US Koran burning row: enter Dr KA Paul
The spokesman for the pastor who is threatening to burn the Koran looks familiar to Foreign Editor Ben de Pear, who watched him lauding former Liberian president Charles Taylor in 2003.
In July 2003, as the last functioning shops and storerooms in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, were ransacked and the exhausted and bloodied people of the besieged city piled the corpses of civilians outside the US embassy, a jumbo jet, emblazoned with “Global Peace Ambassador” on the fuselage, landed at the airport, writes Channel 4 News Foreign Editor Ben De Pear.
It bore an envoy of “God, and of peace”, Dr KA Paul, personal spiritual adviser to Charles Taylor, and a man who claimed he had come with the blessing of God and the US president. He was driven straight to the national stadium.
For over an hour in the stifling heat, I watched with a small crowd of journalists and fearful bussed in supporters as the evangelist lauded President Charles Taylor as a man of peace and god.
Charles Taylor now stands trial in the Hague accused of war crimes.
Less than 10 miles away, Taylor’s army of irregular forces, teenagers and children dressed in wigs and fairy costumes, attempted to hold off the LURD rebels who had surrounded the city.
At the end of the speeches the Dr and President left in the Presidential armoured limo. Days later Charles Taylor stepped down as President and was exiled to Nigeria.
Today, Dr KA Paul stands shoulder to shoulder with another man in the spotlight of international news.
At the eleventh hour the pastor has flown in to offer succour to the controversial Pastor Terry Jones, the man at the centre of the Koran burning furore, even becoming his spokesman to deliver a two hour deadline.
The next 24 hours will tell what effect the entry of this itinerant spiritual envoy will have.