Former Liberia rebel chief charged with war crimes

Belgian authorities have arrested a female former commander in the rebel movement of Liberia’s one-time president Charles Taylor and charged her with war crimes, officials said Thursday.

Martina Johnson is believed to be the first person charged for crimes committed during the country’s first civil war, said a legal group acting for victims of the conflict.

She was arrested near the city of Ghent on Wednesday “and charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity,” a spokesman for the federal prosecutor in Brussels said.

Her arrest followed a complaint filed by a Belgian lawyer on behalf of three Liberian victims in 2012, said Civitas Maximas, a Geneva-based advocacy group. She is open to prosecution in Belgium as a resident of that country, accused of crimes under international law.

The victims accused her of involvement in “mutilation and mass killing” during Operation Octopus, a military assault by Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia on the capital Monrovia in 1992.

“This landmark case marks the very first time an alleged Liberian perpetrator has been criminally charged for crimes under international law committed in Liberia during the first civil war,” Civitas Maximas said in a statement.

Although Liberian, Taylor’s conviction in a UN-backed court in The Hague two years ago was related to his role in the brutal, interlinked civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2001 — not to war in his own country.

Taylor was jailed for 50 years in 2012 on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity over acts committed by Sierra Leonean rebels he aided and abetted.

He was the first former head of state to be jailed by an international court since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg in Germany after World War II.