JUSTICE DENIED: Honoured in Constantia, reviled in Liberia — fugitive war criminal Guus Kouwenhoven dies free

He was a generous individual who valued friendship, hard work and loyalty.

This is how Augustinus Petrus Maria Kouwenhoven, better known as Guus Kouwenhoven, was described at a memorial mass in the upmarket Cape Town suburb of Constantia held last Wednesday, 16 September, to celebrate his life.

The 83-year-old had died just over a week earlier, on 10 September.

During Kouwenhoven’s send-off (Daily Maverick has watched a video of it), a relative who eulogised him created the impression that he was a workaholic who always put others above himself.

But court records tell a very different story.

Stolen paintings

Kouwenhoven was a convicted war criminal accused of providing camps for Liberian militia who “decapitated civilians” and “threw living babies into wells”.

For his part, as News24 reported, he countered that he was the target of a Dutch witch-hunt.

Kouwenhoven seemed super wealthy – he could afford lawyers to steer his lengthy international legal battles, and he was spotted driving luxury cars around Cape Town.

In the years leading up to his death, he was based in opulent suburbs in the city while fighting extradition to the Netherlands, where he had been sentenced to 19 years of imprisonment.

Originally from the Netherlands, scandals tied to him have featured in news articles across the globe.

Take, for example, a 1977 news article from a US Napa Valley newspaper. It said a Dutch “art salesman”, Augustinus Petrus Maria Kouwenhoven, had pleaded guilty to trying to dispose of or sell seven stolen paintings “by 17^th and 18^th century masters”, including a Rembrandt, and was facing two years in jail or deportation.

Roughly 40 years later, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre cited that precedent in a legal affidavit, questioning why South African authorities allowed Kouwenhoven to remain in the country.

The scandals he was involved in stretched from artworks to trees... and civil war.

Charles Taylor, timber, 1,000s killed

In 2002, the Mail & Guardian reported that timber used to make lock gates at a canal in Britain had “come from controversial logging in Africa’s rainforests” and that environmental activists were angry about the pillaging of west Africa’s natural resources.

It added: “The firm at the centre of the row, Oriental Timber Company (OTC), has been accused by the United Nations of corruption, illegal activity and using money raised by its logging activities to help fund the civil war in Sierra Leone that has killed thousands of civilians and left countless more maimed.”

Kouwenhoven owned the Oriental Timber Company.

The United Nations has an online database that provides more context about how Kouwenhoven fitted into this scandal.

“During the second civil war in Liberia, between 1999 and 2003, the trade in natural resources, namely diamonds and timber, had a significant role in fuelling the conflict in Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone, allowing Liberian President Charles Taylor to generate sufficient funds to sustain military activities and purchase large quantities of arms,” it said.

“The Dutch Prosecution Office investigated and prosecuted [Kouwenhoven] for carrying out business activities in Liberia which facilitated the import, storage and distribution of weapons used by Charles Taylor’s regime.”

War crimes and weapons

Criminal proceedings commenced against Kouwenhoven in the Netherlands in 2005.

At the time, Special Court for Sierra Leone prosecutor David Crane said: “I have long been aware of [his] criminal activity, his involvement in […] Taylor's inner circle and direct support for Taylor’s war machine.”

The Residual Court for Sierra Leone that convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor has rejected a request by the former leader to be relocated from the British prison in which he is serving his 50-year sentenced due to Covid-19 to a third country. pic.twitter.com/jBCmClqCsW

— WADR English (@wadrenglish) September 9, 2020

Eventually, in 2017, a Dutch court convicted Kouwenhoven of supplying arms to the Taylor regime between 2001 and 2003 in contravention of the Dutch Sanctions Act. He was also found guilty of complicity in war crimes that Liberian forces or militia members carried out between 2000 and 2002 and sentenced to 19 years’ imprisonment in the Netherlands.

Five years before this, from around 2012, Kouwenhoven started visiting South Africa for a few weeks at a time.

Homes in SA’s seaside suburbs

According to a 2019 Western Cape High Court judgment, Kouwenhoven had been living in South Africa on a visitor’s visa since late 2016 – a year before his Dutch convictions. Kouwenhoven had stated that this was because of his ill health. (I personally spotted him in a wheelchair outside a Cape Town hospital several years ago.)

In 2017 (the year the Dutch court convicted him), he had an address listed in Cape Town’s seaside suburb of Camps Bay.

According to the judgment, towards the end of that year, a Justice and Constitutional Development official realised the Camps Bay property had been sold, and fretted that Kouwenhoven “was winding up his affairs in Cape Town with a view to leaving the country.”

Court records and updated addresses show Kouwenhoven later relocated to the affluent coastal suburb of Bantry Bay, while media reports also placed him in upmarket Constantia, where his memorial service was held last week.

He was arrested in Cape Town on 8 December 2017 and faced extradition to the Netherlands, but was released on bail after 11 days.

Five-storey home, luxury cars

Kouwenhoven challenged his arrest and the grounds for his potential extradition to the Netherlands in legal proceedings that dragged on for years in South Africa. His South African visa was rescinded in 2020.

During Supreme Court of Appeal proceedings in 2021, defence advocate Darryl Cooke challenged the validity and manner of Kouwenhoven’s arrest, saying it was carried out during a “dawn raid” involving 12 police officers.

Judge Malcolm Wallis lashed out at that description, saying: “Unless the climate of Cape Town has undergone a drastic change, 7.30am is hardly a dawn raid in the middle of summer.”

Wallis had also referred to how Kouwenhoven showed officers around his lavish home.

An Interpol investigator involved in the case said in an affidavit: “He gave a guided tour of his five-storey house when the elevator didn’t work. He was also observed [by police] driving many of his luxury vehicles around Cape Town.”

That investigator, Warrant Officer Willem Jacobus Van Der Heever, also alleged that Kouwenhoven had been Charles Taylor’s confidant and provided camps for Taylor’s militia.

“They decapitated civilians, threw living babies into wells and shattered their skulls,” his affidavit said.

‘Ordinary Liberians paid the price’

On 30 May 2012, Taylor was sentenced to 50 years of imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is serving that sentence in the UK.

In September 2021, South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that Kouwenhoven could be extradited to the Netherlands.

At the time, his lawyer Gary Eisenberg, who has since died, told Daily Maverick that Kouwenhoven’s case was being appealed in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). However, records show the ECHR declared the case inadmissible for failing to meet basic application criteria. Ultimately, Kouwenhoven’s costly legal strategy paid off: despite being a wanted man, he died without ever setting foot in a Dutch prison cell.

Kouwenhoven is gone, but his past, no matter how many positive adjectives are used to blur it, is not forgotten.

While those close to him may remember him as generous and selfless, others clearly have very different memories and a contrary view of his legacy.

A Liberian publication, the Daily Observer, reported: “He died a convicted war criminal who never served the 19-year prison sentence imposed on him by a Dutch appeals court in 2017.”

It said Kouwenhoven’s story was not just about a foreign businessman.

“It is about how the country’s extraordinary natural wealth – particularly its forests – was transformed into a financial and logistical resource for a war machine, how international businesses benefited from that system, and how ordinary Liberians paid the price.” DM