Gunmen seized a Liberian border town in an attack launched from Ivory Coast, in a ”blatant violation” of Liberia’s territorial integrity, President Charles Taylor’s private radio claimed on Monday.
”The government will take the appropriate measures to expel the terrorists,” Taylor’s Kiss-FM radio station said, using the government’s standard term for rebels.
The alleged cross-border attack heightens concerns in tense West Africa on two fronts: that lawless Liberia would enter the growing 4-month-old civil war in Ivory Coast, and that France would be drawn deeper into the Ivory Coast war by longstanding defence treaties.
The treaties obligate France’s military to come to Ivory Coast’s aid if its former colony is attacked from outside.
Kiss-FM said fighters coming from Ivory Coast attacked the town of Beam in Liberia’s southeast border county of Grand Gedeh on Sunday.
Fighting killed one person and injured several others, Taylor’s radio said. It did not say which side suffered the casualties. Insurgents continued to hold the town on Monday, the radio station said.
Neither Liberian nor Ivory Coast authorities could immediately be reached for comment early on Monday.
Liberia accused Liberian rebels and mercenaries ”fighting alongside (Ivory Coast) government troops” in the alleged attack. The government called the raid ”a blatant violation of its territorial integrity,” the radio station said.
Fighters from Liberia in recent weeks have been active in the war in Ivory Coast, but all known accounts have them fighting on the side of Ivory Coast’s rebels, rather than the Ivory Coast government.
Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer and one of West Africa’s leading economic powers, is battling a 4-month-old uprising by rebels who want President Laurent Gbagbo out, blaming him in a surge of ethnic tensions and bloodshed in that country. West African and other international mediators are trying to broker peace, fearing Ivory Coast will be engulfed by the kind of ruthless scorched-earth fighting that has destroyed neighbouring Liberia. Ivory Coast’s rebel, government and political parties are now in talks in Paris.
Liberia has seen thousands killed, hundreds of thousands uprooted and most public services eliminated in a decade-plus of fighting that began with a coup attempt by Taylor in 1989. A seven-year civil war followed the coup attempt. Taylor emerged as the strongest warlord and won presidential elections the year after the war ended.
He still battles a northern-based rebellion seeking his overthrow. Countless ex-combatants from Liberia’s conflicts remain. Ivory Coast’s government, which has sought greater assistance from France’s comparatively massive military fighting its rebels, has claimed before that rebels have attacked from Liberia. In Liberia, defence officials claim that militiamen allied to Ivory Coast’s government came to the border at least twice last week to warn that they would attack Liberia if Liberians did not stop fighting alongside the rebels in Ivory Coast.
Taylor told reporters in Liberia on Friday that there were Liberians ”fighting on both sides on their own” in Ivory Coast’s war. He called it ”unacceptable.” – Sapa-AP