Liberian rebels opened a second front yesterday in the city of Buchanan, and hopes of an immediate deployment of peacekeepers faded as the battle for the capital Monrovia entered its 10th day.
West African leaders and officials from the UN and US were last night expected to announce a date for a Nigerian-led force to intervene in the war-ravaged country. But suggestions that the peacekeepers would deploy today appeared to founder on disputes about logistics and money. One official said they might not arrive until next week.
Aid agencies estimate that more than 400 people have died in the latest battle for the capital, and conditions for the living have steadily worsened, with disease, hunger and thirst adding to the death toll.
”We are hoping that the peacekeeping forces are coming this week to relieve us of this misery,” the Rev Franklin Holt, president of Monrovia College, told the Associated Press. As mortar shells landed nearby, he added: ”They [the peacekeepers] are very late. Extremely late.”
Liberia’s second biggest city, Buchanan, also turned into a battleground when rebels from the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model) engaged government forces.
”We received an attack in Buchanan,” said the defence minister, Daniel Chea. ”There is fighting going on there now.”
Workers from the British aid group Merlin reported gunfire in the streets.
Monrovia is being attacked by a larger rebel force, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd). Having rejected a US appeal for a ceasefire on Sunday, the group yesterday tried to tighten the noose around the capital by crossing three bridges into government-held territory. But the fighting seemed lighter than on previous days.
The army chief of staff, General Benjamin Yeaten, said the attackers were repelled. ”We managed to hold them off at the bridge and push them back,” he said. But other reports said the rebels had managed to bypass Stockton bridge, which connects the rebel-held island port to the mainland.
For the city’s 1,3-million residents there is no front line behind which they can shelter, as both sides lob mortar shells into crowded neighbourhoods. A rocket fired yesterday by government forces hit a house on the side of the city they are supposed to be defending, wounding eight civilians, according to aid workers.
”People are just moving up and down, shedding tears, mourning their families. The situation is not humanly comprehensible,” said one aid worker, Patrick Broh.
West African leaders meeting in Accra, Ghana, said that months of dithering would end this week with the dispatch of peacekeepers.
But rumours that a vanguard force would arrive today were played down by the Nigerian brigadier general who will oversee the deployment. Festus Okwonkwo told reporters that a deployment this week was ”unlikely”.
Washington has sent three warships packed with marines but has not said whether the marines will go ashore. The Pentagon hopes that the west African force will be enough to impose order.
The squabbles in Accra about funding and logistics have been compounded by the rebels’ refusal to stop shooting until the peacekeepers arrive.
President Charles Taylor has also refused to step down — the rebels’ main demand — until the foreign troops arrive, and his promise to accept a Nigerian offer of asylum is taken with a pinch of salt.
Analysts worry that the rebel force besieging Monrovia, Lurd, has no clear political agenda beyond removing Taylor, and that the chaos could continue after he falls. – Guardian Unlimited Â