A commander in Charles Taylor's militia has told a war crimes trial
that the former Liberian president ordered his fighters to eat their
enemies, including UN peacekeepers, as a means of terrorising the
population.
Joseph "Zigzag" Marzah, chief of operations for Taylor
who is on trial at The Hague, also testified that he oversaw horrific
crimes such as cutting the babies out of pregnant women, and that the
former president told his men that their enemies "are no longer human
beings".
Taylor, 59, has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity at a special international court over his collaboration with anti-government rebels in Sierra Leone, which borders Liberia.
But in establishing the record of Taylor's leadership of a rebellion in his own country before he finally won power in 1997, Marzah this week described a reign of terror.
Marzah, who led the Death Squad group of killers, said many of the victims of cannibalism were members of the Krahn people of the then Liberian president, Samuel Doe, who Taylor was attempting to overthrow. But those eaten also included soldiers from UN and West African "Ecomog" peacekeeping forces.
"He said we should eat them ... Even the UN white people - he said we could use them as pork to eat," Marzah told the court. "We ate a few [Ecomog soldiers], but not many. But many were executed, about 68."
He said Taylor said eating people "set an example for the people to be afraid".
Taylor's defence lawyer asked Marzah how the fighters would "prepare a human being for the pot". The former commander described decapitating, carving up, cleaning and cooking corpses seasoned with salt and pepper.
0 comments:
Post a Comment