Rebels ignore ceasefire
2003-07-22 23:03
Monrovia - Rebels waging a brutal battle for control of Liberia's war-divided capital announced a ceasefire on Tuesday, after mortars rained down on the city on one of the most blood-soaked days in three years of civil war.
Meanwhile, West African defence chiefs tried to work out details of a long-awaited peacekeeping force many here believe could have averted Monday's carnage.
Despite an order to stop fighting, rebel fighters traded machine-gun and grenade fire near three strategic bridges connecting Monrovia's port area to the northern suburbs and downtown - the symbolic heart of the country and site of President Charles Taylor's offices.
Sporadic shelling also continued, with one round striking a house across the street from the heavily fortified US Embassy compound. Shrapnel rained down on a second house next-door.
Three people were killed and two seriously wounded. Grief-stricken relatives wailed around pools of blood and held up mortar fragments.
Need peacekeeping force
"Our sisters and brothers are dying for nothing," said James Guanue the brother of one of the dead. "We really need a peacekeeping force to come."
Aid workers had been removing the last of a pile of bodies dragged in front of the embassy on Monday by enraged residents, demanding to know when the United States would send troops to the country founded more than 150 years ago by freed American slaves.
Hospital officials and aid groups counted more than 100 killed on Monday, but the toll was believed to be much higher. Defence Minister Daniel Chea placed it at well over 600.
Chea demanded the international community either send peacekeepers immediately or lift an arms embargo imposed by the United Nations to punish Taylor's regime for trading guns for diamonds with Sierra Leone's notoriously brutal rebels. "Our people are being held hostage," he said.
White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said the United States had not yet decided whether to send troops.
"The situation in Liberia now is dynamic," he said in Washington. "We're continuing to monitor events closely."
Three US ships with 2&nbps;000 marines and 2 500 sailors aboard moved toward the Mediterranean Sea, where they are to await orders on whether to proceed around to Liberia. Typically, only the 2 000 marines would go ashore.
Smaller contingent
But some Pentagon officials said Bush was inclined to send in a smaller contingent - perhaps several hundred Marines - enough to provide command and communications support for the West African force.
On Monday, half of a team of 41 marines arrived to protect the embassy, and their helicopters evacuated 23 foreigners, most of them humanitarian workers. The rest of the group was delayed by the mortar attack, and there was no indication when they would arrive.
Meanwhile, government and rebel delegates meeting in nearby Accra, Ghana struggled to meet a Tuesday deadline to agree details of a unity government promised under a repeatedly violated June 17 ceasefire.
Despite continued differences, Charles Benny of the main Liberians United for Reconciliation and Justice movement expressed satisfaction with recent progress on the promised peacekeeping force. "Our troops are being told to cease fire," he said.
Ecowas troops
West African defence chiefs were gathering in Dakar, Senegal to finalise the force's composition and deployment schedule, Nigerian army spokesperson colonel Chukwuemeka Onwuamaegbu said.
One option, he said, was to divert to Liberia a Nigerian mechanised infantry battalion of about 700 to 1 000 troops from Sierra Leone, where the soldiers have taken part in a UN peacekeeping force.
Nigeria, Mali and Ghana were all willing to contribute troops, but need foreign financial backing, Nigerian presidential spokesperson Remi Oyo said.
The participants also want other countries - including South Africa, Morocco and the United States - to send soldiers.
"We don't have any timetable for when the US might send troops. But diplomatic talks are going on by the hour and things can change rather quickly," Oyo said.
No decision yet
European diplomats said a ceasefire was key to any deployment - particularly if the Americans are to be persuaded to participate.
"They haven't taken a decision yet in Washington," Hans Dahlgren, undersecretary in the Swedish foreign ministry and the European Union's special regional envoy, told Swedish Radio on Tuesday. "And I am sure that one of the factors is whether there is really going to be a peace agreement to supervise."
Bush has made any deployment of US troops conditional on the departure of Taylor, a former warlord indicted for war crimes in Sierra Leone.
Taylor has pledged to resign and accept an offer of asylum in
Nigeria - but only after peacekeepers arrive to ensure an orderly transition.
Since sweeping into the northern part of Monrovia on Saturday, rebels have made repeated attempts to cross into downtown, which lies on a strip of land between a river and the Atlantic Ocean.
Lull in hostilities
Residents took advantage of a slight lull in hostilities on Tuesday to forage for food and water in the bombed-out capital - still in ruins from Liberia's last 1989-96 civil war.
Sylvester Coleman, a Bible seminary student, emerged from his basement, where 63 relatives and neighbours have sought shelter, to look for rice. But at four times the usual price, it was beyond his reach. So he trudged home in the pouring rain - empty handed.
Passing the US embassy, where bodies were still piled up under plastic sheeting, he paused. Twenty-seven people were killed when a mortar slammed into an embassy residential compound across the street, where some 10 000 Liberians had taken refuge from the fighting.
"No country has stronger historical ties to Liberia than the United States, so to sit idly by, it's just a shame," he said, surveying the scene. "If the American forces were on the ground, this would not have happened."
- AP