The media have reported the hearings into the war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor as a soap opera starring such celebrities as Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow. Such treatment trivialises the appalling suffering of people in the region, and obscures the real issues. The people of Liberia—and Sierra Leone whose history is intertwined with Liberia’s—are the victims of imperialism’s manoeuvres in the region.

The struggle to grab diamonds and other raw materials did not just lead to a present for a ­supermodel. It also meant death for hundreds of thousands of West Africans in the 1990s.

The US and Britain have involved themselves in the region for 150 years, first through colonisation and later through economic and military pressure.

In the last two decades outside intervention, economic crisis and splits inside the ruling classes triggered brutal civil wars. The British invaded Sierra Leone in 2000, and the US sent troops to Liberia. Ten years after the invasion, which supposedly “freed” people, Sierra Leone remains 179th out of 179 countries according to the United Nations Human Development Index. To give one example, the maternal death rates are the highest in the world, at 2,000 deaths of mothers per 100,000 live births. Liberia is placed 176th in the same index. About 85 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day.

The diamonds of Sierra Leone, which fuelled Charles Taylor’s military campaigns, have a bloody history but they can’t be separated from the very “respectable” diamond firms like De Beers who have traded in such gems and made vast profits from them. Diamonds are indeed just “dirty stones” unless there are jewellery firms prepared to trade them.

The present war crimes tribunal is itself heavily influenced by the US. It was originally set up on an alternative basis to the International Criminal Court —which the US feared might try to arrest Western military and political leaders for their war crimes in Iraq.

The British and US governments, which claim to be friends of the people of West Africa, are its deadly enemies—not that any sense of the real history emerges from the way these issues are covered in the media.

Liberia: Blood and Diamonds
The depth of the crisis that has gripped Liberia in the last few months - which has resulted in thousands fleeing their homes and thousands more being killed in fighting - has led many to hope that the US would intervene to stop the fighting. In August 2003 the president, Charles Taylor, was forced to step down and was granted asylum by the Nigerian government. Taylor was installed in Calabar, in two palatial mansions. The US immediately insisted that Nigeria surrendered him to the International Criminal Court, the same legal system that they refuse to sign up to.

The wars in West Africa can only be understood in the context of a long history of US interference in the small West African states. Liberia was formed by the US in 1847 as a new country for repatriated freed slaves. The US was intimately connected to Liberia. The country used the US dollar until 1980, their flag was a replica of the Stars and Stripes and the capital was named after the fifth US president, James Monroe. As one commentator notes, 'Over the years, Americo-Liberians by the thousands - including 16 of the 19 men who have served as Liberia's president - were educated in US high schools and colleges.'

Behind these facts were brutal economic connections. The country was dependent on one principal cash crop - rubber. For decades Liberia was largely a fiefdom of the US multinational Firestone. During the Cold War the country was supported and armed by the US. The US radio station Voice of America - that blasted the airwaves with anti-Communist propaganda - broadcast from Monrovia.

The US backed successive dictators and crooks. They eventually supported Samuel Doe's government, which came to power in a coup in 1980. There was a wave of resistance to Doe, as students acted as the de facto opposition from 1980-84, when all opposition parties were banned. Students helped to organise Firestone workers but their leaders, together with trade unionists, were viciously repressed. Many spent years on death row.

Charles Taylor was a government minister under Doe, and fled to the US in the mid-1980s after he had plundered the state bank. He returned later in the decade to lead the revolt against the government. With the collapse in the rubber market in 1985 and the end of the Cold War Liberia had lost its strategic importance. The economy was destroyed, and the US could ignore the war that descended on the state.

Taylor, now sponsored by Libya, fought a bloody war for control of the country that sucked in the region. Diamond fields controlled by his forces in Sierra Leone funded the bloodshed. The war did not represent the 'primitive' or 'barbaric' nature of societies in West Africa (as many racist commentators would have it). On the contrary it demonstrated how the region was connected to a globalised economy that was at the same time criminal and informal. The war that cost thousands of lives saw these 'blood' diamonds sold by international traders in London and Antwerp.

The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebels that fought Taylor's government after elections brought him to power in 1997 were a faction in Taylor's original war against Doe. The majority of the rebels were also former student activists who had been involved in the resistance to Doe in the 1980s. They too offered no solution. The rebels were armed and supported by Guinea, which in turn is a faithful ally of the US. The recent war in Iraq has helped to alter the strategic importance of West Africa yet again, with the US greedily eyeing important oil reserves in the region in their attempt to break their dependence on the Middle East. In 2003 Colin Powell who served in George Bush’s cabinet put it like this: 'In Liberia if you ask the question, "What is our strategic vital interest?" it will be hard to define it that way. But we do have an interest in making sure that West Africa doesn't simply come apart.'

Charles Taylor is no longer of use to the US and has been hung out to dry. Such trials are used to conceal a much more dangerous reality, the real threat to West Africa of US imperialism, which will repeat the misery we have seen in Liberia. The only force that can dislodge this threat is the unity and organisation of the region's powerful working class and oppressed.

A short history of Liberia
1821 US Colonisation Society buys part of Sierra Leone in West Africa and US provides firepower to set up a colony—Liberia. It resettled around 20,000 US slaves who had won their freedom.

1926 Firestone and Goodrich granted 99-year concessions to plunder Liberia’s rubber resources. Similar deals set up for US firms to exploit oil, iron ore and diamonds.

1980 Food riots topple the government and Sergeant Samuel Doe takes over. He defends US economic interests.

1985 Charles Taylor, a government minister under Doe, fled to the US after defrauding the state bank. He returned later in the decade to lead a revolt against the government.

1990s A brutal civil war saw some 200,000 killed and over a million made homeless out of a population of 2.5 million. Charles Taylor’s allies in Sierra Leone provided him with diamonds and he sent them arms.

1997 Taylor wins presidential elections. Western powers, which had partly abandoned Liberia at the end of the Cold War, now paid attention to its resources and strategic position. This increased during the “war on terror”.

2003 Nigerian “peacekeepers” arrive, followed by US troops (they leave after a few months). UN then backs intervention force of over 12,000 troops.

2006 April—Taylor appears before a UN-backed court in Sierra Leone on charges of crimes against humanity. June—the International Criminal Court agrees to host his trial.

2008 US president George Bush ends a five-country tour of Africa with a visit to Liberia, one of America’s staunchest allies.