Paris, FRANCE — “Fine Boy” Kamara was one of the most notorious leaders of the Ulimo rebel group when it terrorized the town of Foya, Lofa County in Liberia between 1993 and 1994. On Tuesday he became a witness, appearing via a video link from Monrovia in the appeal of fellow Ulimo commander Kunti Kamara (no relation) of his 2022 war conviction here for crimes including rape, cannibalism, torture and murder.
Kamara’s lawyer had requested Fine Boy give an account of Ulimo’s actions in Foya and Kamara’s role. Kamara has always insisted he was a frontline commander and spent little time with civilians in towns.
Fine Boy confirmed accounts by earlier witnesses that another Ulimo fighter named as Ugly Boy had killed a man suspected of being a rebel with Charles Taylor’s rebel faction, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, and butchered him into pieces, had his parts placed in a wheelbarrow, and sold across Foya. One witness testified that she had been forced to buy, cook and eat the meat.
“I will tell this court the truth because I am fasting,” he said of the observance of the Muslim tradition of Ramadan. “In Ulimo, there were some bad, bad and disgruntled soldiers who were doing their own thing and not following the rules.”
“Because of the ill-treatment and harassment of civilians, he and I battled and we never had a good relationship, and because of that, Ugly Boy and I became enemies,” Fine Boy told the court. “Ugly Boy almost killed me.”
Fine Boy told the court that he joined Ulimo in 1992 in Macenta, Guinea from where their leaders later led them into Liberia.
“The message they preached to us was that we were coming back to open our mosques and that’s how I joined Ulimo to come back to Liberia because life was too hard for me in Guinea,” Fine Boy said.
He said his other motivations for joining the faction were revenge for the murder of his uncle by the NPFL and to protect himself and his family.
Fine Boy said, while in Foya, their faction came under heavy attack by the Sierra Leonean rebel group the Revolutionary United Front. A batch of Ulimo back-up forces joined them in Foya to aid them in pushing back the RUF which had links with the NPFL. He added that Kamara was among the Ulimo forces that entered Foya to aid them.
“When we captured Foya, Foya was empty. Most of the people were in the bush. As we patrolled in the bushes, the civilians started coming out into Foya Town. Ulimo soldiers brought most of them from the bush and some came willingly on their own.”
When Fine Boy joined the Ulimo faction at the time they entered Foya, he replaced Ugly Boy as the new “Deputy S2” – the role served as the liaison between Ulimo and the civilians at the time.
Fine Boy said Ugly Boy’s removal came due to the many complaints from the civilians against Ugly Boy accusing him of harassment, threats, and rape.
Fine Boy confirmed that Kamara was a battlefront commander contending with the RUF at the various borders after RUF invaded Foya, but he said Kamara would go back to Foya from the front at different times and was be based in there the days he was not on the frontline.
Fine Boy denied ever seeing atrocities committed with his own eyes but multiple witnesses have described seeing him commit atrocities. Were Fine Boy to have obtained asylum in Europe, as Kamara did, he may well be sitting in a court himself.
Fine Boy confirmed that in retaliation for the death of rebel leader Mamie Wata’s brother he heard that Ugly Boy collected a young man Ugly Boy claimed was an NPFL rebel and had him killed, cut into pieces, and the victim’s body parts placed into a wheelbarrow with Ugly Boy demanding the civilians buy the human remains or risk being killed if they refused.
Fine Boy told the court this news forced him to go out to put a stop to Ugly Boy – one of the things that brought a big split between them.
“One day I was sitting in the office and a group of civilians came to me and said Ugly Boy had put human parts in a wheelbarrow for them to buy and eat it, so we got up and went there to stop him from those behaviors. We took the parts from him, and we buried the bodies, and I filed a complaint against him,” Fine Boy said.
Fine Boy said he could not confirm or deny other acts of torture, violence, forced labor, and killings that went on in other parts of Foya by other Ulimo soldiers.
In 2021 Fine Boy was one of the witnesses who testified before the Federal Criminal Court in Switzerland when Alieu Kosiah, another Ulimo commander, was being tried for atrocities committed in Foya. Kosiah was found guilty of the charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Switzerland.
