Finnish role in arms shipments to Sierra Leone emerges at trial of Liberian ex-leader

Charles Taylor

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In March 1999 a jet bearing the logo of the NBA basketball team, the Seattle SuperSonics, was busy cargoes of weaponry from the West African countries of Burkina Faso to Liberia, from where they were moved to Sierra Leone, which was torn by a civil war at the time.
     Pictures and other information about these flights are now being used as evidence at the ongoing trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague. Taylor stands accused of financing the brutal civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone with profits from the sale of diamonds.
     One person who was involved in the arms shipments was a Finnish citizen - Joensuu native Jorma Ijäs, who flew the plane
     In the 1990s, Ijäs worked for Ukrainian-born businessman Leonid Minin, who had become a shareholder in the Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprise forest company, which wanted a share of Liberia's vast forest resources. Lucrative timber deals were sealed with deliveries of armaments.
     Minin had offered the Liberians the use of the plane in the autumn of 1998. The deal was such a rush that the plane, with the registration code VP-CLM, flew in Africa bearing the logos of the old owner.
     
UN investigators say that the plane, flown by Ijäs, brougut weapons to Liberia first in December 1998, and then in March 1999. Between these flights, in January 1999, Sierra Leone sank into unprecedented chaos.
     "I never opened a single box", Jorma Ijäs said five years ago after Helsingin Sanomat had written about the flights.
      "Sometimes you fly boxes and sometimes you fly people", he noted.
     Ijäs was fired by Minin in the summer of 1999. Minin was arrested in Italy in August 2000, but the case against him collapsed over technicalities. Helsingin Sanomat was not able to reach Ijäs on Monday.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Finnish businessman implicated in weapons smuggling from Europe to Liberia (30.6.2002)

Helsingin Sanomat