DAKAR, Senegal - Liberia's former President Charles Taylor, accused of fomenting bloody wars across West Africa, now faces judgment for some of the mayhem wrought during his years in power.
Taylor, taken from exile in Nigeria and presented in handcuffs Wednesday to the U..backed tribunal in Sierra Leone, is charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity stemming from a brutal rebellion that left many thousands dead or maimed.
His capture and imprisonment seem to bring his blood-stained 16-year odyssey to a close and avert a feared renewal of conflict in Liberia, had he returned there. Instead, he becomes the first African head of state to face an international war crimes tribunal.
Taylor's 1989 insurgency in Liberia, which eventually killed 200,000, helped tilt the region into crisis.
"Taylor for me is a ruthless dictator whose capture and subsequent trial should be welcome for all Liberian people. The mayhem and destruction he brought has to be accounted for. No more delay," said Romeo Snehtie, a 39-year-old student in Liberia.
Liberia, once among the richer countries in West Africa, is now one of its poorest.
Long years of crisis that ended with Taylor's flight to Nigerian exile in 2003 has left the country all but a failed state.
Taylor's 1989 incursion from Ivory Coast had spread chaos across Liberia and into Sierra Leone, whose brutal rebels fought a 1991-2002 civil war.
Taylor helped pioneer the use of child soldiers, often kidnapped from their parents and drugged.
"Beyond the vast damage he has personally inflicted on West Africa, Charles Taylor embodies the misrule and warlord politics that have devastated the region," said Eric Witte, formerly a political adviser at the Sierra Leone court.
Taylor was born into a family of Americo-Liberians, descendants of the freed American slaves that founded Africa's first republic in 1847 and ruled as elites for more than a century.
He lived in the United States during the 1970s, earning an economics degree from Bentley College in Waltham, Mass.
He later joined the government of President Samuel Doe, an illiterate midlevel officer who came to power in 1980 and ordered the execution of 13 ministers who were tied to poles on a beach and shot.
Taylor fled after he was accused in 1983 of embezzling nearly $1 million. He went back to the United States, where he was detained on a Liberian arrest warrant. But he escaped from a Massachusetts jail in 1985 - cutting through bars with a hacksaw and climbing down a knotted sheet - to launch the civil war that ousted Doe.
Taylor won a disputed election in 1997. But many former allies took up arms against him in 2000 and attacked Monrovia in 2003.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo helped broker peace in Liberia by offering Taylor exile in Nigeria, which he accepted.
Obasanjo said he would hand Taylor to Liberia if a democratically elected leader requested it. After Nigerian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf gave the nod, he made good on his word. AP
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