Source: http://www.liberianobserver.com/node/4535
War Crime Charges May Await George Boley
Publication Date: February 10, 2010
By: Observer Staff
NEW YORK – A foreign journalist who covered the Liberian civil war in the mid-90s, Jeffrey Goldberg, has reported in his blog that former warlord, George Boley, was arrested January 15th by U.S. Immigration and Customs and is now sitting in a jail cell in upstate Batavia.
So far, according to Goldberg, Boley is being charged administratively with lying in order to gain entry into the U.S., and with committing extra-judicial killings while in another country.
Other branches of government such as the Department of Homeland Security are looking at charging Boley with actual war crimes.
When the Daily Observer contacted the Liberian Consulate in New York on January 29, more than two weeks after Boley’s arrest, officials said they had not been informed by local authorities as protocol would dictate. Liberian Ambassador to the United States, M. Nathaniel Barnes, said he had not been contacted by authorities either, but said that the Boley’s family had reached out to him.
Goldberg, in his online publication, said he first met Boley in the 90s while covering the civil war in Liberia.
“I’ve been involved with Boley’s case for a little while. I was subpoenaed by a human rights group in Minnesota, the Advocates for Human Rights, to testify against Boley in a defamation lawsuit that he himself filed against the group... I eventually provided a sworn affidavit in the case, in which I detailed what I knew of Boley’s activities in the civil war...
“I knew, from firsthand observation, that his organization, the grossly misnamed ‘Liberian Peace Council’, recruited and armed child soldiers, fed them drugs and ordered them to rape and kill for starters. The lawsuit, unsurprisingly, was dismissed earlier this month,” Goldberg writes.
Boley, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Akron, received his undergraduate degree at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Brockport and kept his family in upstate New York for the duration of the civil war.
“I’ve been speaking to him on and off now for a year,” Goldberg notes, “and his excuse-making had become increasingly ridiculous. The last time we spoke, he told me that there had been two organizations in Liberia during the civil war named the Liberian Peace Council – his, which was “peaceful”, and someone else’s which was a fighting faction. This was an absurd line of argument, especially to someone like me, who had seen him actually in command of child soldiers in the war zone.”
A Liberian web publication, Bushchicken.com, observes that “With this latest arrest, warlords and other perpetrators of the Liberian civil war will seriously contemplate their travels from the comfort of Liberia. [Charles] Taylor and George Boley are two of the many that have been arrested by the long arm of the US criminal system.”
Copyright Liberian Observer - All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be re-published without the expressed, written consent of the Liberian Observer. Please contact us for more information or to request publishing permission.
