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organizational training. Gaddafi was also interested in training a cadre of African
revolutionaries to spread his version of revolution and cement Libya’s position in the
region. Relationships formed in the camps help to explain much of West Africa’s misery
over the past decade (Farah 2001b: A22).
Charles Taylor, a fugitive from a bank robbery in the United States and wanted
for embezzlement in Liberia, came to Libya in the late 1980s based on a recommendation
from an army officer in Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore, who is now Burkina Faso’s
President. In Libya, Ibrahim Bah, a Senegalese rebel, trained Taylor and Sankoh. Bah is
a key figure in terrorism circles in both West Africa and the Middle East. Bah fought
with the mujahedeen against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan and with
Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and returned to Libya at the end of the 1980s to train
African revolutionaries (Farah 2001b: A22). These four men – Taylor, Sankoh,
Compaore, and Bah – are at the center of a network of that uses war for means other than
power. Their power is based on terror and the use of the state for their own purposes.
And the means for this are guns, diamonds, and increasingly timber all under the mantle
of whatever legitimacy a failed state can provide.
25
After Taylor and Sankoh left Libya,
they began their rebellions against the governments of Liberia and Sierra Leone
respectively. Taylor and Compaore are now presidents, Sankoh is in jail and his rebel
movement, the RUF, has disarmed but for much of the 1990s these three men, aided by
Bah, used the diamonds that Sankoh’s forces controlled to buy weapons and supplies for
the RUF and to grow rich on the proceeds of these deals.
25
After over two decades of fighting, Liberia as a state is little more than a forested version of Afghanistan.
There are virtually no public services or functioning institutions. The state exists to enrich Charles Taylor.
Convention