President George W Bush faces mounting foreign pressure to have the United States lead an international force to pacify Liberia.
Bush is being urged by Britain, France and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to make a commitment before leaving on his trip to Africa next week.
Britain and France have respectively engaged in similar operations in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
“Just as we saw Britain send troops to Sierra Leone and France take the lead in [the eastern DRC town of] Bunia and Côte d’Ivoire, there are a lot of expectations for the US to lead this force in Liberia,” said Annan this week.
West African states are insisting that historic ties with Liberia — the country was founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century — obliges the US to become involved.
The US is being asked to provide 2 000 ground troops to lead a proposed 5 000-strong force given shoot-to-kill powers by the UN Security Council. Once this force has firmly established a ceasefire, a more conventional UN peacekeeping force composed of a majority of African troops would replace the Americans.
White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said this week the US administration was “actively discussing how best to support international efforts to help Liberia return to peace and the rule of law”. Bush himself has declared that President Charles Taylor has to step down.
The former warlord, elected to the presidency in 1997, has reneged on his promise a month ago to step aside in order to end the 14-year civil war in Liberia. Taylor now wants to hold on until his term expires in January 2004. He also wants an indictment against him for war crimes in neighbouring Sierra Leone lifted. Such immunity runs strongly counter to thinking in the Security Council.
Nevertheless, ambassadors from the 15 council members currently visiting West Africa are mooting the possibility of Taylor being offered amnesty and exile if he goes now.
Taylor has already declined such an offer of refuge in Nigeria.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador leading the UN delegation, acknowledged that the regional leaders must be allowed to make their own decisions to end the conflict in Liberia.
The UN ambassadors skipped their stop in Monrovia on advice from their security team. Some of the ambassadors might have been reluctant to see Taylor, Greenstock said. “If they did they would have wanted a statement that he is on his way out.”
The signs are not encouraging from Washington. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pointed to training given by the US to forces in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria and suggested that these troops be given the job in Liberia.
The administration is split on whether or not to intervene. The opponents of such action recall the US humiliation in Somalia and say US forces are already extended in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Voices for intervention, however, increase. The New York Times commented this week that Annan had made a “compelling case for dispatching an American-led international force to Liberia.”
In addition to the historic links, it cited the longstanding economic and political links to the US.
Proponents of getting American boots on the ground in Liberia argue that the humanitarian crisis — cholera has broken out among the hundreds of thousands of refugees in the capital of Monrovia — demands decisive action.
Although a tense truce has held since the weekend, law and order has broken down with the looting of international aid supplies.
Susan Rice, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration who is now with the Washington-based Brookings Institution, argues that a battalion of US troops would make the difference.
The US faces substantial damage to its international reputation if it fails to heed Annan’s call, she says.
Rice says the US risks looking like a “selfish behemoth” — not hesitating to step on countries where it perceived its interests lay, but not helping where it was asked elsewhere.
Meanwhile, reports The Guardian‘s Owen Boycott, as the UN prepared to evacuate refugees from Monrovia, Taylor’s “special emissary” tried to negotiate a process of “national reconciliation” without retribution.
Samuel Jackson told a meeting at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London that if Taylor stepped down there would retribution against his supporters. But Taylor was willing to go if there was a peace process.
Asked what Taylor would do when he left power, Jackson said: “He sees his future as a coffee or cocoa farmer, his home in Monrovia converted to a presidential library. He will be the granddaddy of Liberian politics.”