The Blood on Jesse Jackson's
Hands
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:13:22 +0000
Seen this? BY
Thomas Clough Copyright 2007 April 16, 2007
http://www.weirdrepublic.com/image_2.jpg
The Blood on Jesse Jackson’s
Hands
This is the true story of how Jesse Jackson
unleashed a sadistic warlord on the suffering people of Sierra Leone.
Part One:
The Long Slide Into Hell
Our former president Jimmy Carter tells us
that Liberia’s former “President William Tolbert enjoyed worldwide acceptance
as an enlightened Christian layman, having been the elected leader of the
Baptist World Alliance, representing almost all organizations of this major
Protestant faith.”
(New York Times 7/13/03)
On April 12th, 1980 a Liberian army
sergeant assigned to a beach patrol near the Liberian president’s home directed
his platoon to the presidential palace and surprised President Tolbert in his
bed, where the president was promptly disemboweled.
Master
Sergeant Samuel K. Doe personally cut out
President Tolbert’s liver and heart and ritually mutilated the organs; he left his
teeth marks in the flesh; he would later nail Tolbert’s liver to a wall of the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in
Monrovia. Within hours of his murder, thirteen of President Tolbert’s cabinet ministers
were bound to telephone poles on a Monrovia beach and shot to death by
drunken soldiers loyal to the illiterate Sergeant Doe. Thus began Liberia’s descent
into ruin and depravity.
> As the new self-appointed ruler of Liberia, Samuel Doe briefly indulged in
a flirtation with Libya and then astutely aligned
Liberia with the United States. Despite mounting
evidence of increasing atrocities, Washington
increased military aid to Liberia. Few questions were asked.
In 1985, Samuel Doe staged an election to legitimize his regime and then rigged the outcome.
The United States assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester A. Crocker, announced that Liberia
had enjoyed “the beginning, however imperfect, of a democratic experience.”
It was all a fraud.
Washington’s solid support for Samuel K. Doe sent a clear message to all
Liberians that any moderate opposition to the barbaric President Doe was
futile.
After the coup of April 1980,
a Liberian citizen named Charles Taylor, who was then living in the United States, returned to Liberia
and insinuated himself into Samuel Doe’s inner circle. Charles Taylor
had entered the United States on a student visa in 1972. He had attended
Chamberlayne Junior College in Newton, Mass and later attended Bentley College
in Waltham, Mass. He had graduated
in 1977 with a degree in economics. In 1983 Doe’s government accused
Taylor of embezzling nearly a million dollars. Embezzlement was Doe’s chosen word for Taylor’s failure to make kickbacks.
Taylor fled back to the
United States.
Responding
to a complaint from the Liberian government, American authorities arrested
Taylor in Boston in 1984 and held him for extradition. Taylor was represented by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark,
who would later join Saddam Hussein’s defense team.
After cooling his heels in the
slammer for more than a year, Taylor teamed up with four petty criminals and
together they escaped from the Plymouth House of Correction by cutting his cell
bars with a hacksaw blade and climbing down a bunch of knotted bed sheets.
Later he would claim that God “opened the prison doors for me.”
After his jailbreak, Taylor found his way to Ghana
where he hooked up with Liberian dissidents. Taylor befriended revolutionaries
from Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Libya. In Libya the government intelligence apparatus put the willing Mr.
Taylor through al-Mathabh
al-Thauriya al-Alamiya – in English: World Revolutionary Headquarters.
It was a school for leftist “revolutionary” guerrillas from every part of
Africa. It was at Colonel Qaddafi’s school for thugs that Charles Taylor
befriended a former Sierra Leone army corporal named Foday Sankoh.
http://www.weirdrepublic.com/image_1.jpg
The Invasion
Fortified with money and weapons supplied by Colonel Qaddafi and with the financial and political support
of Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, Charles Taylor made his move on Samuel
Doe’s Liberia.
On Christmas Eve of 1989, Charles Taylor led a band of 100 guerrillas into
Liberia’s northern Nimba County from neighboring Ivory Coast and sparked a civil
war that would continue for fourteen years.
By the time he was forced from power
in 2003 the conflicts he had ignited had swept away the lives of more than 300,000 Africans and uprooted millions
of others who scattered into half a dozen West African nations. Taylor
carried about a map that he called the map of Greater Liberia which included
parts of Guinea and the diamond fields of Sierra Leone. He was a man with a
grandiose plan.
