The travelling tribunal

Outside the courtroom, the sea shimmers. Atlantic waves roll in with white crests of foam. Through the window you can see the bungalows of a holiday resort, an infinity pool, and sunshades made of palm fronds. There is no one on the beach this early in the morning.

It is 17 March 2021 in Paynesville, a suburb of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in West Africa. In the meeting room of a hotel, which has been converted into a courtroom, a woman is talking about how her son was murdered, some 20 years ago. She is wearing flip-flops, a purple skirt, and a pink headscarf. She bobs her leg and thumps her foot on the stone floor: clap, clap, clap.

Around the witness sit foreigners, white people: four Finnish judges (two male and two female), two Finnish prosecutors, the defendant’s Finnish lawyer and three interpreters. Despite the heat outside, the men are in suits and immaculately ironed shirts. The women wear dark blazers.

“When I reached my parents’ house, soldiers approached me at gunpoint,” the witness says. “The soldiers said, ‘stop! Don’t take another step’.” She describes how the soldiers hauled out everything her father owned from their hut. How they tied up her son, and set the whole village on fire. Her voice becomes quiet and anguished. “Then they shot, and my son was dead.” She begins to cry. From her pocket she pulls a small handkerchief to wipe the tears on her face. The session is adjourned.

After a quarter of an hour it continues. One of the two Finnish prosecutors asks:

“Do you know what the commander’s name was?”

“Yes, I remember it well.”

“What was his name?”

“Angel Gabriel Massaquoi.”

Angel Gabriel, like the Archangel, a messenger of God, and the accused’s surname: Massaquoi. A strange amalgamation.

Gibril Massaquoi is his official name. He was a warlord in the civil war in the West African country of Sierra Leone more than 20 years ago. After the war ended, a Special Court, backed by the UN, was set up to try the most serious crimes. Massaquoi testified as a crown witness, in return for which he was promised immunity from prosecution for his deeds in Sierra Leone. In 2008, he went to Finland, where he lived a peaceful, undisturbed life for more than a decade. Then his past caught up with him. A human rights organisation in Liberia had collected evidence. They accused Massaquoi of crimes committed in neighbouring Liberia, where a civil war was also raging at the time. They alleged that he had murdered, tortured, and raped. And since Massaquoi lives in Finland, it was a Finnish court that took on his case.

In recent years, many states have prosecuted crimes according to the legal principle of universal jurisdiction. It is a principle that only applies to the worst crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. In universal jurisdiction cases, the location of a crime does not matter. The crimes are prosecuted even when they occurred in a country thousands of kilometres away. It also does not matter if the alleged perpetrators have long since left their home countries. They are tried by the countries in which they now live.

In recent years many countries have applied the principle of universal jurisdiction: Germany has initiated proceedings against torturers of the Assad regime in Syria and against fighters of the “Islamic State”, France has convicted genocidaires from Rwanda, Senegal has tried the former president of Chad, and Sweden an Iranian executioner. Presumably, crimes committed during the war in Ukraine will also soon be tried in faraway courts.

The Finns, however, took this idea further than most. That’s why lawyers of a Finnish district court are now sitting 7,000 kilometres away from their hometown, asking a woman about the most traumatic moments of her life. Normally, the jurists work in a brick building in the centre of Tampere, Finland’s third largest city. Their experiment has been hailed as the “Finnish way” in international criminal law: Whole courts, with prosecutors, judges, defence lawyers, are travelling in pursuit of crimes – to hear the witnesses in the places where they live, to visit the crime scenes, to get a better understanding of what happened. They hope that this will bring them closer to the truth.

In the spring of 2022, after more than a year of proceedings, the Finnish court will finally pronounce its verdict in the case against Gibril Massaquoi. The result will turn out to be different to what everyone might have expected.

Juhani Paiho, 55, is the man presiding over the trial. He is tall; his head looks like it is carved out of hard rock. In March 2021, more than a year before the verdict, Paiho is sitting by the hotel pool in Monrovia, describing how he came to be the presiding judge in the trial. The other judges were horrified, he says, when the biggest war crimes trial in Finnish history was referred to their small district court in Tampere. But Paiho had googled Liberia on his phone and thought to himself, “You’ll never get a case like this again.”

Paiho is a civil-litigation judge. His bread and butter is maintenance payments, custody disputes, unpaid tradesmen’s bills. But he is also one of the few judges in Tampere with international experience. Years ago, Paiho worked for the European Union in Kosovo for some months. Because of this experience, small as it might have been, he was not only made one of the judges on the trial, but also given the court presidency.

Paiho has seen a lot since then. He drove for three days through the Liberian hinterland to look at crime scenes. He saw dirt roads dissolved in a thunderstorm. He stayed in a hotel where they gave him a bucket of well-water for showers in the morning. One night, he braved a termite invasion. Now he is back in Monrovia, still struggling to reconstruct what exactly happened in Liberia 20 years ago. “We are often unsure if two witnesses are really talking about the same event – or if they are talking about two completely unrelated crimes,” he says. He also mentions how strange the experience of testifying was for some of the witnesses that were brought to Monrovia from faraway villages. Several of them were petrified when they saw the ocean in front of the hotel. They had been told that evil spirits live in the sea.

It is often difficult for the Finnish jurists to tell how reliable the witnesses are – the cultural distance makes everything much harder for them; to interpret what is being said, to probe it, confirm it or disprove it.

Akaa prison in Finland is a 40-minute drive from Tampere, on a lake surrounded by birch and pine trees. 127 people are imprisoned there. One of them is the defendant, Gibril Massaquoi. In Liberia, the Finns could not guarantee his safety, so he stayed back in Finland. He attends his trial mostly via video link from a small room on the ground floor of the prison.

Massaquoi comes into the visiting room wearing a turtleneck jumper, trackpants and slippers. He has been here for two years. The circles under his eyes are deeper, his face gaunter than in the video footage from the war. But he still looks a decade younger than his 52 years.

Massaquoi was a spokesman for the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, of Sierra Leone. The rebel group started a brutal civil war in 1991 that lasted eleven years and is estimated to have cost the lives of 30,000 to 50,000 people. The RUF also chopped off the arms of thousands of men, women and children. Beforehand, the fighters often asked their victims, the cynical question: “Long sleeve or short sleeve?”

