1.Pierre Nkurunziza was born in 1964 to a family of intellectuals: his father was an MP, and his mother a schoolteacher. He is married and has three children.
Charles Taylor was born in 1948 to a family of elite, Americo-Liberians. He has been married three times and has several children.
2. PN's wife has no known academic record. It seems that she did not bother with education beyond high school.
Taylor's current wife Jewel is an economist who used to work for international institutions.
3. PN had his elementary schooling in the capital city, Bujumbura and secondary education at Athenee de Gitega. After high school, like most of his contemporaries, he attended the "Université du Burundi where he registered in the Sports and Physical Education Institute, a department where we normally send students with low grades. Upon graduation, he was hired as assistant lecturer in the same institute.
Like many Americo-Liberians, Charles Taylor studied in the United States before landing a plum job in Doe's regime running the General Services Agency.
4. According to his own account, Pierre Nkurunziza joined the CNDD-FDD terror group in 1995, i.e. a year after the group had taken to the bush in an attempt to transform their genocidal war into a struggle for liberation from minority rule. The reality, however, is that PN and his terror group had been massacring thousands of members of the Tutsi ethnic minority group as part of a longstanding plan that they had prepared and then set in motion in order to avenge the late Président Melchior Ndadaye, one of their own kinsmen who had been slain in a military coup. As PN was among the few intellectuals living out in the bush, and due in large part to his regional origins, he was made president of the group. This followed a coup against two terrorist leaders, Leonard Nyangoma and Jean-Bosco Ndayikengurukiye, both from the southern province of Bururi. The background to this internal strugge is that for decades, power was held by people from Bururi. "Liberation", for CNDD-FDD, meant more than being free of the Tutsi minority: there was a regional component too, it was not enough to be a Hutu or to have played a role in the genocidal war. You had to be from the “Third World,” an expression coined to emphasize how those from other parts of Burundi were angry at the regional entrenchment of power in Burundi.
Mr Taylor ended up in the Plymouth County House of Correction in Massachusetts and managed to escape the prison by sawing through the bars. Some believe that there was some collusion in his departure from Americans who wanted him to play the role he then proceeded to carve out for himself - overthrowing the corrupt, violent and generally disastrous regime of Samuel Doe.
5. Pierre Nkurunziza has been working hard to improve his image, both physically and morally. He does everything he can to appear as a respectable public figure, which sometimes involves working actively promoting myths about himself. Thus, during his many tours in Anglican churches, he not only dresses in white, but he talks at length of how he was saved physically and spiritually. He affirms that God appeared to him and told him that he would rule Burundi one day. On another occasion, he recounts how he was wounded in combat and left for dead in waters of the Malagarazi river (on the border with Tanzania), and that neither crocodiles nor regular army troops were able to kill him. Critics believe that these stories are simply lies invented after-the-fact to help create the "myth of Nkurunziza".
There is nothing this naturally confident man, Charles taylor, would like more than to strut the African stage playing the flamboyant statesman. The showman, who is also a lay preacher in the Baptist tradition, prostrated himself on the ground and prayed forgiveness before his Lord - although he also denied the charges.
6. On the day that Nkurunziza returned to Bujumbura, under heavily armed UN escort, he dressed in jeans to emphasise his image as a hardened fighter. Before that, he had ridden from Makebuko to Gitega, while a group of his faithful followers in the genocidal war jogged alongside the road.
When he was a rebel in the early nineties, controlling most of Liberia apart from the capital, Charles taylor turned up at a West African regional conference in Burkina Faso in full military combat gear. His equally well protected bodyguards jogged alongside his car from the airport to the centre of the capital, Ouagadougou, in a show of strength and loyalty.
7. Pierre Nkurunziza is a convict that has been sentenced to death for war crimes. When we ask him why CNDD-FDD massacred scores of unarmed women, children, elders, women, and even eventrated pregnant ones; Nkurunziza replies that they were fighting for freedom, that there had been years of unjust rule, and that his men are therefore not to be condemned. Yet, on his speaking tours of churches, he begs for mercy for the crimes "that he was obliged to commit" -- even though he had always previously denied that CNDD-FDD ever committed any crimes.
