West African, US and United Nations (UN) military representatives deliberated anew on Monday on a long-promised peace force for warring Liberia, as shelling persisted in the besieged capital and rebels and government forces battled for strategic bridges.
One rocket, fired by President Charles Taylor’s troops from a high building, fell short and plowed into the bedroom of a home on the government-controlled side of the capital, injuring eight civilians, aid workers said.
As rebels pressed their siege of Monrovia — now in its ninth day — a Nigeria army spokesperson said the first peace troops could deploy as soon as Tuesday for a force seen as crucial to ending two months of fighting for the capital.
In Accra, Ghana, however, another day in what have been weeks of off-and-on talks on the peace mission brought no immediate announcement of any firm deployment date.
Nigerian Brigadier General Festus Okwonkwo, who would oversee any deployment, called deployment this week ”unlikely” as he went into meetings with representatives of other West African countries, UN peacekeeping operations and the US military’s European Command.
The United States has said West African nations and the United Nations must take the lead in any multinational rescue mission for Liberia, a West African nation founded by freed American slaves in the 19th century.
Officials of debt-strapped Nigeria, the region’s military power, say debates about who should bear the cost are slowing deployment, and have asked the United States for greater assistance.
As talks play out, shelling and other fighting accompanying rebel assaults on the capital have killed hundreds of civilians since June. With Monrovia’s strategic port in rebel hands, the refugee-choked city of more than 1,3-million is desperately short of food, water and aid. Hunger and disease are building.
Insurgents are driving home their three-year-old war to force out Taylor, a former warlord blamed in 14 years of near-continual conflict in once prosperous Liberia.
Monrovia’s people increasingly speak of the promised peace force with impatience, and despair.
”We are hoping that the peacekeeping forces are coming this week to relieve us of all this misery,” said the Reverend Franklin Holt, president of the capital’s downtown Monrovia College, where up to 2 000 people have taken shelter in the campus’s concrete buildings.
”They are very late,” Holt said of the peacekeepers, as fresh mortar blasts rocked downtown. ”Extremely late.”
Under international pressure to intervene, US President George Bush has ordered US ships to take up positions off the coast of Liberia to offer still unspecified support for a West African-led force.
Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Sunday repeated U.S. insistence that any American role in the peace force would depend on the West Africans deploying first, and on Taylor leaving.
Nigeria has promised two battalions with a total of about 1 300 men to enforce any ceasefire reached in Liberia. The fighters would be the vanguard of what West African leaders say should be a 3 250-strong international force.
One Nigerian battalion is to peel off from a UN peace force already in Sierra Leone. The second, a mechanised infantry brigade, is to come from Nigeria.
A Nigerian army spokesperson, Colonel Chukwuemeka Onwuamaegbu, said early on Monday that deployment could come by Tuesday.
Okwonko, the brigade commander, indicated later on Monday that yet more talks were planned, however.
Of the American role, Okwonko said the US was promising only logistical support and support at Monrovia’s port. He didn’t elaborate.
Taylor, offered asylum by Nigeria, says he will leave only when peacekeepers arrive. Taylor has since June held out promises that he would step down, only to later hedge on timing or renege outright.
In Monrovia, government spokesperson General Benjamin Yeaten said government forces were holding their lines on Monday by the bridges leading to downtown.
Rebels were reported to have bypassed one of the spans, Stockton Bridge, over the weekend, crossing over to Monrovia’s government-held mainland from the rebel-held port. A government officer and residents of the area around the bridge said rebels were still on the government-held side on Monday, but appeared to be pulling back.
Elsewhere, Liberian Defence Minister Daniel Chea was reported to have left Monrovia for the country’s second-largest city, Buchanan.
Liberian forces there in recent days have battled a renewed offensive by Liberia’s second, smaller, rebel group, based in the south-east.
The group, Movement for Democracy in Liberia, is allegedly backed by neighboring Côte’d Ivoire. Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, the group laying siege to Monrovia, allegedly is backed by Guinea.
Both neighbouring countries blame Taylor for armed insurgencies that threaten their own stability. – Sapa-AP