60— Vanguard, THURSDAY, MAY 31, 2012
Mandela makes rare appearance ORMER South Afri can president Nelson Mandela on Wednesday made his first appearance in six months when he received a symbolic flame to mark the ruling ANC’s centenary at his rural home in Qunu. A healthy-looking Mandela, seated on an armchair, smiled as the African National Congress chairwoman Baleka Mbete presented him with the flame in an event shown on television. The handle was emblazoned with the party’s colours. “He was happy and he appeared to be healthy and asked a lot of questions,” ANC spokesman Keith Khoza told AFP. The clips on e-News channel showed the former ANC president Mandela flanked by his wife Graca Machel and grandchildren.
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Images of Madiba, who returned to his childhood village on Tuesday, were last seen in October when he cast his vote in local government elections there.
The revered statesman who turns 94 in July was in February flown to Johannesburg from the village for a medical checkup. His previous hospitalisation in 2011 for a
respiratory infection caused a national panic, following a new blackout on his condition. His last public appearance was at the 2010 World Cup final in Johannesburg.
Romney clinches GOP nomination ITT Romney clinched the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday
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with a resounding victory in Texas and now faces a five-month sprint to convince voters to trust him over Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 6 election. Although the race has been essentially over for weeks, Romney finally cleared the benchmark of 1,144 delegates needed to become the Republicans’ presidential candidate after a long, bitter primary battle with a host of conservative rivals. He will be formally nominated at the Repub-
licans’ convention in Florida in late August. In a statement, Romney said he was humbled to win enough of Texas’ 155 delegates to secure the nomination. “Our party has come together with the goal of putting the failures of the last three and a half years behind us. I have no illusions about the difficulties of the task before us. But whatever challenges lie ahead, we will settle for nothing less than getting America back on the path to full employment and prosperity,” he said.
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Wikileaks founder loses extradiction appeal ULIAN Assange, founder of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, has lost his appeal at the supreme court in London against extradition to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault allegations. Swedish prosecutors want to question Assange over allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two female.former WikiLeaks volunteers. The judges
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ruled with a majority of five to two on Wednesday that the Swedish prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant was a “legitimate judicial authority”. The decision means that Assange, 40, can be extradited. But his lawyers immediately requested to be given leave to appeal to reopen the case. The court gave his lawyers two weeks to contest their ruling.
Charles Taylor: End game for the Liberian warlord BY UDUMA KALU with agency report HE Liberian Civil War, caused by former Liberian President Charles Taylor, described as one of Africa’s bloodiest, claimed the lives of more than 200,000 Liberians and further displaced a million others into refugee camps in neighbouring countries. Young persons were victimized during the civil war of the mid1990s. An estimated 50,000 children were killed; many more were injured, orphaned, or abandoned. Approximately 21 percent of the combatants who were disarmed under the provisions of the Abuja Peace Accords were child soldiers under the age of 17. Many youths remained traumatized, and some still were addicted to drugs. The number of street children in Monrovia and the number of abandoned infants increased significantly following disarmament. Although the sources of the Liberian conflict are complex, on one lev-
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el it represents an attempt by Americo-Liberians to re-establish themselves as the dominant political force in Liberia. The war was not about tribes seeking dominance over one another. Charles Taylor led the invasion into Liberia in the name of trying to right the wrong for the Gios and Manos. This was the motivator for the two ethnic groups who joined the movement. When the Taylor rebels entered Nimba County, their home, the conflict quickly drew in the Mandingoes, who are mostly Muslims. The Gio tribe soon formed their own separate rebel forces under Prince Johnson, and a bloody three-way civil war began. Taylor, president and preacher. He was also a mass murderer. When he was a rebel in the early 1990s, controlling most of Liberia apart from the capital, Taylor turned up at a West African regional conference in Burkina Faso in full military combat gear. His equally well-protected bodyguards jogged
•Charles Taylor alongside his car from the airport to the centre of the capital, Ouagadougou, in a show of strength and loyalty. When, as president in 1999, he faced accusations from the United Nations that he was a gun runner and a diamond smuggler, he addressed a mass prayer meeting clothed from head to foot in angelic white. The showman, who at the time was also a lay preacher in the Baptist tradition, prostrated himself on the ground
and prayed forgiveness before his Lord - although he also denied the charges. Charles Taylor believes he is misunderstood The first, from the then-relatively unknown warlord, announced his invasion of Liberia. In one famous exchange with former BBC Focus on Africa editor Robin White a few years later, Mr White suggested that some people thought him little better than a murderer. Taylor bellowed with a flourish to the effect that “Jesus
Christ was accused of being a murderer in his time”. Charles Taylor was born in 1948 to a family of Americo-Liberians, the elite group that grew out of the freed slaves who founded the country in the 19th Century. For what are suspected to be political reasons - broadening his appeal to the indigenous African majority - Mr Taylor added the African name “Ghankay ” in later years, becoming Charles Ghankay Taylor. Like many AmericoLiberians he studied in the United States. He returned home shortly after Master Sergeant Samuel Doe mounted Liberia’s first successful coup d’etat in 1980. Taylor landed a plum job in Doe’s regime running the General Services Agency, a position that meant controlling much of Liberia’s budget. He later fell out with Doe, who accused him of embezzling almost $1m (£626,000), and fled back to the US. Taylor denied the charges, but ended up in the Plymouth County House of Correction in
Massachusetts, detained under a Liberian extradition warrant. Charles Taylor led a rebellion to oust Samuel Doe from power in Liberia. Some reports say he managed to escape the prison by sawing through the bars; others that there was some collusion in his departure from Americans who wanted him to play the role he then proceeded to carve out for himself - overthrowing the corrupt, violent and generally disastrous regime of Samuel Doe. Taylor ’s rebellion succeeded partly because of Doe’s incompetence. But it was also the fruit of Taylor ’s building of sometimes surprising alliances. Over the years, his friends included the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, the conservative former ruler of Ivory Coast Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the current President of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore, and a rogues’ gallery of businessmen, local and foreign, prepared to flout UN disapproval to make money in Liberia.