A UN-backed war crimes court is trying Charles Taylor on trial for alleged war crimes. The charges relate to his role in the war in neighbouring Sierra Leone where he backed rebels responsible for widespread atrocities. When, as president in 1999, he faced accusations from the United Nations that he was a gun runner and a diamond smuggler, he addressed a mass prayer meeting clothed from head to foot in angelic white.
8. From time to time, his accomplices in different media groups (including some parts of the BBC and Voice of America) give him a platform to promote his vision of the world. One day, as he was addressed by the BBC’s Laurent Ndayuhurume as "Mushingantahe Nkurunziza" [more or less equivalent to Lord Nkurunziza], he instructed the journalist never to address him like that again. From these interviews, which are basically a sort of one-man show, some naïve listeners are fooled into believing that this genocidal leader, who ordered the massacre of numberless innocent people, is a decent politician, that he is a gentleman who does not allow people to address him by titles he did not deserve.
Charles Taylor, the showman, conducted a series of dramatic telephone interviews with the BBC's Focus on Africa programme. In one famous exchange with Focus Editor Robin White a few years later, Mr White suggested that some people thought him little better than a murderer. Mr Taylor bellowed with a flourish to the effect that "Jesus Christ was accused of being a murderer in his time."
9. Pierre Nkurunziza prefers to be called to as Peter, which makes him sound sexy, as the English language is not only gaining more ground in Burundi, but also because it gets him nearer the Anglican church where he seeks refuge from the general public that is always asking for his condemnation. The English makes him also closer to South African protectors.
For what are suspected to be political reasons - broadening his appeal to the indigenous African majority - Taylor added the African name "Ghankay" in later years, becoming Charles Ghankay Taylor.
10. It is a well-known fact that PN and his CNDD-FDD genocidal, terrorist group accessed power thanks to the treacherous action of his homonym Pierre [Buyoya] who paved the FDD's way into power by ordering the army never to drive home their military advantage in confrontations with the genocidal forces, and also by insisting that the CNDD-FDD is a key political player who must be dealt with if we are to restore peace in Burundi. The army was later compelled to integrate genocidal forces in its ranks up to 50% , although the latter had never been able to secure even one commune for themselves for a full week. Others insist that to become president [of CNDD-FDD first, and of Burundi] PN had the backing of Tanzania and the RSA, as both would like Burundi to be run by a weak ethnocratic regime that they could take advantage of in order to exploit Burundi's rich mineral resources.
Mr Taylor's rebellion succeeded partly because of Doe's incompetence. But it was also the fruit of Mr Taylor's building of sometimes surprising alliances. His friends over the years have included the once-radical Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, the conservative former ruler of Ivory Coast Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the current President of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore, and a rogues' gallery of businessmen, local and foreign, prepared to flout UN disapproval to make money in Liberia.
11. PN was made president in august 2005 following a series of sham-elections that were hypocritically hailed as free and fair. Very few observers from the so-called democracies running these sham-elections dared mention that CNDD-FDD’s victory had been brought about through the terror campaign that characterized the period before and during the elections, during which people were threatened with death if they did not vote for PN’s party. CNDD-FDD also made hollow promises of economic welfare.
Charles Taylor won elections in 1997. Although the polls were probably the most democratic the country has ever seen, Mr Taylor's critics say he bullied and bought the electorate.
12. As far as hobbies are concerned, PN is fond of soccer, which he practiced both as a player and a trainer. One of his first actions aimed at taming the Bujumbura population who are still afraid of his death squads, was a soccer match pitting a team made up of members of the Burundi government with one from the UN personnel based in Burundi.
Charles Taylor enjoys table tennis and lawn tennis which he plays behind the high walls of his Monrovia residence - or, to bring the story up to date, he used to play behind those walls.
[1] Adapted from “Charles Taylor - preacher, warlord and president,” <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2963086.stm>
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