The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Liberia former Prez convicted of war crimes in Sierra Leone

The Hague, April 26
A United Nations-backed court convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, the first time a head of state has been found guilty by an international tribunal since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor in Leidschendam, near The Hague. — Reuters

Taylor (64) had been charged with 11 counts of murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, during which more than 50,000 persons were killed.

The first African leader to stand trial for war crimes, Taylor was accused of directing Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in a campaign of terror to plunder Sierra Leone's diamond mines for profit and weapons trading.

"The accused is criminally responsible for aiding and abetting in the crimes," presiding Judge Richard Lussick said as he read out the court's decision.

Taylor was found guilty of providing weapons, food, medical supplies, fuel and equipment to forces in Sierra Leone which committed atrocities, but not of having ordered or planned the crimes.

"The trial chamber finds the accused cannot be held responsible for ordering the crimes. The trial chamber, having already found the accused guilty of aiding and abetting, does not find the accused also instigated these crimes," the judge said.

Wearing a dark blue suit and maroon tie, Taylor looked calm and subdued as the presiding judge took more than two hours to read out the charges, evidence and final ruling.

The litany of gruesome crimes covered rapes and enslavement, beheadings and disembowellings, amputations and other mutilations carried out by child soldiers notorious for being high on drugs and dressed in fright wigs.

And in return for providing arms and ammunition for the conflict, the judge recounted how Taylor had received "blood diamonds" from Sierra Leone, including a 45-carat diamond and two 25-carat diamonds.

"Taylor's conviction sends a powerful message that even those in the highest-level positions can be held to account for grave crimes," Elise Keppler, senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "Not since Nuremberg has an international or hybrid war crimes court issued a judgment against a current or former head of state. This is a victory for Sierra Leonean victims, and all those seeking justice when the worst abuses are committed."

Taylor has denied the charges, insisting he tried to bring peace to the region and arguing his trial was a politically motivated conspiracy by Western nations.

But the judge said that "the accused was publicly promoting peace, while privately providing arms to the RUF." He added, "There was a constant flow of diamonds from Sierra Leone to the accused, often in exchange for arms and ammunition." — Reuters

Blood Diamonds

n The former Liberian President has been charged with 11 counts of murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone

n Charles Taylor was accused of directing rebels in a campaign of terror to plunder Sierra Leone's diamond mines for profit and weapons trading

n In return for providing arms and ammunition, Taylor had received "blood diamonds" from Sierra Leone, including a 45-carat diamond and two 25-carat diamonds

Salahi, White House
gatecrasher, to run for Virginia Guv!

Washington, April 26
Tareq Salahi, who achieved notoriety for crashing a White House party, says he will run for the governor of Virginia.

Salahi plans to run as a Republican. He would take on GOP candidate and state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who recently filed a lawsuit against Salahi for defrauding customers who signed up to take winery tours through Salahi's tourism company.

Salahi and his wife, Michaele, breezed in uninvited to a White House state dinner in 2009, and were able to meet President Barack Obama. Their brazen exploit sparked concern about the Secret Service's effectiveness.

The notoriety also landed Michaele a role in the reality television series "Real Housewives of DC", which was cancelled after one season. Later, she was kicked off another reality program, "Celebrity Rehab with Dr Drew" when it became clear she was addicted to nothing more than publicity.

Salahi's declaration of candidacy is meaningless until January 1, 2013. Virginia law prohibits the State Board of Elections from accepting the declarations until the year in which the elections are scheduled, said board senior official Chris Piper. The state's elections will be in November 2013, Fox News reported.

In more attention-grabbing last year, Tareq Salahi reported that his wife had been abducted. But she had actually eloped with Neal Schon, the lead guitarist for Journey. A $50 million lawsuit filed by Tareq against Michaele over the breakup was dismissed. — ANI

Special to the tribune
Shyam Bhatia in London
‘Unbalanced’ ex-PM Brown declared war on News Corp: Murdoch

The world's most powerful media baron has taken on the British elite with a series of allegations, including a question mark over the mental stability of a former Prime Minister, that have left the rest of the country gasping.

Australia-born Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, which owns 20th Century Fox and the Wall Street Journal in the US, and The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun newspapers in the UK, has been testifying before the Leveson Inquiry that is looking into the culture, practice and ethics of the Press.

His use of language and disclosures about politicians and leading members of the media, including current Prime Minister David Cameron and several former Prime Ministers, is the focus of public attention with long-term consequences that are unpredictable as yet.

The underlying issue at the inquiry is the power and influence wielded by unelected media proprietors in democratic countries like the UK.

Last year, one of Murdoch's profitable celebrity newspapers in the UK, The News of the World, was forced to shut down after it emerged that some of its journalists had been illegally hacking (tapping) into the voice mails of prominent persons in a bid to find stories. Several sportsmen, politicians and actors received cash compensation after their telephones were illegally hacked.

In recent days, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has accused Murdoch of misleading the inquiry. Murdoch claims that when his mass circulation The Sun newspaper declared its support for Conservative Party chief Cameron in 2009, he told Brown, "I'm sorry to tell Gordon, we will support a change of government when there is an election."

According to Murdoch, Brown responded, "Well, your company has declared war on the government. We have no alternative but to declare war on your company."

Commenting on the then Prime Minister's response, Murdoch told the inquiry, “I said, ‘I'm sorry about that Gordon, than you for calling", and that was the end of the subject. I don't think he was in a very balanced state of mind. I don't know."

