Joy erupted in the battle-scarred streets of Monrovia yesterday after a ceasefire between Liberia’s besieged government and two rebel groups brought hope of an end to 14 years of war.
In Douala market, thousands danced, wept and sang as they heard the announcement on the afternoon news bulletin, jostling over muddy ground littered with bullets and shell casings from a fierce battle for the city last week.
”Happy, happy, happy, that’s what I am,” shouted stallholder Mani Efew (25). ”We’re tired of running, tired of the killing, we want peace. No more war! No more war!”
Dozens of excited shoppers took up the chant. Pick-ups crammed with beaming boy soldiers wearing women’s wigs and other fetishes hooted in time.
The ceasefire was signed in the nearby Ghanaian capital of Accra yesterday after talks between the rebel groups — allegedly armed by Liberia’s neighbours, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast — and Liberia’s defence minister. President Charles Taylor was unable to attend for fear of being arrested: he was recently indicted by the tribunal investigating the crimes of Sierra Leone’s decade-long war.
The ceasefire allows for a month of peace talks, leading to a transitional government and disarmament of all sides. It remained unclear whether Taylor would step down as the rebels have demanded. He has previously refused to do so.
Several agreements to end Liberia’s war have ended in failure. The most recent, two weeks ago, sparked an attack on Monrovia by the main rebel group. ”The last ceasefire didn’t last a minute, in fact it caused more fighting,” said the EU’s aid coordinator, David Parker, one of a handful of westerners left in Monrovia. ”If this is to stand a chance, there’ll have to be serious pressure from the international community, especially America, Britain and France.”
Taylor has stood at the centre of West Africa’s arms and diamond trafficking, wars and refugee crises for 14 years, drawing UN sanctions and more recently the UN-backed war-crimes indictment.
Educated in the business schools of Boston and trained in the guerrilla camps of Libya, Taylor launched his warlord career out of a Boston jailhouse window in 1985.
Ripping through the bars with a hacksaw, Taylor shinnied down a knotted sheet — escaping extradition and trial on a $1-million embezzlement charge back in his west African homeland of Liberia.
The escape set the tone for what was to come — Taylor got where he wanted, by force.
Over the next two decades, Taylor fought his way to Liberia’s presidency. In his drive to corner west Africa’s diamonds and arms trade, he backed militias that tore at the stability of the region.
Taylor, now 54, only once acknowledged that he had ruined Liberia in the process.
”I agree that I spoiled it,” Taylor said in 1997, when he was seeking power in elections after failing to win it directly by fighting. ”And I need to be given the chance to fix it.”
Taylor was born of mixed heritage, his father of local Liberian stock and his mother a descendant of the freed American slaves who founded Liberia, Africa’s oldest republic, in the 19th century.
Although only five percent of the population, the Liberian-Americans ruled Liberia until 1979, when their bloody overthrow gave Liberia’s indigenous population control for the first time in the country’s history.
Taylor, trying to distance himself from the unpopular Liberian-American elite, eventually added Ghankay as a middle name.
Taylor spent the 1970s studying and working in Boston, as a gas station attendant and as a mechanic at a plastics factory. He earned an economics degree from Bentley College in Waltham, Massachussets.
Taylor returned to Liberia after the 1979 regime change. He won a top job in the new government, but evidently wanted more — embezzling $1-million as head of Liberia’s General Services Administration.
Taylor escaped to the United States, then broke out of the Boston jail.
He eventually found his way to Libya, and to a mini-battlefield of the Cold War.
Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi trained, armed and funded Taylor and other budding West African revolutionaries, including Sierra Leone’s Foday Sankoh.
Taylor returned to West Africa in 1979 at the head of a small force, invading to overthrow the US-allied government of Samuel Doe.
The seven-year civil war that followed saw Doe and more than 150 000 other Liberians killed. Liberia, once sub-Saharan Africa’s most prosperous country, was virtually destroyed.
Taylor, acknowledged and even respected in Liberia as the country’s strongest warlord, won presidential elections the next year. ”You killed my ma, you killed my pa, I’ll vote for you,” one mordant campaign cry ran.
Taylor meanwhile backed Sankoh in a 10-year terror campaign for the diamond fields of Sierra Leone.
Neighbouring Guinea and Ivory Coast likewise accused Taylor’s war-making of undermining their stability.
The UN Security Council placed him and his regime under sanctions for alleged gun-and diamond-running.
On June 4, a UN-backed war-crimes court announced his indictment over rebels’
campaign in Sierra Leone. – Guardian Unlimited Â