Among Charles Taylor’s “revolutionary” innovations was the formation of his
notorious Small Boys Units, contingents of intensely loyal child soldiers, some as
young as five years old. These boy
soldiers revered Charles Taylor as “our father;” he fed
them a steady diet of marijuana and crack cocaine.
As many as 10,000 child soldiers fought in Liberia’s last three years of civil war – the final swell
of carnage in fourteen years of conflict. Battlefield commanders prized these
little fighters for their unquestioning
obedience and their lack of comprehension of the suffering of others.
Taylor’s officers would demand
that boys kill their parents and family members, thereby breaking the ultimate African taboo. Taylor’s commanders would
recruit heavily from the vast pool of younger males who were frustrated by the
authority of their elders and who lacked the “bride wealth” to get on with
their lives. Rather than waiting years to inherit dowry wealth from their
fathers and uncles, Taylor espoused a smash-and-grab take-it-now philosophy. Young recruits were plied with methamphetamines,
marijuana and crack cocaine to blunt all qualms and to sharpen a killer
mentality. The little
soldiers were given license to
rape and plunder.
All the while he was eroding
the traditional African respect for elders, Charles Taylor was substituting
himself as an enthralling all-powerful elder authority over the young troopers
who maimed and slaughtered in his name.
Taylor’s “boys” ran amok, indulging in ritual
mutilations, impromptu amputations and cannibalism. Women and children were not spared. Taylor’s boys
slaughtered five American nuns.
NOT BY TAYLOR BUT
BY PRINCE JOHNSONON
|
According to the New York Times (4/2/06), “Mr. Taylor also
co-opted the secret societies that dominate life in many West African
countries, like the Poro hunting society in Liberia. This gave him access to a
world of unseen power and allowed him to project an aura of mystery and
invincibility. Rumors that he practiced cannibalism, human sacrifice and blood
atonement rituals merely added to his mystique.”
In September 1990 President Doe was
captured, tortured and dismembered. By 1991 Taylor’s
forces held sway over ninety percent of Liberia and were applying
pressure to its weakened government. Taylor
deployed his militias to seize control of the Liberian economy, of its natural
abundance of timber and raw materials. He controlled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trade as well as
booty from smuggling and drug trafficking.
Making
Matters Worse
In
March of 1991, Charles Taylor began encouraging his fellow gangster, Foday
Sankoh, to ignite a war in neighboring Sierra Leone – a nation Taylor
coveted as part of his imaginary Greater Liberia. With
Taylor’s support, Sankoh’s troopers went straight for Sierra Leone’s diamond
mines. They called their greedy gang the Revolutionary United Front (RUF); they referred to
Sierra Leone as their Kuwait because of the wealth it would provide them. In every meaningful sense, the
monstrous Foday Sankoh was a creature of Charles Taylor. Without Taylor there would not have been a
Revolutionary United Front.
Horrific mayhem laid both countries to
waste during Bill Clinton’s budding presidency.
Two hundred thousand of Liberia’s three
million citizens were slaughtered. Taylor agreed to 13
peace treaties, but only did so when he needed time to rearm. He trashed all thirteen
agreements: It was a methodology he had learned from Colonel Qaddafi. When Taylor felt his grip on
Liberia was firm, he pushed for a “free and open” election for the presidency
of Liberia. But every citizen understood that if Taylor lost the election he would unleash his
AK-47-toting, machete-wielding Small Boys Units on the population.
In short, the 1997 election was conducted “in
an atmosphere of intimidation,” to quote the U.S.
State Department. With armed children running amok in the streets chanting “He killed my pa. He killed my ma. I’ll vote for
him,” Charles Taylor garnered seventy-five percent of the vote.
As Charles Taylor tightened his grip on
Liberia, Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front was suffering setbacks in
Sierra Leone. The government had contracted the services of a private South African
security firm named Executive Outcomes which arrived in May of 1995 and began
inflicting grief on the RUF. By early 1996
Sankoh’s guerrillas had been evicted from
the diamond fields that had bankrolled his homicidal ventures. The RUF
CAPTAIN VALENTINE
STRASSER NPRC HIRED EXECUTIVE OUTCOMES
|
had been severely weakened by
Executive
Outcomes.
