Liberia: Running out of time
2003-07-23 22:55
Monrovia - Liberia's rebels on Wednesday shattered a day-old pledge to cease fire, lobbing mortars at neighbourhoods crowded with refugees and capturing a key bridge in the war-ruined capital - a city running desperately short of food, water and shelter.
With no letup in fighting, West African leaders pledged Wednesday to send two Nigerian battalions to Liberia within days - the vanguard of what they say should be a 3 250-strong international force to bring peace to the devastated nation.
The first Nigerian battalion, 770-strong, would arrive in a week, officials said.
In Accra, Ghana, a top aide to President Charles Taylor pledged the embattled Liberian leader would leave the day the Nigerian troops arrive. "When the interposition force arrives, Mr Taylor will leave," aide Lewis Brown said.
It was the latest variation of repeated pledges to cede power that Taylor has made since rebels opened attacks two months ago on Monrovia, Liberia's capital and Taylor's last stronghold.
Taylor 'bluffing'
Rebels, pressing home a three-year war to oust Taylor, derided his most recent promises to surrender control.
"Taylor is just bluffing," rebel spokesperson Kabineh Ja'neh said in Ghana, site of off-and-on peace talks for Liberia. "You know how many times he has said this kind of thing? We'll make sure he leaves."
Separately, US military helicopters swept into the embattled city Wednesday to bring Marine reinforcements for the US Embassy.
Twenty Marines in full body armor leapt out, completing deployment of a 41-member team meant to boost security within the heavily guarded, high-walled US Embassy compound.
As a fog bank engulfed the rain-soaked city, the helicopters swept out again with 18 American and European evacuees - aid workers, journalists and members of a US assessment team sent to evaluate conditions for any possible US deployment.
Terrence Dudley, a US Navy lieutenant commander and spokesperson for the assessment team, declined to discuss the mission's conclusions. Dudley said only: "We are satisfied with the infomation that we have passed up so far."
US urged to take part
The United States has yet to say whether it will take part in any military intervention in Liberia, as West African and UN leaders and Liberians themselves have urged.
Africa's first republic, Liberia was founded by freed American slaves with US government support in the 19th century.
Rebels since June have launched three waves of attacks on Monrovia. Fighting has killed hundreds of trapped civilians in the capital.
Cut off from the city's cemeteries by the battles, aid workers with masks over their faces buried victims of fighting in Monrovia's beaches Wednesday, shoveling corpses into the sand under driving rain next to the stormy, steel-grey Atlantic.
More dead lay uncollected in the streets - making the death toll since the latest surge in fighting Saturday impossible to calculate.
Explosions boomed and gunfire rattled in the city on Wednesday, despite a rebel pledge on Tuesday to cease fire.
Teenagers
By midday, rebels based in the city's northwestern port area had crossed Stockton Bridge into the northern New Georgia suburb, Lieutenant General Roland Duo said.
From there, rebels were poised to strike at the road to the main airport - and to encircle downtown, the last bastion of Taylor's government.
Government forces - many of them teenagers armed with AK-47s and grenade launchers - fought the rebel advance.
Women clutched the hands of children as they ran east, away from the fighting, in heavy rain.
Fighting has pushed hundreds of thousands of civilians into Monrovia - still in ruins from the country's last 1989-96 civil war.
The battles since Saturday have cut the overwhelmed city off from food and water supplies, with rebels taking control of the port with its aid and commercial warehouses.
Stolen food
Near the US embassy, where at least 10 000 have crowded into a diplomatic residential compound in hope of safety, vendors on Wednesday were selling flour and corn meal from stolen World Food Programme bags, a cup at a time.
Merchants said fighters had looted the bags from UN warehouses and then sold them to civilians.
Dozens of disabled people in wheelchairs gathered in front of the embassy to plead for help, chanting, "We want food. We want food."
Across the city, residents used a short-lived lull in fighting Wednesday morning to run out in search for food.
"My smallest one keeps saying, 'Pappy, I want to eat,' but I have nothing at all to give him," said Emmanuel Jackson, 55, scouting food for his family of seven children, now living under an apartment building's concrete stairs.
Cholera
Aid workers have been logging 350 new cholera cases a week, and expect the epidemic to surge as civilians draw water from an inadequate number of wells, many contaminated.
At a clinic run by British aid group Merlin, frail, emaciated children hooked up to IV-drips moaned on beds improvised out of wood and plastic sheeting as mortars thudded in the distance.
In Dakar, Senegal, West African leaders meeting on Liberia's crisis pledged deployment of the first battalions of a long-promised multinational force.
One battalion would peel off from a UN peace force already deployed in Sierra Leone, UN spokesperson Patrick Coker said in that country, which borders Liberia.
The other battalion would come from Nigeria - for a total initial deployment that West African leaders put at 1 300.
West African foreign ministers also called for an additional stabilisation force of 3 250 men, much larger than previously discussed.
In Switzerland, Swiss authorities announced on Wednesday they had frozen $1.47m in assets linked to Taylor.
The step was taken at the request of a UN-backed court in Sierra Leone, which has indicted Taylor as a war-crimes suspect in that country's vicious 10-year civil war.
Taylor allegedly trafficked in guns and diamonds with the rebels, investing proceeds from diamond sales in a number of countries, including Switzerland.
- AP