West African diplomats were due to arrive in the Liberian capital Monrovia on Tuesday on a mission to try to broker a truce for the war-shattered country, as the United States and other nations evacuated their citizens.
Mohamed ibn Chambas, the executive secretary of the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) which is brokering peace talks for Liberia being hosted by Ghana, and Ghanaian Foreign Minister Addo Akufo-Addo left Ghana on Monday for the nearby west African country.
Chambas said they would briefly stop over in Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital, and then spend the night in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, before leaving for Monrovia on Tuesday.
The talks in the Ghanaian town of Akosombo, near the capital Accra, were suspended shortly after they got down to their first working session on Friday after the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd) stepped up their offensive against President Charles Taylor’s government in the capital.
Together with a recently emerged rebel group, Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model), Lurd controls at least 12 of Liberia’s 15 counties.
The rebels had penetrated to the edge of Monrovia last week, prompting French troops to evacuate 512 foreign nationals from the capital on Monday. The evacuation proceeded without incident.
Among the evacuees were 170 Lebanese, 103 US nationals, 17 French nationals, 11 Australians, six Britons, and ”a large number of Africans from 10 different countries” as well as 61 children, the French military said.
They were taken by helicopter to the Orage, a French military vessel anchored in international waters off Monrovia’s coast. The ship was expected to arrive on Wednesday morning in Abidjan, the commercial capital of neighbouring Côte d’ Ivoire.
US President George Bush also announced that 35 US military personnel were in Liberia with the aim of protecting the US embassy and US citizens still in the country.
At the United Nations (UN), the Security Council called for an end to fighting between the rebel and government forces in Liberia, while UN Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed alarm at the fate of Monrovia’s one million-strong population.
”We are deeply concerned at developments in Liberia,” this month’s council president, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador to the UN, told reporters after two hours of consultations behind closed doors.
A UN spokesperson said Annan was ”alarmed at the severe impact which intensified fighting between rebels and government forces in Liberia is having on Monrovia’s one million inhabitants”.
Annan also warned all the parties to the fighting in Liberia ”that perpetrators of international humanitarian and human rights law violations, which have been far too common in Liberia, will be held accountable for their acts”.
Some 200 000 people have died in more than a decade of almost uninterrupted civil war in Liberia. The latest conflict was sparked in 1999, when Lurd took up arms against Taylor, a former warlord in the civil war that broke out in 1990 and ended in 1997, the year Taylor was elected president.
The conflict has also displaced some 300 000 people, many of whom have sought refuge in neighbouring west African countries, forced to stretch their meager resources to take them in. – Sapa-AFP