In February of 1996 the United Nations sent election monitors to Sierra Leone and allowed a veteran
UN official named Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to step outside his UN role and run for
president of Sierra Leone. Mr.
Kabbah won the election with far more votes than voters. President Kabbah then asked
KABBAH HAD RETIRED BY THEN FROM THE UN AND HAD
RETURNED TO SIERRA LEONE. HE WAS APPOINTED
CHAIRMAN OF CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW COMMITTEE (Which failed) he was
helped by James Jonah his un partner to ridge the Elections which was won
by Dr John Karrifa-Smart
|
the well-armed Nigerians to become his
protectors. The Nigerians
were only too happy to oblige and
promptly established a heroin trafficking hub
at the Freetown
airport.
By the end of 1996 the Revolutionary
United Front appeared to be a hollow shell. It was then that President Kabbah did something
nearly fatal: he made “peace” with Foday Sankoh and agreed to terminate his government’s contract
with Executive Outcomes.
Soon thereafter, in May of 1997, disaffected
government troops stormed the Freetown prison, released hundreds of condemned criminals and RUF
officers, and then
seized the reins of government. President Kabbah ran off to neighboring Guinea. Then the coup bossmen invited
Foday Sankoh and the RUF to join their junta.
Altogether they tore up the constitution;
they festooned the hills surrounding Freetown with artillery pieces and then
they threatened to bombard the city if anyone complained. They massacred and
mutilated civilians; they abducted girls as sex slaves; they forced villagers
to toil in the diamond mines. Order
would not be restored until Britain, Sierra Leone’s former colonial ruler, sent
in troops in 2000.
In short order the RUF took control of the junta and established goon rule: the
political opposition was punished with rape, amputations or death. Judicial due
process was suspended; civic leaders were locked away.
> Sankoh’s troops pounced on the diamond
fields of Kono and Tongo. Soon rough uncut diamonds were
being ferried away to Liberia in Charles Taylor’s military helicopters. Thereafter, Liberia became a big-time
exporter of diamonds even though Liberia itself produced few diamonds.
Just when it seemed that the lives of the citizens of Liberia and Sierra
Leone couldn’t get any more grim, Bill Clinton
took an interest in these unhappy nations.
E N D O F P
A R T O N E
Part
Two:
Clinton’s
Disastrous Special Envoy
Bill Clinton was determined to avoid
any African entanglements. He had ignored Rwanda as it slid
into savage chaos in 1994, when the intervention of a single American
battalion would have averted that humanitarian disaster; Clinton was not about to rescue
Sierra Leone in 1998. Clinton punted
African affairs to his secretary of state Madeline Albright who then fobbed African policy off onto the
Congressional Black Caucus – a Democrat power block in Congress. Clinton never
offered an opinion about anything African without first consulting Congressman Donald
Payne (D., N.J.) of the Black Caucus or Clinton’s soul mate, Jesse Jackson. Every gesture of
Clinton’s administration toward Liberia was crafted to legitimize the warlord
Charles Taylor.
President
Taylor had achieved so much personal control of the Liberian economy that folks
had taken to referring to
Liberia as Charles Taylor, Inc. The tight circle of friends around Bill Clinton saw in
Charles Taylor a man they could deal with. To inaugurate their
relationship, a private meeting was arranged between President Taylor and Jesse Jackson
whom Bill Clinton had personally designated as his “special envoy” to Liberia.
In February of 1998 Jesse Jackson touched down at the Monrovia airport. Waiting to greet him was a Liberian named Romeo Horton. Mr. Horton had gone to college in the United States and he had
traveled between the two countries for two decades. In the early 1980s Horton was in one of Master
Sergeant Samuel Doe’s jail cells when Jackson and others appealed for his
release. Jackson later met Horton in Chicago.
Romeo Horton’s presence at Jackson’s arrival in Monrovia was stagecrafted by the warlord Charles Taylor. Taylor had summoned Horton back to Liberia to
brief him about Jesse Jackson. The last thing Taylor wanted was a sermon on
human rights from Clinton’s “special envoy.” His worries were baseless. Because
of the helpful Mr. Horton, Jackson’s
audience with the Liberian gangster on February 12th, 1998 was all smiles.
