THE HAGUE - Supermodel Naomi Campbell told a court Thursday how she received a pouch of rough diamonds as a late-night gift she assumed came from a former Liberian president in the dock for war crimes.

Demurely but stylishly dressed, the catwalk queen told judges it was a “big
inconvenience” to have to testify about a bag of “dirty-looking pebbles” in
Charles Taylor’s trial at The Hague for murder, rape and enslavement.
“I really didn’t want to be here,” she said.

“Obviously I just want to get this over with and get on with my life.”

Campbell said she was woken by a knock on her bedroom door at a guesthouse
after meeting Taylor at a celebrity dinner hosted by then South African
president Nelson Mandela in September 1997, and handed a pouch she only opened
the next morning.
“I saw a few stones in there. Very small, dirty-looking stones ... maybe
three, two or three,” Campbell, 40, said of the gift delivered by two men she
did not know.

At breakfast the next morning, she told her then agent Carole White and
actress Mia Farrow about the gift, both of whom assumed the stones were
diamonds.

“One of the two said ‘that is obviously Charles Taylor’ and I said ‘yes I
guess it was’,” she told the court, adding she never saw Taylor again and did
not confront him about the gift she claims she subsequently gave to a charity.

Taylor, 62, is standing trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone on
11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the
1991-2001 Sierra Leone civil war that claimed some 120,000 lives.

He is accused of receiving illegally mined “blood diamonds” in return for
arming rebels who murdered, raped and maimed Sierra Leone civilians, cutting
off their limbs and carving initials into their bodies.

Prosecutors had subpoenaed Campbell in a bid to cast doubt on Taylor’s
credibility and to try to disprove his claim he never possessed rough diamonds.

She told the court she had not wanted to put her family in danger after
reading on the Internet of “this man who killed thousands of people,
supposedly.”

The model, dressed in what Vogue magazine’s website called “a demure,
elegant cream-colored cardigan and dress by Azzedine Alaia,” wore her
straightened hair swept back in a smart bun with a sparkling, choker necklace.
She told judges she gave the stones to a friend, Jeremy Ratcliffe, who
worked for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund to “do something good with”.

But she claimed she spoke to Ratcliffe last year, “and he still has them”.

The charity has denied receiving such a contribution.

The British beauty told the court it was “quite normal” for her to receive
gifts. “I get gifts given to me all the time, at all hours of the night.”

She claimed she was “not a diamond expert” and would not have immediately
guessed that the contents of the pouch were in fact diamonds.

“I am used to seeing diamonds shiny and in a box, you know.”
She insisted she wasn’t sure who the gift came from, saying she “assumed”
they were from Taylor.
The prosecution alleges the diamonds were part of a batch Taylor took to
South Africa “to sell... or exchange them for weapons.”

After a lull in media interest in Taylor’s three-year old trial, dozens of
journalists from around the world descended on The Hague for Campbell’s
testimony.

The model arrived and departed in secrecy, though, in line with a court
order she had obtained that prevented her being photographed.

Oliver Courtney, a spokesman for the human rights NGO Global Witness, told
AFP after Thursday’s testimony that “Charles Taylor was a brutal dictator; we
hope that Naomi Campbell’s testimony will help bringing him to justice.”

In Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown, around 100 people crowded into a small
courtroom to watch television coverage of Campbell’s testimony.

“It’s a memory relived as I remember being sent by my commander to dig for
diamonds in Kono (in the east of the country) and then to turn all gem stones
to him,” former rebel Anthony Smith told AFP.

“Nobody told us after this where the diamonds have gone.”

Thomas Moiwo, a double amputee from the conflict, said: “I am disappointed
over the testimony as it failed to show the way Taylor might have distributed
our diamonds.”