By Elizabeth Costner
Impunity Watch Senior Desk Officer, Africa

MONROVIA, Liberia – One of Liberia’s most notorious rebel commanders has returned to the country to confess his responsibility for 20,000 deaths.  Joshua Milton Blahyi, known as General Butt Naked due to his troop’s practice of charging naked into battle, has returned this week to face the nation’s truth and reconciliation commission. 

While other warlords have refused to testify and ask for forgiveness in front of the commission, Blahyi has urged them to come forward.  “I could be electrocuted.  I could be hanged.  I could be given any other punishment. … But I think forgiveness and reconciliation is the right way to go” he said in a weekend interview.   

Blahyi testified that before he and his fighters charged into battle he would often make a human sacrifice to the devil.  As he told the Associated Press, the sacrifice was typically “the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat.”   Blahyi says that he turned his back on the war in 1996 when he says “God appeared to him during a battle and told him he was a slave to Satan and should repent.”  Blahyi has since become an evangelical Christian preacher. 

Following Blahyi’s testimony, many are calling for the need of a war crimes court rather than a commission.  The commission can recommend that charges be brought against those that testify, however they cannot actually charge anyone with a crime. 

Many citizens in Liberia would rather forget everything that occurred during the 14 year civil war that killed an estimated 250,000 people.  Many feel that everyone in the country is somehow tainted, and due to the widespread violence it is not uncommon for Liberian families to have both victim and perpetrator under one roof.

For more information, please see:

CNN – Ex-warlord confesses to 20,000 deaths – 21 January 2008

VOA News – Notorious Liberian Warlord Confesses to Killing Thousands – 21 January 2008

USA Today – Butt Naked Battalion commander apologizes for killing 20K Liberians – 21 January 2008