OneWorld.net (U.S.)

WASHINGTON, D.C., Mar 29 (OneWorld) - Former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor is to stand trial nearly three years after a UN-backed court indicted him on 17 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in West African massacres.

Advocates and analysts welcomed Taylor's capture as a blow against impunity and for peace and stability in Liberia as it claws its way back from more than two decades of civil war.

However, some also said Washington had bullied the fledgling government of Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf into pressing Nigeria to extradite Taylor, and had held the Liberian people hostage by threatening to withhold economic life support if Johnson-Sirleaf did not push the issue.

Johnson-Sirleaf's government, in power since January, had sought to bring Taylor to justice after first tackling domestic priorities including moribund basic services, an 85 percent unemployment rate, and HIV/AIDS.

By catapulting Taylor to the top of the list, Washington appears to have exposed Johnson-Sirleaf to the political fallout of a Taylor trial without giving her time to establish her own credentials as a provider of government services and prove her ability to make good on campaign promises.

This when the country lacks an army following disarmament and demobilization that have spawned new misgivings among old enemies, and even as Liberians pin their hopes of justice on a nascent, homegrown truth and reconciliation commission.

Taylor, an ex-warlord who spent nearly three years in Nigerian exile, became the world's highest-profile fugitive Monday night, when it emerged he had disappeared from his seaside mansion. Nigerian officials said border guards detained him Tuesday night as he attempted to steal into neighboring Cameroon.

He was repatriated on board a Nigerian presidential jet and flown by UN helicopter Wednesday to the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown, according to the UN's IRIN news service.

''The wall of impunity has been washed away,'' said David Crane who, as the special court's chief prosecutor, wrote Taylor's 2003 indictment.

Crane, now a law professor at Syracuse University, brushed aside concerns that Taylor's extradition could undermine the power of exile as an inducement for dictators to relinquish power.

Taylor agreed to quit Liberia in 2003 because he received an offer of safe haven from Nigeria, Crane acknowledged in a radio interview here. But once Taylor was indicted as a war criminal, Crane added, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was obliged under international law to hand him over.

Some also saw Taylor's capture as averting a potential new crisis in Liberia, saying that he would have ramped up efforts to destabilize the country and discredit Johnson-Sirleaf had he given Nigerian authorities the slip and established a new base of operations.

Taylor maintained a small army of fighters in the countryside and supporters in key public offices--including his wife, a legislator. He and some of these supporters had admitted they were in frequent touch. Thus, the former ruler remained a destabilizing influence over Liberian politics even from exile, said Suliman Baldo, Africa program director at the think tank International Crisis Group.

The ex-warlord's ''being put away means that his ability to manipulate and agitate for his own sake would be very seriously curtailed,'' Baldo said.

Relief at the successful extradition was tempered by what some saw as unreasonable U.S. pressure on Monrovia.

''Clearly, a hammer was being used on the Liberian government,'' said Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. ''There was a clear link between development assistance for the people of Liberia and actual extradition.''

U.S. impatience over Taylor appeared to be driven in part by disgust at his reputation and in part by allegations he had harbored Al-Qaeda suicide bombers.

Perhaps more significantly, the Bush administration has been eager to see a major despot brought to swift justice by a panel other than the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court, to which it stands firmly opposed, the Christian Science Monitor quoted Ayesha Kajee of the South African Institute of International Affairs as saying.

Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's much-trumpeted first female head of state, won election last November on the strength of promises to improve the economy, health, and education services before turning to Taylor.

Instead of allowing the new Liberian government to tackle its problems and consolidate peace on its own terms, ''the Bush administration, kind of like a bull in a china shop, said, 'Well, you do this and do this now according to our timeframe','' Woods said.

Even so, Bush told Obasanjo before reporters at the White House Wednesday that ''the fact that Charles Taylor will be brought to justice in a court of law will help Liberia.''

Born in 1948, Taylor studied economics at Bentley College in Boston, where he joined the Union of Liberian Associations in The Americas and criticized the Liberian government, in which current president Johnson-Sirleaf served as finance minister, according to biographical notes assembled by IRIN.

He returned to Liberia in the late 1970s, shortly after Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe staged the country's first bloody military coup d'etat. Executions and reprisals followed, including the execution of President William Tolbert for rampant corruption and mismanagement.

Doe appointed Taylor to head the General Services Agency but three years on, Taylor was accused of stealing $1 million of government money and he fled to the United States.

Doe was a frequent guest of the Ronald Reagan White House and filed an extradition suit for Taylor to be arrested and deported.

U.S. authorities detained Taylor at the Plymouth County House of Correction in Massachusetts but after 15 months Taylor broke out in September 1985. The circumstances of his escape remain murky.

Taylor then resurfaced in Libya, Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire, where he mustered financial support and men to launch the rebel movement that eventually brought him to power--only to relinquish it in the face of a growing insurgency and in favor of exile in Nigeria.