The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia were closely intertwined. Many soldiers fought on both sides of the border. The RUF supplied diamonds from Sierra Leone’s mines to Liberian president Charles Taylor. In return, the rebel group received weapons.

When talking to Massaquoi one has to remain careful and vigilant. Massaquoi is a media professional. As a spokesperson for the RUF in the late nineties, he regularly gave interviews to foreign journalists. He deflected, denied, and blamed others. When the RUF kidnapped several hundred United Nations blue-beret soldiers in 2000, Massaquoi stood in front of the world press and suggested that the soldiers might have merely got lost in the forest. He offered to send out a search party.

Shortly after the war, in 2002, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its work in Sierra Leone. Its final report said Massaquoi was “unique in the RUF” in that he remained a mystery even to those who were very close to him.

“Mr Massaquoi, the other fighters said after the war that you were a mystery to them. Why do you think that was?”

“Because they were jealous.”

Massaquoi never gets loud or aggressive in conversation, even when confronted with the most serious accusations. He instead politely says “thank you for the question”.

In the courtroom in Monrovia, a man tells the Finnish court how his wife and sister were murdered while they were preparing palm oil in the forest. He describes how their bodies were found: his sister lying on the ground, with a baby on her back. The small child survived, miraculously. Another man relates how he buried the half-decomposed bodies of his neighbours. The witnesses describe what happened to them with great emotional force. They show the judges the scars all over their bodies, their arms, and legs, and faces.

The first doubts about Massaquoi’s guilt begin with something that seems trivial in the face of all this visible, undeniable suffering: markers of time. For many Liberians, time is something they do not measure in months and years. It is more defined by the seasons, by the growth of fruits and crops. The illiteracy rate in the country is 51.7 percent. Many people are only able to vaguely estimate their own age.

In a courtroom, however, questions of time become crucial. Massaquoi’s Finnish lawyer, Kaarle Gummerus, asks each witness over and over again: When did this happen? In 2001 or possibly later, in 2003? Gummerus sits at his table, 57 years old, a stiff face like a poker player, and keeps repeating his questions about time until they begin to seem pedantic, almost cruel. The witnesses are often helpless. At one point, a former Liberian soldier says exasperatedly, “I can’t remember everything. My brain is not a computer.”

Gummerus, however, has a good reason for this line of questioning: Massaquoi has an alibi for the entire period after 10th March 2003.

Massaquoi never concealed who he was from the Finnish authorities. They knew who they were bringing into the country. When the United Nations Special Tribunal began its work after the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone, Massaquoi realised more quickly than others what was at stake. He offered to help as a key witness. The investigators of the Special Court for Sierra Leone interviewed him for weeks. The transcripts of his interrogations run up to 1735 pages. Thanks to him, several of the biggest war criminals were arrested and convicted. Massaquoi was not only guaranteed immunity from prosecution for his crimes in Sierra Leone, he was also included in the court’s witness protection programme. Investigators suspected that sooner or later word would get around in Sierra Leone that he was the traitor, who had talked to the investigators. Massaquoi was given round-the-clock armed security guards. He lived in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, until 2008. Then Finland, which had been very supportive of the special tribunal’s creation, offered to shelter him.

For twelve years Massaquoi led an inconspicuous life in Tampere. He lived with his family in social housing on the outskirts of the city. He cleaned the ice-hockey stadium, delivered newspapers on frosty nights. The Finnish police left him alone.

That was until the day the Finns learned that Massaquoi was suspected of having committed war crimes not only in Sierra Leone, but also in Liberia. No one had promised him immunity from prosecution for such acts. In May 2020, the Finnish police arrested him. It was still night, he had just returned from his newspaper round.

The police officers were amazed how calm Massaquoi was after his arrest. He lay down in his cell and fell asleep.

Why was he so visibly unimpressed?

When asked, he says, “I slept well because I am innocent.”

“But what about all the witnesses?”

“They are lying. All 91 witnesses.”

The Finnish trial of Massaquoi is the first war-crimes trial in Liberia. Unlike in Sierra Leone, key players in Liberia’s war remained in prominent positions after it ended. Almost all of them avoided criminal proceedings. Only the former Liberian president Charles Taylor was tried in The Hague in the Netherlands. Otherwise, none of the country’s warlords, generals and executioners have ever been prosecuted. And this despite the fact, that the war in Liberia was even more brutal than the one in Sierra Leone. According to estimates, 250,000 people died between 1989 and 2003, about ten percent of the population.

The perpetrators are in parliament today. They are presidential candidates. You meet them at the headquarters of Charles Taylor’s old party, the National Patriotic Party, which is now part of the governing coalition again. They live in large houses not far from the hotel where the trial is taking place. The Finns have entered a world where the past lives on beneath the surface.

Police inspector Thomas Elfgren has spent so much time in Liberia in the run-up to the trial that his driver has arranged a special number plate for the SUV he uses to drive around Monrovia, which reads: Tuffe1. Tuffe is Elfgren’s nickname. The Finnish police have made multi-week visits to Liberia on five occasions. Elfgren, 67, is tanned and slim. He walks around the city in short-sleeved shirts, three-quarter-length trousers and sandals.

On a morning in March 2021, the inspector is driving through the city’s dense Waterside market district. It is one of the three crime scenes where Massaquoi is alleged to have killed or tortured people. The SUV drives very slowly through the traffic jam. The alleys of the market are narrow, packed to bursting, with piles of stiletto-heeled shoes and pink bras, wheelbarrows full of T-shirts, toilet paper, mangoes, and prickly pears – a fruit that looks like a green, spiky heart.

At a crossroads, Elfgren points to the right and says: “This is where the dead were lying in the street back then.” Today there is a shop selling cooking spoons.

A few metres up the street was the shop where, on one occasion during the war, hungry people broke in to steal food. Soldiers came and opened fire. A witness says in court that he saw Gibril Massaquoi there, shooting people with a pistol. Another claims that Massaquoi had a knife and used it to cut a man’s throat. Still others say he did not kill with his own hands, but gave the orders. The versions are so different that no clear picture emerges of what actually happened that day. Nor can the witnesses say exactly when it happened – they cannot put a date on the murders.

