Rebels opposed to the government of Liberian President Charles Taylor have entered the suburbs of the capital Monrovia, an eyewitness said on Thursday.
A Liberian government official, contacted by phone, denied reports that the rebels were within five kilometres of the city centre, but confirmed that fighting was under way.
An aid worker who fled her home in the suburb of Brewerville said her children had seen the rebels, from the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd) group, in Banjor, a western suburb.
There was fighting very close to the town of Duala, she said, adding that the rebels were seeking to cross the St. Paul Bridge which connects the city centre to the western suburbs.
Another eyewitness, contacted by phone, said Duala, some four kilometres from central Monrovia, was flooded with displaced people fleeing the region of Brewerville, where there are several refugee camps.
”I have never seen this many people since the fighting started.
Human or vehicular traffic is no longer being allowed beyond St. Paul Bridge,” the eyewitness said. The bridge is less than five kilometres from the city centre.
The reports of fighting came as Taylor, who briefly went to Ghana on Wednesday for peace talks with the Lurd rebels, announced that an abortive coup attempt had been made against his regime.
Lurd, one of several groups fighting Taylor’s forces, controls a large part of the west African country, where endemic civil war has left an estimated 200 000 people dead since the 1980s.
A top defence ministry official, who spoke to AFP’s Ivory Coast office by telephone from Monrovia and asked not to be named, denied that Lurd forces had gotten as close as five kilometres to the capital.
”It’s not right,” he said in reaction to the report. ”We’ve been attacked by Lurd rebels, and we’re retaliating.” The official declined to state where the ongoing clashes were taking place.
At the Liberian peace talks in Ghana, Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the executive secretary of the Economic Community of West African States, expressed concern over fighting.
”All the mediators are concerned about any escalation in the fighting,” he said.
”We would hope that the guns will be silenced. This is worsening the already very, very bad situation in Liberia.”
Lurd representatives in Ghana could not be contacted late on Thursday but Chayee Doe, a Lurd deputy chairman, said by telephone from the United States: ”We were attacked by Taylor’s men in Po River and we were defending ourselves, we continue to defend ourselves.”
Asked whether Lurd intended to seize the capital during the talks, Doe simply said: ”As long as we are under attack, we will fight.”
In the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, meanwhile, a regional official of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) also reported unrest in the Monrovia region, with civilians fleeing from refugee camps towards the capital.
Ramin Rafirasme, west African spokesperson for the WFP, said refugees from a camp at Vicks outside the capital in particular were fleeing into town, where the situation was very tense, and there were no facilities to look after them.
”People are in the street, in the rain. The situation remains very tense in Monrovia. We are very worried by the situation of these people,” he said.
The WFP official said that some 17 000 refugees had been housed in the camp at Vicks, which is 10 kilometres from Monrovia.
A total of around 115 000 people were housed in camps around the capital, he said, adding that ”Monrovia is not equipped to receive displaced people.”
”If a peaceful solution is not found fast, the humanitarian situation, which is already very bad, could become catastrophic,” he warned.
Rafirasme said that international aid agencies were considering an emergency intervention in Liberia, but the lack of infrastructure and security made this difficult. – Sapa-AFP