DIAMONDS are a GIRL’s BEST FRIEND at COURT

“A cheap publicity stunt” Courtenay Griffiths the defence counsel called it and you saw what he meant. He was referring to the prosecution gambit in the war crimes trial of the former president of Liberia, Charles Taylor, a gambit that has brought the trial headline news and top bulletin story status all around the world for the first time in its three years’ duration.

Taylor is charged on eleven counts: terrorism, murder, “violence to life, health and physical or mental well-being”, rape, sexual slavery, “outrages upon personal dignity”, “cruel treatment”, “other inhumane acts”, conscription of children, enslavement and pillage. There’s no suggestion that he committed these acts personally, rather that he caused and enabled them to be carried out. The charges relate to the civil war that ran through the 1990s in Sierra Leone, in which Taylor allegedly funded the Revolutionary United Front, agent for countless atrocities. This was one of the several wars to which Tony Blair committed British troops, on this occasion in Operation Palliser of 2000 and the subsequent, celebrated, SAS hostage rescue operation dubbed Operation Barras. You might think there was plenty of news value in the rehearsal of such an eventful war and the bringing of such a catalogue of war crimes charges.

The prosecution gambit was to sprinkle the proceedings with a little celebrity dust. The fashion model Naomi Campbell was subpoenaed to give her account of a dinner in 1997, hosted by Nelson Mandela, at which she and Taylor were both guests. She told the court in The Hague last week that she had never heard of Taylor or indeed of Liberia before that evening. She claimed that she had been awoken during the subsequent night by two men who presented her with what she deemed “a bag of dirty stones”. These proved to be so-called blood diamonds.


At the notorious dinner: the Imran Khans, Campbell, Taylor, the Mandelas, Quincy Jones with date, Farrow, actor Tony Leung

Blood diamonds, also known as conflict diamonds, were a major source of funding for illegal and illicit activity until the mining industry and a coalition of African governments decisively tackled the issue in 2002. Until this point, trading in blood diamonds was not in itself illegal. What the prosecution in the Taylor trial is seeking to demonstrate is that Taylor dealt in these gemstones as a means of funding the brutal uprising in Sierra Leone, evidence that he empowered the atrocities carried out by the RUF.


Charles Taylor in his presidential days: butter wouldn't melt

Campbell’s recollection has this week been flatly contradicted by two other guests at the Mandela event, the actress Mia Farrow and Campbell’s former agent, Carol White. Their testimony suggests that Campbell flirted with Taylor and knew perfectly well that she was receiving diamonds from him. Given Campbell’s track record for volatile, high-handed and unbridled behaviour, loose sexual morality (she allegedly screwed the boxer Mike Tyson in the back of a chauffeured limo), self-centredness and carelessness with facts, the world is rather inclined to disbelieve her.

But Farrow is arguably hardly less flaky than Campbell. Her New Age enthusiasms and the strident righteousness with which she takes up causes – about which, it’s tempting to suspect, she knows precious little – put her reliability into question. I wonder too how anyone can be quite so categorical about what was said over breakfast thirteen years previously, especially when she probably didn’t care for the person saying them and she was fussing – as Mia certainly would have been – over her children who, it seems, were with her on the trip.


Naomi Campbell in one of her trademark encounters with the press

A different question hangs over White’s testimony because she is in dispute with Campbell concerning money. Defence council Griffiths not surprisingly pressed her on her motivation for testifying. It’s hard not to feel that the trio should be cast away on a small island for a few months and left to sort themselves out. No doubt it would end with the voracious model eating both the others.

Casual observers could be forgiven for imagining that it was Naomi Campbell who was on trial here. Given the contradictory quality of the three pieces of testimony and the lack of credibility any of these witnesses could command, the prosecution may well be wishing that it had never opened this particular box of tricks.


Mia Farrow sports a snappy if debatable slogan

On the other hand, if the whole sorry episode does anything to reduce our culture’s puerile infatuation with celebrity, it will have achieved something. Many individuals have come forward to bear witness during this long trial, people who were bereaved, who were raped, who were brutally beaten, who lost their homes and all their possessions, who had limbs hacked off – a macabre detail that characterises the RUF’s taste for cruelty. They have not been rewarded with media attention. Perhaps now some of them will be.


Celebrity fan Taylor entertains FIFA president Sepp Blatter in 1999 and appropriately bestows upon him the Humane Order of African Redemption

If not, we may be moving towards a time when only celebrities are able to enjoy any of the benefits of the world and its society, when public spectacle will determine who works and who does not, when all but the most dull, workaday activities are pursued by public figures and those voted into celebrity who will enact on our behalf the pleasures of travel, of eating a varied diet, of indulging gourmet sex and of singing and dancing and taking pleasures of all kinds, while we – the “little people” – gawp at them on our VDUs and cell phones and otherwise keep out of sight. Oh happy day.