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 FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) - The severed fingers clinging to the rail of a river bridge. The 12-year-old boy drawing a picture of a bloody knife and a trail of red drops, trying to exorcise the ghosts of those he murdered.
I cried then and cry now as I drag out of the shadows of memory the horrors of Charles Taylor's sieges on Liberia's capital.
Villagers were waving palm fronds and ululating adoration of Taylor the first time I saw him, on a trip behind rebel lines that began with a clandestine crossing from Ivory Coast, balancing Tandy laptops on our heads as we forded the St. John's River into Liberia. That was in May 1990, five months after Taylor launched his Christmas Eve invasion from Ivory Coast.
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