuel Doe, a “country boy”, an army sergeant from the backwoods Krahn tribe, had scaled the gates of the presidential mansion with a few others, caught the president in his pyjamas, shot him in the head, disembowelled him, gouged out one eye, and dumped his body in a mass grave with his dead attendants.

When Tolbert’s former ministers had been tried and summarily sentenced, Doe invited the world’s press and camera crews – and anyone else who wanted to come along – to watch their executions, tied to stakes on the beach at Monrovia.

This footage is on YouTube now. (I’m not adding links).

Two years later Doe, with an afro haircut and embroidered white kaftan gown, was hosted by Ronald Reagan at the White House.

For Evelyn, Liberia was a metaphor of the failure of the US to support good governance in the developing world. The descendants of the 400 families of freed slaves, the Americo-Liberians – as they called themselves – with their antebellum mansions and old Southern ways, had always lorded it over the native population, calling them the “country boys”, keeping the wealth in their own hands, spending 1% of the national budget on the presidential yacht.

From her I learned that in 1931 an international commission even found Liberian government officials guilty of organised slavery! How ironic is that?

In 1990 she was there again when Doe was captured by strong man, Prince Johnson. Once more film crews were let in to watch Doe, beaten and stripped to his underpants, being harangued by Johnson, gesticulating elaborately with a beer can in his hands. Johnson finally orders Doe’s ear to be sliced off. Johnson then holds the ear high and chews it, before Doe is led away.

The next day Doe’s body is walked around Monrovia in a wheelbarrow.

Worse things happened in neighbouring Sierra Leone where Taylor financed former corporal Foday Sankoh and his bandit army, called the Revolutionary United Front. The RUF seized control of the Sierra Leone diamond fields and terrorized the local population, cutting off the hands of children and conscripting villagers as mules to carry in supplies from Liberia.

Intimidation rose to a peak in 1996 when RUF wanted to stop the election. In spite of that, as Evelyn reported, a million people turned out to vote.

Evelyn is passionate about the International Criminal Court and other bodies like it and furious about the US resistance to submitting to them.

I don’t believe Evelyn spends a single day without thinking of those sad handless children with their shy smiles and pathetic stumps.

We both reported from places too chaotic, too small, too badly run to make much difference to most people in our world.

We both listened to the tortured and the bereaved and hoped we could make someone else hear them too, if only for a moment.

I am sorry I lost touch with Evelyn. I won’t let that happen again.

She has given me some websites to subscribe to.