The precedent-setting case of Mr Guus the gun-runner

For those who remember it in its heyday, the Hotel Africa was like a scene out of Casablanca. A seedy mix of businessmen, flight attendants, government ministers and cheap prostitutes would prop up the bar. There was even a piano. Patrons remember a world of Montecristo cigars and Rolex watches.

Outside in the equatorial African sun, expats would float in the swimming pool, sipping cocktails. Liberia's VIPs would wander among the resort's 52 villas and the 300 rooms of the five-star main hotel.

At the centre of this world within a world was "Mr Guus", an entrepreneur, hotelier, timber trader, dealer in luxury cars, gambling tycoon and everyone's friend. Anybody who needed anything in Liberia went to Guus Kouwenhoven, a tall, thick-set Dutchman in gold-rimmed sunglasses.

A former guard remembers a who's who of Monrovia coming and going from the hotel's Bacardi Club.

"Mr Guus had a lot of contact with government officials," he remembers. "Every day there would be a parade of senators and ministers."

These days Kouwenhoven's accommodation is more modest. He spends his days in a holding cell in The Hague, awaiting a possible life sentence as the first arms dealer to be tried for crimes against humanity.

The eight counts against him include breaking a UN arms embargo to deliver arms and logistical support to a crazed dictator in return for a steady supply of illegal rainforest timber and blood diamonds. Through his firm, the Oriental Timber Company, he is alleged to have run a private militia of 2500 men and boys.

Human-rights lawyers say the case could set a vital precedent in bringing to book European businessmen guilty of large-scale human rights abuses abroad.

According to Global Witness, a British group that investigates the use of natural resources to finance conflict and human-rights abuses, the case against Kouwenhoven is vital for the future of the international law, and the stability of Africa.

For the boy from Den Bosch it is an inglorious end to a remarkable journey that took him from used-car salesman to the right-hand man of Charles Taylor, the disgraced former Liberian president, who faces charges of attempted genocide at the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.

To those who knew Kouwenhoven as a young man, it might be less of a surprise. After military service he embarked on a career of buying and selling anything he could get his hands on, starting with tax-free cars for Nato personnel and moving on to bulk supplies of rice from Southeast Asia.

By the 70s, he was a regular in Amsterdam nightspots. An old bartender remembers: "He was a flashy guy with the gift of the gab, fast cars and fast women. He would be out with the property [developer] guys every Monday and it would be champagne and caviar all round."

By this stage Kouwenhoven was criss-crossing the world, being spotted in diplomatic parties in Beirut and Los Angeles. In fact, his career nearly came to an end in LA after he was caught in an FBI sting, trying to fence six stolen paintings, including a Rembrandt. Sentenced to two years, he served only 17 days and was deported. Kouwenhoven referred to it as his "greatest mistake".

This mea culpa over a stolen painting is at odds with the scene that confronted David Crane, a professor of law, sent to neighbouring Sierra Leone as special prosecutor by the UN in January 2002.

"When I arrived in Freetown it was 90 per cent destroyed. We showered in the rain, which was cleaner and more plentiful." What Crane found, beyond the heavily guarded walls of compounds like Hotel Africa, defies description.

Plagued since the early 80s by coup attempts and civil war, Liberia's rival ethnic fighters outdid each other in brutal savagery. Arbitrary rule and economic collapse culminated in civil war when Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) militia overran much of the countryside, entering the capital in 1990.

A once-flourishing economy built on exports of rubber, coffee, cocoa, iron ore, diamonds and gold had been channelled into the coffers of a few individuals. Fighting intensified as the rebels battled each other, with the Liberian Army and West African peacekeepers.

In 2003, the UN estimated as many as 1.2 million people had lost their lives in the most appalling circumstances. "They didn't just die, they died in horrible agony," says Crane. "Imagine standing in a mass grave of dead children. I could describe to you the horror but you wouldn't take it in, you couldn't. People like Kouwenhoven did this."

The government had become a vast criminal enterprise. By the 90s, Kouwenhoven was the director of two lumber companies. One, the Oriental Timber Company, was Liberia's largest, thought to control up to 40 per cent of the country's valuable hardwood rainforests.

According to the prosecution, Kouwenhoven's company used a fleet of ships to export tonnes of tropical hardwoods as far as Greece, France and China. His vessels would come into the port in Buchanan, unload Serbian and Chinese arms, bought via a Russian arms dealer, then load up with freshly felled rainforest timber.

The prosecution has presented ships' manifests and logbooks, backed by personal testimony from former employees of OTC and members of Kouwenhoven's militia. Timber was the Liberian government's biggest source of income, worth £53 million ($161 million) a year, the UN says.

"These were thugs," says Crane of Taylor and his Dutch business partner. "Small-time crooks and bit-players who took advantage of the absence of law. But they became mobsters who will go down in history as horrors."

OTC was given permission by Taylor to build roads to export the timber. These roads were used to funnel arms to rebel groups in border areas, destabilising Sierra Leone.

In court this month, Kouwenhoven's lawyer, Inez Weski, painted a different portrait. "There is no proof that my client committed any offence," she said in her closing arguments.

According to the defence, UN and NGO reports accusing OTC of illegal logging and exchanging guns for timber were an attempt by opponents of Taylor to cut him off from his biggest source of income. She further claimed prosecution witnesses implicating Kouwenhoven had been paid for testifying and could not be trusted.

A spokeswoman for the Dutch prosecutors' office said that defence claims that witnesses were paid off were laughable. Kouwenhoven claims he is the victim of a conspiracy and was never close to Taylor.

"I never once ate with him or played tennis with him. My heart stopped every time I was called to go up and see him," he said. "I never personally experienced the war. We just knew there was a war through the media. We never heard anything about the killing of civilians."

But according to the prosecution, OTC's 2500-strong militia was at the beck and call of Taylor. "Guus knew exactly what was going on," said Natalie Ashworth from Global Witness. She says Taylor used to call him his "pepper bush", a local reference to someone very close.

The two may be close again very soon. Sierra Leone and the newly elected government of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia want Taylor transferred to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague.

- INDEPENDENT