However, they agree on one thing: the battle for Monrovia had already begun. The war had arrived in the capital. And that defines a precise time window for the murders: the battle for Monrovia began in June 2003 and ended two months later.

Massaquoi has an alibi for this period. He was in Sierra Leone, where the war was already over and the work of the special tribunal had already begun. Massaquoi was guarded 24 hours a day by the court’s security guards. Nevertheless, numerous witnesses claim they saw him in Monrovia at the time.

Something is off. Something is not right.

A storm comes in from the sea, fast and without warning. The rain pelts the corrugated iron roofs. It sounds like the growl of a huge, faceless monster. Then comes the thunder, so loud that the prosecutor, Tom Laitinen, winces. As a bolt of lightning flashes over the Atlantic, he covers his ears like a child.

52-year-old Laitinen has a prudent temperament. He often takes long pauses in conversation, as if he needs to sort out his thoughts. The pressure on him is immense. It is an expensive trial. It was Laitinen who suggested moving it to Liberia. He believes you understand things better when you see them in front of you. “We have to assess the whole person, his facial expressions, his gestures, how he speaks. You can’t do that nearly as well on video as when you’re in the same room.”

Laitinen admits the witness interviews are nevertheless often unpredictable for him. “It’s still not clear to me what questions I need to ask to elicit their most important memories.”

In few areas of modern politics is the belief in “progress” as strong as in international criminal law. The dream: a world in which organised, mass cruelty is banished by law. A future where the thought of a prison cell deters potential mass murderers from unleashing their troops.

In reality, justice crawls behind the violence with agonising slowness, often years or decades late. The business of justice is costly, frequently thankless and not infrequently futile.

When the Finnish police arrested Massaquoi, they found a book manuscript on his computer. 372 pages, entitled: The Secret Behind the Gun. Massaquoi says he started writing it more than two decades ago, while he was still in the RUF; it is a mixture of biography and political treatise.

In it, Massaquoi says his family was so poor that he often only ate one meal a day. When the RUF forcibly recruited him, he was in his early twenties and a mathematics teacher at a Catholic school in Pujehun, in southern Sierra Leone, on the border with Liberia. “Actually, I would like to have been an accountant,” he says.

In the text, Massaquoi remembers his first meeting with the leader of the RUF, Foday Sankoh, at a training camp. In an awestruck tone, Massaquoi writes: “We jogged alongside him. It was an electrifying moment.” Later, Sankoh made the young Massaquoi his personal assistant. In the most brutal scene in the book, Massaquoi describes how Sankoh, who was not to survive the civil war, had a woman killed. Sankoh ordered his soldiers to douse her with hot palm oil and then tie her feet to a tree “where she hung,” Massaquoi writes, “until she died”. In our interview in prison, he calls Sankoh a “caring man”.

The Finns are friendly and reserved guests in Monrovia with a curious two-part daily routine. From morning until afternoon, they are their professional titles: a judge, a prosecutor, a defence lawyer, and a policeman. In the evening, they take off their official hats for a few hours. Gummerus, the defence lawyer, and Laitinen, the prosecutor, sit together and eat spaghetti bolognese in the humid night heat. Paiho, the judge, chats by the pool with Elfgren, the police inspector. They talk about their children, their hobbies, about stomach upsets. They are not only closer to the witnesses here, but also closer to each other than they would ever be in Finland. In the end, they will have spent 16 weeks together in West Africa.

In court, it quickly becomes clear that the prosecutor Laitinen is not getting anywhere against Massaquoi’s alibi for the murders in Monrovia. But there are two other alleged offences. Massaquoi is also suspected of being responsible for crimes in the interior of the country that happened earlier, sometime in 2001, long before he turned crown witness for the Special Court.

Lofa County is beautiful and poor. The landscape is hilly. Along the roadside are kapok trees, 70 metres high, the oldest of which were already standing when slave traders dragged people from this region onto their ships 250 years ago. Plumes of smoke rise above the forests. Farmers are clearing land for rice fields.

The village of Kamatahun Hassala is situated on a hill. The houses are made of mud bricks, the roofs of corrugated iron. There is a small mosque. The witnesses in court described this village. In their memories it appeared as a hellish place. During the war, hundreds of people from the surrounding area were rounded up here. Dozens were burnt alive in huts.

Witnesses claimed in court that a soldier who called himself Angel Gabriel gave the orders. One man said this commander tortured him with electric shocks and then urinated in his mouth. Another said that Angel Gabriel had a man killed in order to make soup out of him. In the narratives in court, he is the decisive figure in the massacre.

But when you go to Kamatahun Hassala alone, without a judge or prosecutor, to talk to survivors on the spot, a different picture emerges.

Varfee Konneh lives in a small two-room house. In the bedroom hangs a poster of the American singer Alicia Keys. Konneh grows rice in cleared paddies, just outside the village. When the soldiers came, he was 12 or 13 years old.

He says he saw everything. How people were herded into one of the houses, young men and old, women and children. The fire. The dead.

He only survived because the soldiers used him as an errand boy, says Konneh. He was cooking food and fetching water. Then, while collecting water, he fled.

Who was the commander of the soldiers? Konneh says only one word: “Zigzag.”

Joseph “Zigzag” Marzah was a notorious commander in Charles Taylor’s army, a man who bragged about eating people, even after the war. Few names have spread such terror in Liberia. Marzah is a free man today. He never had to face justice for his crimes.

Three other men in the village who say they were eyewitnesses to the massacre mention this name to DIE ZEIT. They all say Joseph Marzah gave the orders.

Konneh says that fighters from Sierra Leone were also involved in the killings in Kamatahun Hassala. But neither Konneh nor any of the other men can remember a man who called himself “Angel Gabriel” or Gibril Massaquoi. None of these villagers have appeared before the Finnish court.

When Konneh returned to the village with a small group after more than a year on the run, everything was empty and overgrown with plants. “The first few nights,” he says, “we heard voices in the darkness.” They were ghosts, he says.

What did they say?