These two hustlers were ready to do business. It was in the Clinton Administration’s interest to
mainstream Charles Taylor. Clinton
was keen to avoid any African entanglements; he saw Charles
Taylor as someone with whom he could deal.
Soon after this meeting, Nigerian
troops liberated Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Foday Sankoh’s troops retreated across the border
into Liberia where they were welcomed by Sankoh’s mentor and partner in mass
murder, Charles Taylor.
In
early March of 1998 Sierra Leone’s exiled president, Ahmad Kabbah, returned to
his homeland. A mere two weeks later, Bill Clinton and an enormous entourage of
“friends of Bill” entered Liberian airspace on a fun-filled taxpayer-funded
African safari. (Transportation
costs alone were $42.8 million.) It was then that Bill Clinton
emboldened Charles Taylor with thirty minutes of encouragement during a
telephone downlink from Air Force One.
The airborne entourage included
Jackson and lots of his business pals who were in Africa to make a financial
killing.
Just before Bill Clinton’s big African
adventure, Nigeria’s dictator Sani Abacha had announced his intention to run as
the one-and-only unopposed candidate for president of Nigeria. People with a
preference for democratic civilian rule had scoffed at the mockery of democracy
that a single military candidate represented, but Bill Clinton was quick to
assert that it was enough for Abacha to run for office “as a civilian.” Jesse
Jackson chimed in that “No body should dictate to the Nigerian people who their
leaders are,” by which he meant no one except the unopposed
military-dictator-candidate-for-president Sani Abacha.
Just as the multi-million-dollar
Bill-and-Jesse screw-the-taxpayer African party junket was winding down,
Liberia’s homicidal
bossman Charles Taylor ordered Foday Sankoh’s machete-wielding Revolutionary
United Front back into long-suffering Sierra Leone where they began a slaughterfest
called “Operation No Living Thing.”
To hear our State Department describe
it, this premeditated attack on Sierra Leone was an orgy of “brutal killings, severe mutilations, and
deliberate dismemberments, in a widespread campaign of terror.” So
Taylor was an acknowledged terrorist as was his sidekick, Foday Sankoh.
Amnesty International enumerated thousands of murders and mutilations. All the
while, Jesse Jackson was doing feel-good public relations
for the terrorist Charles Taylor.
Showcasing
a Terrorist
Back in Chicago, Mister Jackson hosted an extravagant media
presentation designed to showcase the terrorist Charles Taylor as the savior of
Liberia.
Though Mr. Jackson fraudulently billed his Taylor love-fest as a
“reconciliation” conference and falsely claimed that it was an opportunity for
opposition Liberians to have a dialog with Charles Taylor, opposition leaders
remember that evening differently.
According to Harry
Greaves, who co-founded the Liberian Action Party, “This was just a PR exercise by Charles Taylor.”
Taylor’s wife Jewel Howard
Taylor led the Liberian government
delegation and the warlord himself filled the enormous video screen of Jesse’s
Chicago PUSH auditorium and rambled on at length.
S.J.K. Nyanseor, chairman of Liberian
Democratic Future, would later protest to the Congressional Black Caucus that
Jackson’s shindig was “nothing
more than a scheme designed to promote Taylor and his repressive government.”
He was offended that Jackson had not invited
a single opposition leader to his so-called “reconciliation conference.” Indeed, the invitations that Jackson sent out did
not mention any Liberian speaker or guest other than the warlord Charles
Taylor. In fact, Mister Jackson’s aide, Yuri Tadesse, crudely informed
opposition leaders that they would not be given any opportunity to say
anything.
Mr. Bodioh Wisseh Siapoe, chairman of the Coalition of Progressive Liberians, was repulsed
by the participation of Jackson’s close associate Romeo Horton, whom he
asserted “helped finance
the carnage of our people.”
Jesse Jackson spent the evening shamelessly shilling for the barbaric
Charles Taylor. Jackson demanded that Liberians stop posting details of Taylor’s
atrocities on the Internet. Mr. Jackson indignantly proclaimed that “The international community frequents the Internet and takes
note of whatever information is disseminated on the Information Superhighway. So, please stay off the Net,”
according to people in attendance.
