Liberia’s besieged President Charles Taylor Friday renewed a pledge to step down, but stressed he would only leave after an international peacekeeping force is deployed to his west African nation.
”It makes a lot of sense for peacekeepers to arrive in this city before I transit,” Taylor told a meeting of Liberian clerics in the capital of Monrovia. ”Before I transit, I think it is important that peacekeepers be present.”
He welcomed the possibility of American troops among a possible international intervention force.
”I welcome and will embrace the presence of American troops in Liberia. I think it will be essential for stability,” adding, however: ”I don’t understand why the United States government would insist that I be absent before its soldiers arrive.”
Taylor offered a chilling warning, however, to his rebel opponents that government forces were still ”capable of carrying out havoc in the city. Even government soldiers and supporters that are angry are capable of havoc”.
”I’m not fighting to stay in power. What I am fighting for right now is that there would be such a normal transition that anger, frustration and other things don’t creep in,” Taylor said.
US President George Bush is weighing a possible US contribution to a peacekeeping contingent — requested by United Nations (UN) Secretary General Kofi Annan, France and Britain — that could range anything from none to several thousand American troops.
Although Taylor indicated during the first round of peace talks in Ghana on June 4 his willingness to step down if doing so restores peace to Liberia, he later insisted he will stay until his term runs out next year.
While Taylor was in Ghana, a UN-backed war crimes court in neighbouring Sierra Leone indicted the Liberian leader for gun trafficking and supporting Sierra Leone rebels during their vicious 10-year terror campaign, when rebel atrocities included hacking off victims’ limbs. Taylor cut short his Ghana visit and flew home an
international fugitive.
Since Liberia’s main rebel movement took up arms in 1999 against Taylor, a one-time warlord who was elected Liberia’s leader in 1997, one-third of this country’s three million people have been forced from their homes by fighting.
Insurgents last month laid siege to Monrovia — Liberia’s Atlantic ocean capital and Taylor’s final redoubt — leaving hundreds dead and sending tens of thousands of displaced villagers racing into the city centre to seek shelter.
Now those refugees are stalked by hunger, disease and Taylor’s looting, often drunken fighters.
On Friday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) appealed for urgent international assistance for Monrovia’s 97 000 refugees who cope with dirty water, dwindling food stores and lack of adequate medical care.
Measles and malaria are on the rise, the UN agency said in a statement in Geneva, and at least 455 have been diagnosed with cholera since June 17, when rebels and the Liberian government signed a repeatedly violated ceasefire agreement.
”A bad situation is quickly becoming worse,” said WHO’s director general, Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Peace talks resumed on Friday with chief mediator and former Nigerian junta leader Abdulsalami Abubakar meeting rebel envoys in Accra, the capital of Ghana. He was scheduled to meet later with Taylor’s delegation.
The sides are negotiating over a possible transitional government which rebels say must exclude Taylor — who launched Liberia’s 1989-1996 civil war. – Sapa-AP