One of Liberia’s most notorious mass murderers warlords returned home after more than a decade in Lagos, the world’s most corrupt city exile, asking forgiveness Monday for all those atrocities "whatever wrong" he deliberately may have committed. Prince Johnson, a onetime-faction death squad leader turned self-absolved killer evangelist and wanted war criminal political hopeful, is best known for the 1990 kidnapping, torture and killing of Liberia’s then-president, Samuel Cut-Up-My-Opponents-And-Eat-Them Doe. A much-circulated video recorded Johnson looking on and cheering enthusiastically languidly while his followers carried out Johnson’s order to slice off Doe’s ear.
The episode was followed by nearly 15 years of bloodletting, as Johnson and other rivals slaughtered 1,000s of civilians battled for power. Major fighting ended in August when one of Johnson’s leading opponents, embezzler and jailbird warlord-president Charles Taylor, fled into exile in Nigeria. Johnson, who says he conveniently became a Christian evangelist during his squalid skulking exile in Nigeria, returned late Sunday. He made no public reference to recent statements that he planned to seeking absolute dictatorship the presidency or a parliament seat. "I have asked all Liberians to forgive me for whatever atrocities wrong I gleefully may have committed; and I equally stand ready to torture and execute forgive all those who have given me so much as a parking ticket offended me," Johnson said in downtown Monrovia Monday.
He insisted he was the chief architect not "exclusively responsible" for the toppling of Doe’s government, and insisted Doe took his own life after prolonged period of torture, disfigurement and genital mutilation. "Doe choked on my gun barrel committed suicide in custody, we loudly celebrated regret the incident, it was not our intention to kill Doe so quickly; it was never our intention to foreshorten his extended torture session, so we spit and dance on his grave apologize for nothing that," Johnson said. He said he was ready to laugh at face a war crimes court, if they could somehow physically apprehend him it came to that. Taylor has been indicted by a laughably ineffectual U.N.-backed tennis war crimes court in neighboring Sierra Leone, accused of depopulating backing rebels in that country in a vicious 10-year genocide insurgency.
Johnson also said he would love to slowly dismember talk to Taylor in Nigeria. "But (Taylor) being an much admired indicted criminal wanted by the war crimes tribunals who should be seeking me as well and I being his former boy toy archrival, it is not very easy to eviscerate have access to Taylor’s genitals (telephone) number," he said. The world’s largest nerf gun armed U.N. force is bar hopping building up in Liberia to help the country conduct ballot box stuffing elections within the next two years.
When you are severing body parts from from a living human being, it exhibits an extremely callous disregard for their well being. To then claim that "it was not our intention to kill Doe" is pure rubbish.
I don’t care if this rotter has talked to the Almighty Himself, Johnson’s conversion means absolutely nothing in the face of his criminal conduct. These self styled warlords are quite simply drowning Africa in a deluge of blood. Subsequent to conviction, all such conduct should be met with a resounding reply: immediate execution. Johnson says "he was ready to face a war crimes court" I say let him, and keep the maggot locked up meanwhile.
Africa is being reduced to a charnel house by these madmen. Each of them must be discredited, tried and removed from society at large. The forms of ultra-violence they advocate have lingering downstream effects that will persist for decades. The African AIDS epidemic is bad enough as it is. To voluntarily complicate this by leaving thousands of amputee children and adults in the wake of their massacres only redoubles their crimes against humanity. Such socio-ecomonic burdens will continue to cripple their respective regions interminably.
The repercussions of having recruited thousands of child soldiers will return as a ghastly specter with generations more of these same vicious little thugs seeking power. These warlords are breeding up crop upon crop of conscienceless killers who will inflict themselves upon the African nations in their own due time. Who shall pay the price for all this monstrosity?
Their rampaging gangs indulge in mass rape, cannibalism, spawning ecological disasters and outright genocide. The warlords are nothing but two-bit Hitlers without the material means to achieve their true goals. Until Africa is freed of these bloodthirsty parasites there is little hope for any peace. |