Mister Jackson introduced no fewer than
ten of Charles Taylor’s officials who spoke for hours about the paradise Charles Taylor was
creating in Liberia. When some opposition
folks appealed for a tribunal to try Liberian war criminals, PUSH operatives
declared that time was short and drove the dissidents from the stage.
According to Harry
Greaves, “The general perception in the Liberian community was that Jackson was
a paid lobbyist for Charles Taylor.” Liberians
fingered Jackson’s pal Romeo Horton as Taylor’s bagman to Jackson.
Harry Greaves knew for a fact that
Jackson was a money grubber: Liberian human
rights advocates had appealed to Jackson to support their cause by attending a prayer service at
the Washington National Cathedral in 1990. Jackson had agreed.
Invitations were sent announcing Jackson’s coming appearance. Then, at the last
minute, Jackson demanded an up-front payment of $50,000 to appear. The human rights
group could not meet Jackson’s demand for cash, so Jackson ditched the
event. Clearly, Jesse Jackson had both feet firmly planted in
Charles Taylor’s camp.
Jesse’s Evil Deeds
African journalist Tom Kamara has written that
“Reverend Jackson is considered a civil rights leader in America, but in Africa
he is a killers’ rights leader.” Why would he say such a thing? Here’s why . . .
On July 25th, 1998, the Nigerian
government sent the warlord Foday Sankoh home in chains. President Kabbah announced
that Sankoh would stand trial for treason against Sierra Leone. Days later, a handcuffed Sankoh appeared on
television telling his gang of thugs not to shoot at government soldiers or
their Nigerian army allies. At that moment it
seemed that peace was at hand: a sadistic mass
murderer was in chains and his boy-soldier murder machine was about to become a
leaderless rabble. These were
positive developments. Any genuine follower of Jesus Christ would have welcomed
this moment.
Sadly, Jesse Jackson was secretly using all of his influence to
spring the homicidal Foday Sankoh from captivity. After all, Sankoh was a
partner-in-genocide with Jackson’s associate Charles Taylor, and what was good for Taylor promised rewards for
Jesse Jackson . . . so to hell with the people of Liberia. Jackson
immediately set to work pressuring Sierra Leone’s President Ahmad Kabbah to
release Foday Sankoh.
On September 18, hundreds of Taylor’s Special Security Service officers
and members of his police Special Task Force, teamed up with rag-tag
contingents of Taylor’s armed factions and indiscriminately used automatic
weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and light artillery against Liberia’s ethnic
Krahns. Hundreds of
Liberians, many women and children, were slaughtered in seventeen hours of
mayhem. People were shot on the spot during house-to-house searches. Taylor was
hunting for rival warlord Roosevelt
Johnson, an
ethnic Krahn.
>
The following day, Roosevelt Johnson sought refuge in the American
embassy. As he and his associates were entering the United States
Embassy, Taylor’s goons opened fire, killing two of Johnson’s friends and wounding two United States Marine
Corps embassy guards. Taylor’s
thugs had trashed the Geneva Convention governing diplomatic relations.
So, how did Bill Clinton’s
administration respond?
Jesse Jackson called his pal Charles
Taylor and urged him to call
off his dogs. After that, Bill
Clinton’s State Department threw a blanket of secrecy over the embassy murders,
referring to the location of the Geneva violations in official reports as “a
Western embassy.”
With the Clinton
State Department and Jesse Jackson hard at work concealing his violations of
international law, Charles Taylor was emboldened to commit even more outrageous
acts of indecency. Taylor and the Revolutionary United Front began a
push to recapture the diamond fields of Sierra Leone.
Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson set off on another African junket as
Clinton’s “special envoy.” While in Guinea, Jackson cajoled Charles Taylor and
Ahmad Kabbah into signing the Mano River non-aggression pact, which included the stipulation that neither country
would allow its territory to be used as a staging area for attacks on the
other. It was all for show: even as he was
signing the Mano River pact Taylor
was subverting its intent by rearming Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front for
guerrilla operations in Sierra Leone.
> As Jesse Jackson recalls it, “Kabbah had just executed some of Sankoh’s guys and was about to
execute Sankoh. So we appealed to Kabbah not to kill Sankoh.” Why would Jackson do that? Sankoh was a monster who employed drug-addled
children to kill and mutilate countless Africans; Sankoh was an agent of mayhem, chaos and suffering.
Why
was Jesse Jackson so keen to win the release of this satanic monstrosity?