“Alilor e va ngor? Zizamazza lov e par ngor.”

Who killed me? Zigzag Marzah killed me.

Kaarle Gummerus, Massaquoi’s defence lawyer, sits in his hotel room in Monrovia in a polo shirt and gym shorts, pointing at the screen of his laptop. He has listed all the witnesses interviewed by the Finnish police. Most of them were shown a selection of photos with twelve faces, one of which was of Massaquoi. The witnesses were supposed to identify him.

In the Excel spreadsheet, the lawyer sorted the witnesses by location and date of interview. If someone chose Massaquoi’s picture, the tile is dark green. Those who did not identify Massaquoi show up as a blue tile, and those who were not sure as grey.

Gummerus points to the block of witnesses from Lofa County: it’s almost all blue, with a few grey blocks in between. Not a single tile is green. Not one of the witnesses from Kamatahun Hassala or the surrounding villages identified Gibril Massaquoi as the perpetrator.

71 of the 91 witnesses were shown the photos, and only eight identified Massaquoi. They all came from the capital Monrovia. Massaquoi has an alibi for all their accusations.

“Strange, isn’t it?” says Gummerus.

The man who started the case, who brought it to the Finnish authorities, is sitting on the rooftop terrace of the Boulevard Palace Hotel in Monrovia. Up here, the city is just a distant roar and muted honking. Hassan Bility shows off his scars, one in the crook of each arm. “This is the mark he left behind.” He means Massaquoi. That’s where the rope cut into his flesh, he says. Bility is a short man with ears that stick out. He is the best-known human rights activist in Liberia.

The scars he shows are the result of a common torture method during the Liberian civil war: the arms are tied so tightly behind the back that the tips of the elbows touch. It is immensely painful. Within minutes you lose all feeling in your arms. Bility says it was Massaquoi who tied him up like this, in 2002, in a Taylor-regime torture cellar in Klay Junction, 35 kilometres north of Monrovia. It is the third alleged crime scene. The Finnish prosecution has charged Massaquoi with torture based on Bility’s account.

Bility was a journalist, one of the few who dared to write critically about Charles Taylor. Taylor’s security forces arrested him several times, tortured him, and finally expelled him from the country. Bility went to the USA. After the war, he came back and founded a non-governmental organisation, the Global Justice and Research Project. Bility’s organisation collects evidence against Liberian war criminals living abroad and forwards it to European and American prosecutors. Several war criminals are already in prison as a result of his work, including in Switzerland and the USA.

In 2009, Bility appeared as a witness in the trial against Charles Taylor in The Hague. There he mentioned for the first time that Massaquoi had tortured him. Bility recalled it thus: “He asked me if I knew what the name Gibril meant and I said yes because I speak Arabic. I said it means Gabriel. He said, ‘Okay, I am your Angel Gabriel’.”

At the time, no one cared about that statement. The case was about Taylor, not Massaquoi. It was only years later that Bility’s organisation gathered more evidence of Massaquoi’s guilt – triggering his arrest in Finland.

The strange thing is: Bility was the only one who ever mentioned that Massaquoi had called himself “Angel Gabriel”. In none of the many texts about the RUF, in no interview, in no other source – not even in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, which is several thousand pages long – is this nom-de-guerre ever used.

Until the Finnish trial, that is. Then suddenly the vast majority of witnesses were saying that Massaquoi had called himself “Angel Gabriel”.

How does all this fit together?

Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that the Finnish police officers around Elfgren needed help when they came to Liberia for their investigation. They needed someone who knew the country, who could find witnesses and translate interviews. They needed a fixer.

Anyone who knows as little about a country as the Finns do about Liberia is at the mercy of their local assistants. The interpreters control what the outsiders understand and what they don’t. The Finns hired a man named Albert Kollie, who was one of 14 employees of Hassan Bility’s NGO. The Finns used him for several months, paying his salary during that time. Kollie was absolutely indispensable to them. He located almost all the witnesses in Monrovia and Lofa County who testified against Massaquoi in court.

Kollie was not supposed to interview potential witnesses himself, but only to pass them on to the Finnish police, who would then conduct the interview. This was important: memories are easily manipulated. The mere naming of a suspect can lead witnesses to believe that they recognise him as the perpetrator. The victims have to come up with the name on their own.

In court, Kollie described his approach as follows: “I asked the witnesses if they would be willing to talk about the activities of the RUF. I did not give names. I told them to just tell the police what they had experienced. Some then wanted more information, but I told them: No.”

Anyone who proceeds in this way will run into many dead ends, and have numerous conversations with people who remember the war, remember murders – but do not remember the suspect. Normally, a lot of time will be wasted, before the right kind of witnesses are found.

But that didn’t happen.

In just three and a half months, Kollie found dozens of witnesses who blamed Massaquoi for countless crimes in Monrovia and Lofa County. He had a spectacular rate of success. When Kollie is asked to explain in court how he managed to do it, he says he simply went around the city. “I go to the Ataya shops”, he says – places in the centre of Monrovia where mint green tea is served. He also claims that he found other witnesses on public transport, in buses and shared taxis. He discovered one man buying soap. Each time he overheard people talking about the war. Kollie says he never explicitly asked for Massaquoi.

Massaquoi’s lawyer finds this increasingly implausible. He asks why every single witness Kollie found could remember Massaquoi, of all people.

“I don’t know, I just accepted what they told me,” Kollie said.

Did he insist that the witnesses mention Massaquoi?

“No, not at all.”

Albert Kollie says he came across Gibril Massaquoi at every turn.

This, almost certainly, cannot be true. In other, much more thorough investigations, like the 2009 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, there is not a single trace of him. The commission recorded more than 17,000 testimonies from the war. But neither Gibril Massaquoi nor “Angel Gabriel” are ever mentioned. If Massaquoi committed war crimes in Liberia, it was in secret. There cannot be that many people who have stories to tell about it.

Why didn’t the Finnish investigators notice that something was wrong?

At one point during our interview, presiding judge Juhani Paiho said that people tend to smooth out stories, look for coherence, fill in gaps. Especially in a foreign country. There is often no other way to proceed.

Albert Kollie gave the Finnish police investigators what they wanted: a guilty person. They willingly accepted the gift.

