natural resources in conflict

liberia

The recent civil war in Liberia, in which more than a quarter of a million people died, half of them civilians, and during which some 1.3 million people were displaced, provides perhaps a stark example of military-political entrepreneurship driven by natural resource exploitation. Warlord Charles Taylor financed his armed insurrection in 1989 by using revenue generated by the sale of timber and diamonds. When he gained power in 1997, Taylor proceeded to sponsor the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) - whose signature was to chop the limbs off civilians to promote terror - in its struggle in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Systematic rape was another tactic; it is estimated that half of all women in Sierra Leone were subjected to sexual violence, including rape, torture and sexual slavery during the civil war.

The Liberian government not only provided material support to the RUF, but also sent its soldiers to fight alongside them, partially in an effort to gain control of the lucrative Sierra Leonean diamond fields, less than 100 miles from the Liberian border. UN sanctions were not imposed on Liberian diamonds until March 2001, almost two years after Liberia became involved in funding the war in Sierra Leone. As a result of sanctions, Taylor's government shifted its focus to timber as its primary source of revenue; again, it took another two years for the UN to impose sanctions on timber.

Taylor ran a shadow state that completely bypassed the normal state institutions, diverting logging revenues to himself rather than the treasury and using these funds to finance his ambitions of regional destabilisation. Logging company militias also became private armies. Liberia's revenues from logging were a minimum of US$187 million in 2000. According to government figures only US$7 million of this money made it into government coffers so, subtracting for production costs, around $100 million went unaccounted for. The Liberian timber industry played a vital role in arms brokering, with logging companies themselves sometimes acting as arms traffickers.

In 2000, Taylor regularised his theft of natural resources by passing the ‘Strategic Commodities Act', which declared that the President was granted the ‘sole power to execute, negotiate and conclude all commercial contracts or agreements with any foreign or domestic investor', effectively signing over control of all the natural resources in Liberia to himself. This ‘theft by legislation' effectively legalised Taylor's pillage: given the inherent instability of the regime, it also encouraged the immediate liquidation of Liberia's natural capital. Between 1997 and 2001, the production of roundwood in Liberia was estimated to have increased by over 1,300%.

In March 2003, the Special Court for Sierra Leone formally indicted Charles Taylor for participating in a joint criminal enterprise ‘to take any actions necessary to gain and exercise political power and control over the territory of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond mining areas. The natural resources of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamonds, were to be provided to persons outside Sierra Leone in return for assistance in carrying out the joint criminal enterprise ... as part of his continuing efforts to gain access to the mineral wealth of Sierra Leone and to destabilize the Government of Sierra Leone.'

UN timber sanctions were finally imposed in July 2003, more than two years after they were first discussed by the Security Council. The following month, with his funding cut off, and the advance of various rebel groups on Monrovia, Taylor went into exile in Calabar, Nigeria. He continued to be involved in Liberian politics, despite this being against the terms of his exile deal, until his escape and subsequent arrest on 29 March 2006.