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.
An Associated Press reporter accompanying General Daniel Opande, the Kenyan commander of Liberia’s 3-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 devastation underscores the difficulty a still-fledgling UN peace mission faces in ending rule by AK-47 in Liberia after 14 years of unrestrained
bloodletting.
Due to grow to the world’s largest, at about 15 000, the UN force so far has seen only about 4 500 armed troops deploy.
Peacekeepers have been concentrated in Monrovia, the capital, 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.
But the U.N. military leader’s word on the ground that Model rebel leader Thomas Nimely Yaya was now allied with the ex-Taylor government seemed to have little impact on the girl rebels and bare-chested boy fighters strutting with machine guns and Kalashnikovs.
Arriving in Guiae, Opande’s mission found rebels holding six hungry and frightened townspeople, newly dragged out of hiding by the insurgents.
”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.
East of Graie, in the village of Sarley, the bodies of 12 women and children lay in the streets, newly slain, 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 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.
Eastern Liberia near the border with Ivory Coast remains under control of Model fighters, believed backed by the neighbouring country — like Taylor’s other neighbors, resentful of Taylor’s fueling of armed insurrections throughout West Africa.
MODEL rebels joined the attack on Taylor’s forces only late last year.
Persistent attacks here and across Liberia’s interior represent both militia thugs preying on helpless civilians, and clashes between insurgents and Taylor loyalists.
”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.
Boi claimed the civilians had been slaughtered by government fighters as Taylor’s troops retreated from Tappeta — but that was five months ago, and the civilians were newly killed, peacekeepers said.
Even as U.N. 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.
Rich in rainfall and timber, the east had been part of what for decades in the 20th century was Africa’s most prosperous nations, and a leading US trade partner in Africa.
A civil war begun by Taylor, a graduate of Libya’s Cold War-era guerrilla camps, stopped investment in all but arms and destroyed roads, water systems and electrical grids.
”This place is completely destroyed,” said Opande, standing in the heart of once-lively Tappeta, now strewn with debris, and being overtaken by grass.
”It makes me, as an African, feel very sad,” the Kenyan said.
”Because instead of building, we are destroying, and we continue to destroy, and destroy and destroy.”
”The people here will start from zero,” Opande said. ”And I don’t understand why.” – Sapa-AP