Jackson flew to Freetown and appealed to President Kabbah on Sankoh’s
behalf. Jackson repeated his appeal during a stopover in Ghana. A smiling
Jackson proclaimed, “We live in the morning of a new day.”
In January 1999, Sankoh’s
guerrillas launched an epic attack on the capital city of Sierra Leone, driving before them a human
shield of women and children. Along the way they
torched homes, chopped off arms and legs, raped children and shot bystanders on
a whim. Within
three weeks the RUF had slaughtered six thousand citizens, most of them
non-combatants. When a Nigerian
army counter offensive drove the RUF from Freetown, Sankoh’s thugs
torched entire city blocks and abducted thousands of children to exploit as boy
soldiers or sex slaves.
Just as Sierra Leone’s President Kabbah had persuaded
the Nigerian peacekeepers to strike a crushing blow against the barbaric RUF,
Jesse Jackson interceded to stop this winning counter offensive. Clinton’s State Department had invited a RUF spokesman to Washington where the RUF
spokesman chatted with Donald Payne who, in turn, urged President Kabbah to
release Foday Sankoh and to negotiate with Sankoh’s RUF “without precondition.”
Under
pressure, with the Nigerian counter offensive stymied by Jesse Jackson &
Company, President Kabbah reluctantly acquiesced to U.S. State Department meddling.
Foday Sankoh was released on April 19th and Sankoh flew away to Lome,
the capital city of Togo.
Because of Jesse Jackson and his meddlesome friends a monster was once
again unleashed on the African civilian population; a golden opportunity to decapitate Sankoh’s rogue murder machine had
been snatched away. After that, Jesse
Jackson would personally guarantee the ruination of Sierra Leone by physically
removing President Kabbah from an African summit meeting in Ghana and spiriting
him away to an unannounced confrontation with the insurgent bossman Foday
Sankoh in Lome, Togo.
The abduction of President
Kabbah happened this way: At
an African summit meeting in Accra, Ghana, Jesse Jackson urged President Kabbah
to meet with Foday Sankoh. Jackson arranged to have a helicopter waiting at the Accra airport.
Jackson arrived at the airport surrounded by his ample staff and by people
friendly with Charles Taylor. When President Kabbah attempted to board the helicopter with his
information and finance ministers, Jackson suddenly declared that there was no
room for Kabbah’s aides, both of whom were
known
to be opposed to making concessions to the warlord Foday Sankoh. Jackson refused to
make room for Kabbah’s aides by leaving any of his attendents in Accra. So,
Jackson spirited President Kabbah away to Togo without a single supportive aide. It was a one-hundred-mile hop down
to Accra, where Jackson refused to exit
the helicopter until his image could be captured by a late-arriving CNN film
crew. The president
of Togo was kept waiting in the hot African sun for most of an hour because of
Jackson’s swollen vanity.
The isolation of the remote meeting place and Jesse
Jackson’s pressure tactics paid off for Jesse and his homicidal allies: Against
his better judgment, President Kabbah agreed to a ceasefire with Sankoh’s
Revolutionary United Front. This would allow the Qaddafi-trained Foday
Sankoh an opportunity to
replenish his weapons supply. Kabbah was also pressured to enter into power-sharing negotiations
with Sankoh. Jesse Jackson then convinced the U.S. State
Department to supply Sankoh’s guerrillas with updated communications equipment
so that Sankoh could better coordinate his field operations in the bush.
As a direct consequence of the Jackson-brokered
Lome Accord, former death
row prisoner Foday Sankoh was elevated to the office of vice president of Sierra Leone. Even worse, Foday Sankoh
was granted the chairmanship of Sierra Leone’s Management of Strategic Mineral
Resources – translation: the
diamond mines.
This
was what the Charles Taylor/Foday Sankoh partnership had been seeking all along
and Jesse Jackson handed it to them on a silver platter! Within days Sankoh was negotiating with the diamond gnomes of Antwerp. When the Belgian diamond merchant Michel
Desaedeleer handed Foday Sankoh a bank check the warlord was nonplussed.
The diamond merchant recalled, “He just looked at it
and asked me, ‘What’s this?’ It was the first bank check he had ever seen.”