On Wednesday, Brown issued a statement saying, "I did not phone Mr Murdoch or meet him, or write to him about his decision. The only phone call I had with Mr Murdoch in the last year of my time in office was a phone call specifically about Afghanistan and his newspaper's coverage of the war.

"This was in the second week of November after his newspaper, The Sun, printed a story in the second week of November about the death of a soldier and his mother's complaints. I hope Mr Murdoch will have the good grace to correct his account."

Murdoch had kinder words about other former Prime Ministers, saying he had a "respectful relationship" with Mrs Margaret Thatcher and had "long been impressed by Tony Blair". About the current Prime Minister, Murdoch said, "He was a good family man.” But describing Cameron's late son, Ivan, as "retarded" has shocked the public.

Young Ivan, who suffered from severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, died at the age of six in 2009. In the UK, using the term "retarded' to describe a disabled child is considered offensive.

Murdoch has also made controversial comments about a leading British journalist, Sir Harold Evans, a former editor of The Times. When Murdoch bought The Times some 30 years ago, he claims Evans "came to me, shut the door behind him and said, 'Look, tell me what you want to say, what do you want to say and it needn't leave this room, I will do it.

"And I said to him, 'Harry, that isn't my job. All I would say to you, and this is the nearest I have come to an instruction, was to please be consistent. Don't change sides day by day. I am not saying political stories, but on issues."

Evans has responded, saying, "I was comic and sad to see Rupert Murdoch testify at the Leveson Inquiry dealing with all the charges against him. It was comic for me because he had to find a way of denying that he ever broke his promise to maintain the independence of The Times under my editorship. Political independence was only one of the promises he made and broke. It was sad that, having lost his memory, he compensated by spectacular displays of imagination. On the stand, he invented a scene in which I came on my knees, begging him to tell me what to think, and not to tell anybody that I'd asked him."

Former editor Blasts claims

London: Harold Evans, the legendary editor of The Sunday Times who famously resigned after falling out with media baron Rupert Murdoch, on Thursday ridiculed the latter's claims at the Leveson Inquiry on Wednesday about events at the newspaper. Evans responded in an article in The Guardian as Murdoch prepared to appear before the inquiry for the second day on Thursday to respond to the issue of phone-hacking. "Rupert Murdoch has apparently lost a great deal of his power of memory, but nature has compensated by endowing him with a vivid imagination. He can surely deploy his new gift in the service of Fox movies," Evans wrote. — PTI

Blames rogue tabloid for phone-hacking

London, April 26
Rupert Murdoch blamed News of the World journalists for conspiring to cover up a culture of phone-hacking at the tabloid, saying they hid their activities from his son James and protegee Rebekah Brooks and that he personally was not paying attention.

On the second day of testimony in Britain's high court on Thursday, Murdoch painted a picture of a rogue culture at the best-selling Sunday tabloid, in an echo of his company's now abandoned defence that a single "rogue reporter" was to blame.

"I think in newspapers, the reporters do act very much on their own, they do protect their sources, they don't disclose to their colleagues what they are doing," Murdoch told a judicial inquiry into press ethics.

Showing frequent flashes of annoyance as the questioning became more pointed, the media mogul admitted he had not paid enough attention to the News of the World, but did not accept that he had allowed a culture of illegality to flourish.

Asked where the culture of cover-up had originated, Murdoch answered: "I think from within the News of the World. There were one or two very strong characters there who I think had been there many, many years and were friends of the journalists."

"The person I'm thinking of was a friend of the journalists and a drinking pal and clever lawyer and forbade them to report to Mrs Brooks or to James," said Murdoch, in a thinly veiled reference to the News of the World's former top lawyer Tom Crone, who has accused James Murdoch of lying.

"That's not to excuse on our behalf at all. I take it extremely seriously that that situation had arisen," he said.

The appearance at the inquiry of a man, who has courted Prime Ministers and Presidents for the past 40 years, is a defining moment in a scandal that has laid bare collusion between British politicians, police and Murdoch's News Corp.— Reuters

Bo ‘bugged’ phone call to Chinese Prez

Beijing, April 26
A wiretapping network run by Chongqing officials was detected on a phone call made to Chinese President Hu Jintao in August, a discovery that helped topple city's ambitious party chief Bo Xilai, the New York Times reported.

The Times report said nearly a dozen sources with the Communist Party ties had confirmed the wiretapping and the widespread bugging programme. The party's official version of events has omitted the tapped call by a visiting Chinese minister to Hu in August. If true, the report confirms rumours of the incident that had spread since Bo's ouster in March.

The public case has focused on the suspicious death of British businessman Neil Heywood in November, and his alleged murder by Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, a crime that has upset China's carefully managed leadership transition.

"But the hidden wiretapping, appears to have provided another compelling reason for party leaders to turn on Bo," the Times said. — Reuters

26 years after, Chernobyl scars refuse to go

The April 26, 1986 explosion spewed a cloud of radiation over much of the Northern Hemisphere, forcing out hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in heavily hit areas of Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.

A widow cries as she holds a picture of her late husband, a victim of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, during a memorial ceremony in Kiev. The catastrophic nuclear accident had rendered a vast area equal to half of Ratnagiri district uninhabitable and an area equal to one-third of Maharashtra unfit for any agriculture activities.

Construction has started on a gigantic steel-arch to cover the remnants
of the Chernobyl reactor on the 26th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident.

A widow cries as she holds a picture of her late husband, a victim of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, during a memorial ceremony in Kiev. — AFP