Furthermore, in doing so, the Finnish court unwittingly provided an incentive that made it easy to manipulate witnesses. Everyone who testified in the trial was given a travel allowance that was small by Finnish standards but huge by Liberian ones. Most witnesses went home with around $100, and some who said they came from far away pocketed up to $500. The daily allowance, without travel expenses, was $20 for witnesses was.

Juhani Paiho, the presiding judge, says he cannot imagine that this massively influenced the witnesses. But the Finns sometimes do not seem to grasp just how poor the people sitting in front of them are. The median daily income in Liberia is two dollars. Many of the witnesses took home enough money to feed their families for several months.

There is no guarantee that physical proximity will bring you closer to the truth. You can be very close and still only see the wrong thing. You can travel a great distance and still misunderstand everything. At the same time, the courtroom is a good corrective. In cross-examination, inventions often fall apart.

War crimes trials must leave the possibility of acquittal. They must demonstrate that, under the rule of law, the consideration of evidence is wide open. Even someone like Gibril Massaquoi, who was deeply involved in one of the cruellest wars in recent decades, must be able to hope to go home a free man in the end, if the crimes he is accused of cannot be proven. Even the acquittal of a bad man can be right.

It is a cold, rainy day in November 2021 in Tampere. All the witnesses in Liberia have been heard, the alleged crime scenes have been visited. The court is back in Finland and Massaquoi is being questioned a second and final time. He is wearing a black bomber jacket and a grey turtleneck.

His defence lawyer asks him, “How many times did you go to the special tribunal in the spring and summer of 2003?”

“Several times, whenever they needed me.”

“Did it ever happen that the investigators wanted to see you and you weren’t there?”

“No, never.”

Massaquoi gives detailed information from 9.30am to 6pm that day. He remains calm, he takes notes, everything he cites sounds plausible. At the end he says: “Nobody in their right mind would do what the prosecution is accusing me of.” No one would go from the safety of a witness-protection programme into a war zone, into the realm of a megalomaniac dictator who had his confidants killed by the dozen because he suspected them of treason.

Massaquoi has an alibi for the murders in Monrovia. Of the alleged witnesses in Lofa County, no one can identify him. And in the case of the torture in Klay Junction, it’s one man’s word against another’s. “I was never there,” Massaquoi says.

All this does not mean that Massaquoi is innocent. Maybe he did kill in Liberia, maybe he really did torture Hassan Bility. But it cannot be proved.

The verdict comes on 29 April 2022, in writing, and sent by email: “The accused Gibril Massaquoi is acquitted on all charges”, it says on page 31 of 850 pages.

Kaarle Gummerus, Massaquoi’s defence lawyer, says on the phone that he will demand compensation for his client of several hundred thousand euros for the long period in prison.

Tom Laitinen, the prosecutor, appealed the verdict earlier this week. Massaquoi himself says he wants to write a PhD thesis – about his own trial.

Translated by Voxeurop.

All she wanted was a photo of the new-born babies and asked that István and Tamás love the twins

When we began this story, I was still having treatment to get pregnant by artificial insemination. It can be a deeply depressing process to go through: you think, what happens if this doesn’t succeed? Would I be capable of, say, adopting? Would I be able to love a child who might have had a terribly tough background, arriving with a “package” that I would have to deal with. The straight answer, I think, is that even now I couldn’t do it, even after seeing close-up what a chance the twins received when they were adopted by István and Tamás.

I began documenting the life of the family with my colleague Orsi Ajpek because we thought it was important that people become better informed about rainbow families like this one. As a family, they may be unusual, but they live the same kind of ordinary, everyday life that any heterosexual family lives. It’s just that in Hungary the circumstances have radically changed in the past few months. There have been a series of legal changes that have made adoption by single parents and same-sex couples all but impossible, followed by the “paedophile law” that explicitly incited hatred towards gay people.

About a year ago we talked to István and Tamás about how absurd it was that the 40-hour course to prepare would-be adoptive parents was no longer mandatory. Now we are talking about whether the time might come where the family packs its bags and finds another more welcoming country in which to bring up their children.

In Hungary, it is unusual for a rainbow family to put their lives in the public eye. István and Tamás don’t want to become a visible target and are protective of their privacy. They have their own everyday struggles as adoptive parents. Nevertheless, they decided to show themselves so that those who attack gays and rainbow families out of ignorance can see how they live. Perhaps through this article people can understand that “these children are not suffering in chains and their parents don’t spend the whole year frolicking around in pink thongs in preparation for Pride, but in fact live ordinary lives”. Another factor was a wish to help young people who think that their lives are at an end because they are not heterosexual. They want to set an example for them and give those people hope. If reading their story changes the opinion of just one parent and encourages them to support their homosexual child, then the publicity has been worth it, the two fathers say.

We arrive in the residential district of a small town in Pest County and for the umpteenth time park in front of their house. The twins are tottering in the doorway waiting for us, but there has been some drama and it is hard to say which of them has bigger tears rolling down their face.

“It has been one of those days,” says István with an air of resignation. The magic of our arrival quickly loses its effect and the two children continue crying in unison while demanding to be picked up and allowed on to their dads’ knees. But lunch needs to be prepared. It’s mushroom and paprika stew and between stirring István gives hugs to first one and then the other, and sometimes to both at once, to calm them down. He doesn’t despair — it’s the most natural thing in the world for him to be the father of two children. For as long as he can remember he has wanted this with Tamás.

For seven years, starting in 2012, they actively tried to become parents. They had been living in the Scottish city of Glasgow for two years. They got married in 2016 and wanted to settle down there, but in the end they came back to Hungary. One reason was that they hadn’t been able to adopt there. They wanted to have children so badly, and initially even contemplated going down the illegal route. No time or money was spared in exploring every possibility, including methods that we outsiders can only guess at.

They described the surreal world constructed around those who will give anything to become a parent. A huge amount of money changes hands and there is a real battle for potential surrogate mothers. They were in discussions with Portuguese, Ukrainian, British and Hungarian surrogate mothers but had also considered the Czech Republic, Congo and South Africa. The Ukrainian surrogate mother would, for a larger amount of money, have used her own eggs to have their children. One Hungarian woman offered to do it for 5 million forints (€14,000) but they didn’t go through with it. They say that at first it seemed like the easier option to pay to become a parent, but it isn’t. “What do you say to the child about how much you paid for them? The price of a small flat?” They felt that that none of these ways would work.

