Posts Tagged ‘Special Court for Sierra Leone’

Cindor Reeves leaves Canada

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - 0 Comments

Cindor Reeves, a man who risked his life to bring one of the most blood-soaked tyrants of the last 25 years to justice, has left Canada following a deportation order against him.

Reeves was once the brother-in-law of Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord and then president of the country who is now on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Taylor is there in large part because Cindor Reeves helped the Special Court for Sierra Leone build its case against him. Reeves did this at great personal risk, and without asking for anything in return. The Special Court put Reeves and his family in a witness protection program in Europe. Unhappy there, Reeves came to Canada and applied for refugee status. When he did so, Reeves lost the protection of the Special Court, which effectively abandoned him.  Continue…

  • Cindor Reeves and the Globe and Mail

    By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 3:29 PM - 17 Comments

    The Globe has published an editorial calling on Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to allow Cindor Reeves to stay in Canada.

    The Globe’s editorial is based entirely on my articles and blog posts, although they don’t acknowledge as much. I admit I find this bothersome, but am pleased other media are now following the story.

    The CBC’s interview with Reeves and with Alan White, former chief of investigations for the Special Court, meanwhile, is now available online.

  • A tyrant on trial

    By Michael Petrou - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 11:37 AM - 8 Comments

    It can be lonely writing about and covering wars and humans rights atrocities in Africa. Nobody really cares – at least not as much as they might had the victims been from almost anywhere else on the planet.

    Consider the coverage afforded to the civil wars in Liberia and in the former Yugoslavia. They happened at around the same time. More died in Liberia. How many reading this even know that Liberia was consumed by a horrific, anarchic conflict for much of the 1990s?

    It was, and so was next door Sierra Leone. Charles Taylor – first a warlord and then president of Liberia – is now on trial in The Hague for his role in the latter conflict. He’s on the stand now. The Special Court for Sierra Leone is posting daily transcripts. They’re worth reading.

  • Canada spends millions on the court that's prosecuting Charles Taylor-but doesn't want to protect the man who risked his life to bring the tyrant to justice

    By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:16 PM - 1 Comment

    From this week’s print magazine. The story, in a nutshell, is this:

    Charles Taylor’s brother-in-law, Cindor Reeves, risked his life to help the Special Court for Sierra Leone build a case against Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who controlled an army of murderous, drug-crazed child soldiers in next door Sierra Leone. Reeves is now a refugee claimant in Canada. Canada appears poised to kick him out.

  • The man who brought down a tyrant

    By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 11 Comments

    Cindor Reeves helped bring Liberia’s brutal dictator, Charles Taylor, to justice. Now Canada may kick him out.

    The man who brought down a tyrantIt was June 2002 when Cindor Reeves was first tipped off that his brother-in-law, the president of Liberia, had sent a team of assassins to murder him.

    At 30 years of age, Reeves was already a seasoned gunrunner and diamond smuggler. His brother-in-law was Charles Taylor, who in 1989 had launched a long-running civil war with his rebel fighters in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia that killed more than 200,000 but left Taylor in charge of much of the country. (He was elected president during a brief lull in the fighting in 1997.) The Liberian war also spilled over its borders. Taylor had created a proxy army next door in Sierra Leone that called itself the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF. Since 1991, the RUF and its legions of drug-crazed child soldiers had terrorized Sierra Leone, killing and hacking off the limbs of tens of thousands of civilians, and enslaving thousands more to mine for diamonds. Continue…

From Macleans