Victims of Sierra Leone’s civil war await news from The Hague today where convicted war criminal Charles Taylor is to receive his sentence. Sento Thoronka is one of them. She has just one arm after Revolutionary United Front rebels, backed by Taylor, cut off her other one as a common terror tactic.
Like so many others Sento wants the stiffest sentence possible.
“When they sentence him I’m going to feel fine because he has done bad things to us. There is nothing anyone can say to me that will ever make me forget what he did, because when I look at myself I look odd,” said Sento Thoronka.
Many children in modern-day Sierra Leone know little of the 11-year war which left 50,000 dead and in which rape murder and mutilation were common place.
The former Liberian president has become the first head of state to be convicted by an international court since World War II. Taylor was found guilty of aiding rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Prosecutors want him to be jailed for the rest of his life.
