Super Model Naome Campbell on the day she appeared at The Hague. Since then, nothing much has been heard about Charles Taylor.
The miseries of Africa over the centuries have all come from the greed and profitable exploitations of Europeans and today, seeing the misery and destruction within Libya as Europe’s high tech war machines chase the Libyan leader from one concealment to another no matter the cost, it seems little better than the 15th century. The continent is manoeuvring under the weight of uncertainty and certainly making headlines within the European press, for example like the focus on Naomi Campbell, a stunning Afro model who is alleged to have taken a small gift from an African leader. We doubt if anyone was interested in this leader, it was the lovely model who got the headlines. Campbell is one of the world’s highest paid models. She fought to avoid testifying because she said she was concerned about the safety of her family. But the prosecution had hoped her evidence would show that Mr. Taylor received so called “blood diamonds” from rebels in Sierra Leone during the country’s decade-long civil war. Prosecutors say Mr. Taylor – then president of West African Liberia – exchanged the diamonds for weapons, which he smuggled into Sierra Leone. He is accused of arming and commanding rebels who raped, murdered, and mutilated thousands of civilians.
However the leader’s name was Charles Taylor, the American educated President of Liberia and today he still sits imprisoned and forgotten in the war crimes tribunal compound, three years from the first day of confinement. He made the headlines having made a gift of a diamond, not an ordinary allotrope of carbon but a blood diamond. So what is a blood diamond?