They finally decided that the official adoption route was the only acceptable way to go, which in Britain is a far longer and more complicated process than in Hungary. For six months they had to have monthly meetings with the social services. “We had to write essays, we had compulsory reading, we were interviewed separately and together, they asked for references from friends and employers” — they list the hoops they had to go through.

It was all going smoothly until Brexit completely jammed the process. In spite of the strict procedures they had followed they did not get approval for adoption. The problem wasn’t that they were two men, but that everything changed after Brexit.

“The biggest concern was that we would take the child away from its roots. It was very hard to explain to them that we hadn’t come from a Communist country.”

In the end their application was rejected because they were young and were studying alongside their work, so were not considered ready to be adoptive parents.

They had already decided to go back to Hungary if they didn’t get approval in Scotland. They moved back in 2017, but still had not given up hope of becoming parents. In Hungary it wasn’t possible even then to adopt as a same-sex couple, but a single person (ie, not married) living with a registered partner could adopt, regardless of their sexual orientation. They agreed that István should make the application. This was a conscious choice, as was the decision before they got married that they should take each other’s name, so that any children they did have would bear both their names.

In early 2018 they applied to the Regional Child Protection Service (Tegyesz), which came to inspect their home and their circumstances. The couple went through the compulsory psychological assessments and completed the preparatory adoption course that was then mandatory.

The psychologist working with István said they generally recommended that a single would-be adoptive parent take on a child of the same sex, but István and Tamás asked for that not to be the case.

“We gave our reasons why we could also bring up a daughter. We said we understood the importance of a female model for a child’s all-round healthy upbringing, but we said this did not necessarily have to be the mother, and there would be grandparents, aunts and cousins around the child who would fill that role.”

Their arguments were accepted and at the end of 2018 they were given approval for adopting “a 0-4 year old child or twins” with no restrictions regarding their sex or background.

It was compulsory from 2003 onwards for would-be adopters to take part in a preparatory course. This 20-hour course was extended to 40 hours in 2018. This gave more time to cover important subjects such as connecting with children, the question of the child’s background, adopting older or disabled children and the handling of loss, according to Zsófia Kiss, a specialist psychologist. She runs courses for the Ágacska Foundation, which specialises in adoption. Alongside her birth daughter she has an adopted son, and often draws on her own experiences so that she can more convincingly prepare couples for adoption.

The aim of the course is to prepare the adopters so that as little as possible takes them by surprise. They cover the areas that are defined by genetics which adopters certainly cannot change. For example, genetically defined characteristics include the colour of their skin and eyes, their temperament, skills, capabilities and inherited diseases.

“However, the child’s behaviour and values are defined by its environment. There is no such thing as a stealing gene or a lying gene. Empathy can be taught,” Kiss says.

István and Tamás often came across these stereotypes when they intentionally prepared their friends and family members for the fact that there was a good chance that “Gypsy children would be running round the house”. This caused some serious debate when some acquaintances joked that they would have to hide their wallets away. But the couple also heard people say that if they adopted Roma children, “sooner or later their blood would show through”.

The majority of adopted children are born from unwanted pregnancies and have not received proper care in the womb. “The mother may have been starving or undernourished; she may have smoked, drunk or taken drugs — but it should be noted that generally it is not the mother’s fault that she finds herself in this position,” says Kiss. All such behaviour affects the embryo’s nervous system. An underdeveloped nervous system can be a factor in the neurological and psychiatric states such as ADHD, concentration problems and delayed speech development, which cannot be cured but can be handled. Adopters need to be prepared for this.

“We don’t want to shock them but we tell them everything that could arise, which of course doesn’t mean that it will,” the psychologist explains.

Adoption is often preceded by loss. Typically, adopters have not themselves been able to have biological children, and at this point the great majority resort to medical help. When that also proves unsuccessful the would-be adopter is already burdened with a considerable sense of loss. This loss has to be processed, Kiss says, because the adopted child has its own losses which also have to be handled.

“If I am not well myself, it will be harder to help others. If I am still feeling that it is a blow of fate that I couldn’t have biological children, and if I go into adoption with the sense that “If I can’t have a horse, I’ll make do with a donkey,” that is a huge trap. The child will grow up in the shadow of this idealised biological child that I am still clinging to,” Kiss says.

It is not only heterosexual couples that have to struggle with loss. István and Tamás had to abandon their hopes of having a biological child because of the legal system in Hungary. “If we had gone in for adoption in a different country, we might have been able to go through surrogacy. But even if we had got round Hungarian laws and had decided to live in a mosaic family, having children with a lesbian couple, we still did not want to be ‘weekend fathers’,” they say.

They also had to accept that their adopted children won’t bear any of their own features, but they say that they can see their gestures and habits in the children. “Our daughter sleeps in the same way as Tamás, and like him hates labels in her clothes,” they say.

The government modified the legislation on adoption last year. In theory this aimed to simplify and speed up the process, so that more children could find families quicker. Children in the child protection system can be adopted after three months instead of six months if their birth parents take no interest in them. The 40-hour preparatory course that had been mandatory was made optional and free, a move that aroused strong protest.

“To be frank, we wouldn’t have gone on the course if it hadn’t been compulsory. We thought that we knew it all,” Tamás says. However, they acknowledge that they learnt skills on the course that helped them through the harder moments. For them the course was the most useful and most important part of the adoption process, “because a 3-year-old can’t hear that they have been rejected. One can involuntarily think or even actually say such things,” István says. “One of our very kind friends asked — in tears, with the best intentions: ‘How can people reject them?’ I explained that these children have not been rejected, they have been looked after. The child who has been rejected is the one found on a lakeside shore in a plastic bag.”

