Taylor to reject call for 80-year sentence

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor will on Wednesday next week tell judges he bears no responsibility for atrocities during Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war, rejecting the prosecution’s demand for an 80-year sentence in a maximum-security British jail.Taylor, convicted last month of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone’s conflict, is the first head of state to be found guilty by an international tribunal since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.His trial caught the public’s attention with its grisly mix of massacres and mutilations committed by drugged child soldiers, and the notorious “blood diamonds” or uncut stones from the conflict zones which supermodel Naomi Campbell described as “dirty little pebbles” when she testified in court.Taylor and his defence lawyers have characterised the case as a racist sham and a Western conspiracy, led by the United Kingdom and the United States, against black Africans.The first African leader to stand trial for war crimes, Taylor was charged with 11 counts of murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in which more than 50,000 people were killed.The warlord-turned-president was also accused of directing Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in a campaign of terror to plunder Sierra Leone’s diamond mines for profit and to obtain weapons. ACCOMPLICEJudges found that Taylor was an accomplice to some of the war’s worst atrocities, carried out by the RUF militia organisation which Taylor helped fund and supply.