Heavy artillery and small-arms fire pounded Monrovia yesterday as a four-day battle for the city degenerated into scenes of random violence and widespread looting by the army of Liberia’s besieged president and indicted war criminal, Charles Taylor.
As the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd) redoubled its attack on the city’s main port, residents estimated that 500 civilians had been killed in that small area of Monrovia alone.
Taylor’s army, a ragged assortment of Israeli-trained officers and hastily-armed street-boys, rushed to meet the rebels’ advance, before switching its efforts to retaking Monrovia’s main brewery in the nearby suburb of Doala.
”We are fighting to liberate Doala in general, the beer factory in particular,” said one soldier running to the front with a submachine gun.
At midday, the rebels unilaterally declared a ceasefire to ”avoid a grotesque humanitarian catastrophe,” according to a statement posted on the internet. Yet aid workers and local journalists in Monrovia reported no let-up in the fighting around the port, or in looting across the city.
”There’s heavy fighting for the port and loads of guys just shooting into the air and looting everywhere,” said David Parker, the EU’s aid coordinator by telephone from the city.
After a stray rocket hit a funeral home, Taylor’s soldiers poured in to loot among the tangled corpses. Around the port, journalists reported seeing dozens of residents dragging the bodies of family-members to bury in the sand or dump in the surf.
With most of Monrovia’s food reserves stored inside the port, food prices tripled overnight, leaving the majority of the city’s 1,2 million people hungry and prone to worsening epidemics. Health workers have reported many cholera cases among about 100 000 people seeking refuge at the main football stadium.
Most of Monrovia’s population were refugees even before the current battle, having been chased from their villages in northern Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone during a decade of bitter conflict in the region.
Up to 100 foreign aid workers were trapped in the American embassy in Monrovia as a planned evacuation was stalled by UN red tape.
”While the UN pisses about looking for safe-passage guarantees from every side, we’re having to work out how to save ourselves,” said one of the trapped aid workers.
Four UN helicopters were awaiting permission to fly from Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, despite a blinding tropical storm throughout the day. A UN spokesperson, Patrick Coker, said: ”We’re just awaiting clearance. We remain on very short notice to move in.”
The battle for Monrovia had waned late on Thursday as both the rebels and government forces withdrew pending a statement by President George Bush, who is due to visit Africa next month.
Yet with Bush merely restating that Taylor should cede power to a transitional government, the fighting quickly resumed.
Washington has come under mounting pressure to intervene in Liberia, as Britain did in Sierra Leone and France has in Ivory Coast. – Guardian Unlimited Â