Foday
Sankoh exploited Sierra Leone’s diamond sales to buy allies and arms. Belgian air force planes brought in weapons for the Revolutionary United
Front insurgents in crates disguised as
farm produce. Rebel diamonds purchased
sixty-eight tons of weapons for the RUF from Ukrainian arms dealer Leonid
Minim. Diamonds bought the
silence of United Nations watchdogs in Freetown. Raw uncut diamonds purchased
political influence in the United States.
Looking back on the mayhem that Jesse Jackson worked so hard to unleash on the people of Sierra Leone,
Jackson allows that “putting Sankoh over the diamonds, that was a bit too
generous.” Jackson pretends that he was not a driving force behind the ruinous Lome
Accord, but what is perfectly clear is the fact that at the historical moment when
the leader of a sadistic boy-soldier insurrectionist army was about to meet the
hangman, it was Jesse Jackson who intruded into the internal affairs of Sierra
Leone, won the release of the genocidal Foday Sankoh, and then pressured the
president of Sierra Leone to negotiate with the rebel leader.
The hideous development of Foday Sankoh being elevated to the vice presidency of Sierra Leone and given
control of the diamond mines so that he could finance further slaughter in Sierra Leone and Liberia is
a direct consequence of meddling by Jesse Jackson acting as Bill Clinton’s
“special envoy.”
Jackson was “special” indeed; he had a gift for making life
unbearable for the people of Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Without
Jackson’s enthusiastic intrusion into Sierra Leone’s internal affairs the trade
in blood diamonds would have stopped. Jackson has the blood of
countless slaughtered Africans on his hands.
The Jackson-brokered ceasefire
fell apart in less than six months; it was just an opportunity for Sankoh’s sadistic gang to rearm and
redeploy. Jackson’s legitimization of Sankoh and Taylor set the stage
for the slaughter of tens of thousands of African children.
Was Jackson surpassingly stupid or just his usual
self-serving self when he unleashed Foday Sankoh on a suffering Sierra Leone?
Did Jackson get a clue when
Sankoh’s machete-wielding savages began murdering UN peacekeepers and then took
500 peacekeepers hostage in May of 2000?
By mid-May Jackson was warned to stay out of Freetown because he
had been labeled a “killers’ rights
leader” by Africans. Jackson blundered into Monrovia at
the height of the hostage crisis and then attempted, with no success, to
cajole Charles Taylor into intervening. Jackson had unleashed the dogs of war and Taylor saw no
profit in reining in his buddy Foday Sankoh.
On June
5th, 2000, U.S. State Department spokesman
Philip Reeker disavowed any support for Jackson’s bumbling attempts at
diplomacy. The Clinton folks gave their “special envoy” the boot.
In a revealing article in the New York Post titled “The War
That Jesse Built” (7/10/03), author Kenneth
R. Timmerman suggests that
“Among the first questions
prosecutors should ask Taylor is whom he paid off using Foday Sankoh’s diamonds.
U.S.
intelligence officers reported these payoffs at the very moment that Jackson
was negotiating a favorable role for Taylor and for Sankoh in Lome, former CIA officers and other sources have told
me over the past two years. As
a result of the payoffs, Taylor continued to enjoy support among the
Congressional Black Caucus and with the Clinton State Department.”
The ever hustling Mr.
Jackson, who has been cutting corners and cutting deals ever since he dropped
out of the Chicago Theological Seminary after a scant six months and began
calling himself “the Reverend Jackson,” definitely has the blood of slaughtered
African innocents on his hands. Because he was acting as America’s “special
envoy” to Africa, it’s high time Mr. Jesse answered a few tough questions about
the horror he wrought in Africa.
It’s
time to follow the trail of the African blood diamonds.
I AM GRATEFUL TO MY FRIEND WHO E-MAILED THIS
ARTICLE/STORY- WRIT
TEN BEFORE CHARLES TAYLOR’S TRIAL STARTED.
IN THE WAKE
OT THE FORTH COMONG GENERAL ELECTIONS IN NOVEMBER 2012, THE IMPLICATIONS OF
THIS STORY SHOULD BE CLOSELY STUDIED. ALL THOSE FOREIGN AGENTS WITH SPECIAL
INTERESTS MUS THE WELL VETTED. WATCH FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS
22/02/2012
21
|
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2007
April 16, 2007
{0}
{2}