However, making the course optional is not the main problem, say the dads. Now basically only married couples have a chance of adoption — the decision over whether unmarried people (or same-sex couples) can adopt “in cases deserving of particular merit” lies in the hands of one single person, the minister of family affairs. In the modified legislation, children that are up for adoption must first be offered to married couples in the same county. If that doesn’t succeed, the search is widened to include married couples elsewhere in the country. If that is also unsuccessful, then the search is opened up to single people, first at a county level and finally at a national level. The children that are available for adoption at that final stage are those that were turned down by heterosexual couples. If the minister decides that a child should not be given to a single adopter, the case can spin out and the child can get stuck in the system. So effectively adoption has become harder for the very people who were typically the most likely to undertake the upbringing of older or more problematic children and those with a more troubled background.

‘Those who are most welcoming are the ones in this system who for the bloody life of them won’t be given children. And that is not fair. Why is a single parent worth less than a heterosexual married couple?” István and Tamás ask.

Once the couple received their approval, they didn’t even dare go on holiday, they were so anxiously awaiting the phone call. On the advice of friends they signed up with an adoption agency. Such agencies operate on certain conditions. In Hungary there are two agencies that deal with single parent adopters — in exchange for an annual membership and a commission.

In September 2019 the head of the agency finally rang them to say a woman had chosen their profile. After the second call it turned out that it was opposite-sex twins.

“They told us the woman was 32 weeks pregnant and was about to give birth. We were given their background, their little ‘package’, and told to decide,” István says about the second phone call. He says it was not an utterly difficult “package” but there were “some things in it”. No one other than the couple themselves knows exactly what it contained, and they have deliberately not told anyone, even their closest friends. “Our story begins with the phone ringing. What happened before that is the babies’ story, which we will tell them one day. It is up to them if they want to talk about it then,” Tamás says.

Since it was an open adoption process, István and Tamás met the twins’ biological mother. They say a meeting like that is both incredibly depressing and uplifting, and it was the agency boss who got them through the more awkward moments.

“Even after the children are born you are full of doubts. You are afraid the mother will have second thoughts, while she is afraid you won’t like her children and will change your mind.” They both describe her as an attractive and kind woman. They have a positive image of her, which they say will make it much easier to talk about her with the twins later.

“We don’t want to embellish the story but we can give a positive image of her. That is how we have to discuss the whole thing, because these children, like any adopted children when they reach a certain age — whatever you do — feel rejected. These children weren’t rejected, because their biological mother worked hard to make sure they would be all right. She took care of them.” By getting in touch with the agency, she gave them a chance. She asked that they should go to a house with a garden, to a family without other children, and she explicitly said she wanted a gay couple to adopt them. The agency also offered her heterosexual couples, but István and Tamás were the first that she met.

“We reassured her that if she chose us, we could promise her that we would give our lives for these babies and we would do everything we could to make sure they have a good life.”

István and Tamás particularly wanted her to choose the children’s names. When they had their first meeting, it turned out that she had already chosen names. It was one of the most touching moments when she said the two names, because suddenly it gave a personality to the two children. After that meeting, the mother did not want to meet any other couples.

The twins were born in the 35th week, at the end of November 2019. “After we saw the babies, the head of the agency asked us again if we intended to go ahead with the adoption.” István and Tamás of course burst into tears and for the hundredth time said yes. The agency sorted out all the official paperwork and registered the children with the local authority, where the mother had to officially declare that she was giving up the children and entrusting them to István and Tamás.

“This was a very agonising situation. The official explained to her that she could still change her mind, and would have six weeks to do so,” István says, looking back.

When the dads said goodbye to the mother, they asked if she would like to keep in touch with them. She didn’t. She said she found this all very painful. All she wanted was a photo of the new-born babies and asked that István and Tamás love the twins.

The six-week period after a temporary placement ruling allows both sides the chance to change their minds. The head of the agency told the couple they should only get in touch if there was a problem.

In practice they didn’t have time to count the days. After one week the boy was admitted to hospital. He wasn’t eating much and was crying at such a pitch that they knew something wasn’t right. The hospital’s first reaction was that “the gay dads are overreacting to a trapped fart. The baby has colic.” But the inflammation indicators were so high that the doctors suspected meningitis. They were allowed home after a week, but it was never clear what had caused the inflammation. The couple say that it never occurred to them to pull out of the adoption. That time in hospital just confirmed that they really were a family.

The critical six weeks ended in early January 2020, and the mother did not change her mind. “Those last few hours were very difficult. I sat looking at the clock, wishing the time to pass, wishing it to be midnight. At midnight we went into the children’s room and told them that they were staying with us. It felt so good,” says István.

The dads wanted the children to have a definite female presence in their lives and to this end choose two godmothers who would be a part of their everyday lives. However, until they went to kindergarten the twins spent most of their time with István, while Tamás went to work. István spent more time with the twins, staying awake with them at night if they were ill, or reading up about weaning, and this awoke a sense of fatherhood earlier in him. For Tamás, the week-long stay in hospital with his son was an important turning point. Even though it did not bring a sense of fatherhood, it did awaken a sense of responsibility. “From then on it was totally clear that this child needed protection. We bonded that week, during those long nights,” says Tamás.

For both men, becoming a father has been a long process. “There comes the time when you are important, when only you can calm a child, when the child will only accept things from you. Those are the moments when you begin to feel that you are a parent, a father.”

The dads say that they have no traditional roles in the house. “We are equals, there is no division of roles. We each do the tasks we are better at or prefer doing. I am a much better cook, for example, but Tamás is better at cutting hair.” So István became Daddy while Tamás is Dad. It was one of the defining moments when the children identified them using those two words.

They have a lot less time for each other and their lives have changed: the focus is on the children, who they bring up with amazing humour but with consistency. It is such an idyllic environment that Orsi and I have noticed that we visit them to recharge our batteries.

The two men have the kind of solid bond that it is rare to see in a relationship. They generally uphold traditional values in their parenting — they are pretty strict when it comes to eating, sleeping and watching television. Even so, there are times when we are run ragged, getting up at night or both kids screaming at once, even though of course it is the children who made the family complete.

“The first couple of weeks were very easy. They woke up every four hours, had some food and went back to sleep — and we wondered, is this it? Then suddenly they began crying and staying awake for longer and longer,” they recall. István and Tamás went through the same low points and doubts as any first-time parents.