Many of the witnesses who had testified in both Kamara and Kosiah’s trials told the court of the trauma they continue to suffer from the deaths of their loved ones and the horrors they said they witnessed during the war in Lofa.
Two of Tuesday’s witnesses, both women, said they still live with the trauma of things that happened to them during the wars. They requested the judge hear them “in camera”, meaning with no witnesses, for their privacy. Only the judges, jury, civil parties, and lawyers were allowed inside the courtroom.
Before the two women’s in-camera testimonies, the court heard Christian Ballouard, a psychologist share with the court his analysis of three civil parties who have told the court that they continue to suffer from trauma after the Liberian wars and what happened to their relatives. We are withholding the identities of these witnesses to protect them from retaliation.
The psychologist said he had found found the victims were suffering trauma and physical effects. Ballouard said he spoke with the civil parties in private at separate times and locations adding that he did not detect signs of falsehood, but he registered that the victims still suffered from some form of trauma. Ballouard acknowledged some inconsistencies in dates and times provided by parties’ testimonies, something he said could be due to other factors.
Convicted war criminal
In a wandering, combative and, at times angry testimony convicted warlord Alieu Kosiah laid out an argument that he and his former Ulimo ally Kunti Kamara, whose appeal of his 2022 war crimes conviction was the forum for Thursday’s appearance, were innocent.
Mr Kosiah was convicted of multiple war crimes in a Swiss court in 2021.
His 2023 appeal upheld those convictions and added crimes against humanity convictions. Mr Kosiah is serving a 20-year prison sentence but could be released as early as 2027 with good behaviour. Mr Kosiah announced in the court, for the first time, that he would take his case to the Swiss supreme court and, if necessary, the European Union Court for Human Rights.
Given he and Mr Kamara are convicted for the same crimes, Mr Kosiah may hope that if Mr Kamara’s verdict is overturned it could help his own case.
Mr Kosiah, who travelled from Switzerland under armed-guard to testify, stood with a thick pad of notes that he used to lay out his case in his six-hour presentation. He became emotional in his opening statement pleading with the jury:
“You can destroy this man. You can destroy me,” he said. “Because we don’t have any money. You have money.”
Mr Kosiah wandered off point frequently to the visible anger of Court President, the French version of a chief judge, Jean Marc Lavergne and appeared ready to make a political speech:
“If you really want to stop war in Gaza, killing black people there”.
Mr Kosiah dismissed the panel of all white Swiss judges who adjudicated both his cases and spent hours laying out his case for why the witnesses in the trials of Mr Kamara and himself were not reliable.
“Most of these people are Kissi. I am Mandingo,” he said of the different tribes. “Those are important issues that you need to know before you even go into the case.”
Mr Kosiah focused his address to the nine jurors. (There were no jurors in Mr Kosiah’s Swiss trial which was adjudicated by judges only).
“The reason is that I think Kundi (Kamara) has a slight advantage. Because I was convicted by three white judges. They have never been to Africa. They will never go there. So, the question is, ‘what is their cultural or tribal understanding of Africa? Of religion? History? Geography?’ But the jurors are not politicized. Given full information, with full knowledge, I am confident they will take the right decision.”
The judge read out a long list of the crimes for which Mr Kosiah had been found guilty including dozens of murders of civilians, rapes and the use of child soldiers. Among his crimes were those that have featured in Mr Kamara’s case, including the killing of the teacher, the mutilation of his body and forced labour to carry elements of the Lofa powerhouse to the Guinea border where Ulimo sold them. Mr Kosiah rejected the convictions.
“Mr. President, you said a lot of things about what I did. There’s no body in this case. There’s no proof. Everything is based on the credibility of the complainants. So, it’s for the judge and the jury to find that they’re credible.”
Mr Kosiah honed in on one of the key witnesses claiming that his testimony could not have been correct because Mr Kosiah could not have been where he said he was at the same time as he was leading battles in other parts of the country. He rejected the idea that Mr Kamara, his number two, could have made the orders that he is claimed to have made. Mr Kosiah showed a current passport photo that he said proved that one of the people he is convicted of murdering was still alive.
