UN faces pillaged Liberia

2003-11-10 12:36

Tappeta, Liberia - The first UN peace missions to Liberia's rebel-held far east have found deserted towns emptied of all but looting insurgents, and terrorised civilians under rebel grip or lying rotting, dead, in the bush.

A correspondent accompanying General Daniel Opande, the Kenyan commander of Liberia's three-month-old UN peace force, saw hamlet after hamlet still bloodied by pillaging fighters, or by persistent clashes between rebels and government hard-liners.

"There is no war, no more ground for you to gain," Opande exhorted rebels in the eastern town of Griae - newly attacked, sacked and burned by the insurgents, four months after their leader signed the West African nation's peace deal.

Playing out in territory under control of the smaller of Liberia's two rebel movements, the continuing devastation underscores the difficulty a fledgling UN peace mission faces in ending rule by AK-47 in Liberia after 14 years of unchecked bloodletting.

Opande's trip to the east marked a small, fact-finding mission; nationwide deployment can come only when the force moves far beyond its current starting strength.

Peacekeepers have been concentrated in Monrovia, the capital, which has been calm since August, when West African peace troops landed and warlord-president Charles Taylor fled into exile.

An August 18 power-sharing deal brought rebels of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy and the smaller eastern-based Movement for Democracy in Liberia into a transition government with Taylor's followers.

Arriving in Griae, Opande's mission found rebels holding six hungry and frightened townspeople.

Insurgents had just dragged the men and women out of hiding.

"The war is our problem. When the war comes, we run into the bush," said 65-year-old Dennis Siaway, barefoot like the rebels' other shaken captives.

Peacekeepers left the civilians still trapped in the rebel-held town.

East of Griae, in the village of Sarley, the newly slain bodies of 12 women and children lay in the streets, UN troops sent just ahead of Friday's mission told Opande.

In Monrovia, the transition government minister charged with carrying out the peace accord expressed dismay on Saturday that it held so little sway outside the capital.

"For people to still be fighting is quite disappointing, depressing - and unwarranted," minister Blomah Nelson said.

"There's a war - and someone has to die," Model official Boi Bleaju Boi said in the town of Tappeta, where peacekeepers found decomposing bodies of residents killed as fighters looted their homes.

Even as UN forces surveyed the town, rebel fighters stripped off, carted away and stacked corrugated iron roofs from huts - removing some of the last stealable goods.

Boi said rebels were taking the roofs for safekeeping.

"We are trying to pack them, so that the rightful owners will come for them," he said.

- AP