“For eight years we had been trying to have children, we had done all we could, and then these two miracles arrived. But when you are up every night for three weeks you do ask yourself — and the fact that the question arises makes you feel bad — whether you are doing it right, whether this is what you want. And then you turn the corner. We were sitting there in the third week and I was rocking the little boy. I told him to give me a sign there is some point to all this, and he broke into a little smile,” says István.

Of course it hasn’t got much easier since then. The baby boy reacted much more strongly to stimuli, he was more sensitive and everything was more of a drama compared to his sister. He needed special exercises to develop his movement, but he has caught up completely. Now there is real competition as to who can dive more quickly onto the sofa, or who will pull the other round the kitchen island on the toy truck. So their lives are pretty much like that of any other family of twins. With one difference. Right from the start the dads have told the children that they are adopted.

“You instil an awareness of that— it’s not like that one day you sit them down and you tell them. You have to make the children aware that this is not a taboo subject, that this is something they can talk about.”

Zsófia Kiss says they recommend that parents find some form of positive expression for this. For example, “It’s so good we adopted you, as that makes the family complete.” What you might say will vary as the children get older. “By the time they go to nursery, they should be clear that they were from another woman’s tummy and were then adopted. As they develop, they will ask more questions about what happened and why they were adopted,” says the psychologist.

You won’t be able to get away without the child asking if their biological mother was a sex worker or was raped. “They could hear this from someone else, and the secrecy can drive a wedge between parent and child. You might need to call in a specialist at this point, since the story of their biological family is an integral part of their whole self-image. “You don’t have to embellish it, you just have to relate to the child’s biological roots acceptingly.”

Also, it cannot be a taboo subject for the kids that István and Tamás are gay. “For them it will be natural that two people love each other, regardless of their gender,” says István. From the start the dads have smuggled in tolerance, acceptance and different family combinations into the twins’ lives. On the bookshelves, alongside traditional Hungarian children’s stories are books such as And Tango makes three, about two male penguins who create a family together.

István and Tamás say that ever since they were kids at nursery they were both more interested in boys than girls, but for many years they suppressed these feelings, mainly to live up to social expectations. Tamás says he did not want to stand out. He buried himself in his studies, tried to look “more manly” and to have dates with girls. István was having his own struggles. “I thought this was terrible, I so loved my mother and sister and felt they didn’t deserve such a bad family member.” He knew he had to keep it secret. He was constantly struggling with this and felt totally alone. He planned that he would have a wife and children but would lead a parallel life. As a teenager he did wonder if he should just end it all and then he wouldn’t hurt anyone.

However both of them came to the decision that they could not live like this. It helped that both of them could go to gay bars that had opened, where they discovered there were others like them. They also found more information on the internet. For István, the turning point was when a gay guy asked him: “You do know that you too have a right to happiness, don’t you?”

They say that it still isn’t easy talking about that period, not least because they don’t want to reopen old wounds. They know that it was just as hard for their parents to process the fact that their sons were attracted to men as it was for them. “We were smashing their dreams of a wedding and having grandchildren. It makes a parent blame themselves. Why didn’t I notice? What did I do wrong? Of course, the answer is nothing.”

István came out to his parents when he was 21. Tamás was 24 when he met István at a party in 2008. “It was love at first sight, the way we connected that evening,” he says. They started dating and then moved in together, but Tamás only introduced István to his mother and brother after they had been together for a year. He had never told them before that he preferred men. It took a while for the family to accept the situation and tell others.

István’s position is more complicated, as some of his family are less accepting. Until he was 30 he played along with this, and never spoke in front of his relatives about being attracted to men, though clearly everyone knew. It was just easier for one and all to keep quiet about it. For a while he brought Tamás to family lunches, but in the end it was just too awkward. He has completely lost touch with some of his relatives because of his relationship, but there are others who have become much closer since the arrival of the twins. The one person who they were most afraid would not be able to handle the children’s arrival was István’s grandmother. But she has been one of the most welcoming in the family, and was perhaps even more excited about them than the dads.

The couple do not usually get involved in political affairs, and they don’t like to mix family relations with politics, but the subject of the government’s policies come up increasingly often. They had never really paid attention to which party people voted for, and politics was never discussed at gatherings of family or friends. However, the anti-gay legislation has changed that. It particularly worries them as they are now a same-sex couple bringing up two children. “I’m concerned about the safety of my children. I didn’t care when it was just me being abused or spat at in the street, but now they might do it to my children,” says Tamás.

It would be painful now to find out that someone close to them has voted for the government. “That decision would effectively legitimate this whole madness — it would effectively be a vote against my family,” he says. They admit that if the government passes more legislation that makes their family’s life impossible, they might have little choice but to leave.

They feel that there is active incitement against gays in Hungary, although in their immediate environment they have not met much resistance. So far no one has created difficulties for them because they adopted as a same-sex couple. Their strategy is to take it as given that they are a rainbow family. They undertake the battles so that it does not make things harder for their children.

“We went into the kindergarten and told them that we are one family with two dads. We will do the same at the nursery and later at school.”

The health visitor “didn’t bat an eyelid” when Istvan told her the children did not have a mother, and in the kindergarten, where the children began at the end of October, the staff didn’t make any comments — on the contrary. The head didn’t cause a problem when it came to filling out the parts of the forms referring to the children’s mother.

The dads want to bring up the children so that they know how to defend themselves. “If they are self-confident and take it as natural that they have two dads — and what’s more feel good about being in this family — when anyone tries to make fun of them it won’t faze them.”

“We want to teach them to be tolerant, to understand that if someone hurts them, it’s not necessarily because that person is malicious — he or she might be just ill-informed. They need to learn to communicate with and educate those around them,” says Tamás.

The dads were preparing for the twins’ second birthday for months, with a separate Facebook page, a present list, a three-tiered cake and enough balloons for a wedding. They wanted the perfect party as the pandemic prevented them from celebrating the children’s first birthday the way they wanted to. It all happened just the way they wanted, a big party with family, friends and lots of happy children. “As a parent it is very important — and it’s a very good feeling too — if lots of people like your children. And lots of people like ours.”