Mr Kosiah denied he was at the scene of multiple atrocities despite multiple witnesses in his trial and Mr Kamara’s placing him there. Mr Kamara himself had said Mr Kosiah was in Foya at the time. Mr Kosiah said Mr Kamara’s memory was impaired.
Mr Kosiah’s long speech tested the patience of the judge who urged him to hurry up, and to focus on the subject at hand, multiple times. An irritated Mr Kosiah shot back:
“Mr. President you are making a big mistake. If you don’t have the information you’re going to convict this man for nothing.”
At another point he said, “Mr. President, I know what I’m talking about. I lived this. You can’t change me!”
As he did in his appearance in Mr Kamara’s first trial, and in his own hearings, Mr Kosiah focused his anger on Alain Werner of Civitas Maxima, who brought the case against him in Switzerland and, with Hassan Bility of the Liberia-based Global Justice and Research Project, has been instrumental in gathering evidence used in 11 cases against Liberians, Sierra Leoneans and Europeans accused of atrocities in Liberia’s conflict.
Mr Kosiah claimed, without evidence, that Civitas coached witnesses to lie to investigators in the United Kingdom’s case against Agnes Taylor, the former wife of convicted warlord Charles Taylor. Agnes Taylor had been charged with war crimes in the United Kingdom, including the murder of a man Mr Kosiah claimed was still alive. Mrs Taylor’s case was withdrawn when a court ruled prosecutors had not proved a technical point essential to the case. She was not found innocent of the charges. She then returned to Liberia. Mr Taylor is serving a 50-year sentence in a UK prison for his role in Sierra Leone’s war.
Mr Kosiah misrepresented the outcome of the appeal of a Finnish court in January in the case of Gibril Massaquoi, a Sierra Leonean accused of atrocities in Liberia on behalf of then-President Charles Taylor. Mr Taylor’s National Patriotic Front for Liberia had been the mortal enemy of Mr Kosiah’s Ulimo faction in 1993. Massaquoi was acquitted of charges against him by an appeals court in January 2023. Mr Kosiah told the court that Mr Massaquoi’s acquittal had changed everything for defendants in Europe, claiming it showed that Civitas and the witnesses lied.
“Massaquoi raped people, cut people into pieces. It’s almost the same accusations against me,” Mr Kosiah claimed. “Now we know that was fabricated. Why can this court not take that into consideration? Alain Werner is a criminal.”
Mr Kosiah also claimed, without evidence, that the United States officials were now “hanging their heads in shame” at having been “duped” by Werner and Bility. Michael McCarthy, the former United States ambassador to Liberia, and Beth Van Schaack, the U.S. Global Ambassador for War Crimes, have been very public in their support for Bility and his work to date.
In fact, the Finnish appeal court found that the crimes for which Mr Massaquoi was charged, had been committed but the court found prosecutors had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr Massaquoi had been responsible. The court did not find Mr Massaquoi innocent, neither did it find his accusers had lied.
Mr Kosiah also described Mohammed Jabbateh, known as Jungle Jabbah, who was convicted in 2018 of criminal immigration fraud by a U.S. court for lying about his war crimes to immigration authorities, as a top leader of Ulimo. When asked about his conviction, Mr Kosiah again mischaracterised the case. He told the jury the U.S. prosecutors “could not get Jungle Jabbah” on war crimes despite taking 20 witnesses to testify in the case so they resorted to immigration fraud. In fact, US prosecutors could not prosecute Jabbateh for war crimes because in 2018 the U.S.., unlike European countries, did not have crimes against humanity laws under which they could prosecute crimes committed in 1993.
Mr Kamara, who is fasting during the day for Ramadan, sat quietly in his protective glass case throughout the testimony. On Tuesday he has asked a court artist, drawing images of people in the trial, not to capture his image. French law gives defendants the right to their own image. For that reason New Narratives is only using images of Kamara from the first trial.
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the West Africa Justice Reporting Project.
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