Helicopters dropped the first US troops into Liberia yesterday, but President George Bush warned that a larger force would not follow the seven marines until the Liberian president, Charles Taylor, had left the country.
Taylor is expected to formally announce his intention to resign today, following a pledge to leave this Monday. Asked whether Taylor’s departure was a condition for a larger US deployment, Bush said: ”Yeah, we would like Taylor out.”
Taylor, meanwhile, has appealed to the international court of justice in the Hague to lift the war crimes indictment brought against him by the UN-backed special court in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
His lawyers said the warrant for his arrest violated ”customary international law”.
The ICJ rules on disputes between states.
Taylor has said that he will go into exile in Nigeria only when the war crimes charges are annulled.
The war crimes court in Sierra Leone indicted him for crimes against humanity this year, accusing him of backing and arming the Revolutionary United Front (Ruf) in the civil war between 1991 and 2001 which ended in Ruf’s defeat.
Ruf was accused of cutting off the hands and feet of its victims. At least 50 000 people were killed.
Taylor is held to have prolonged the misery by supplying the RUF with arms in return for diamonds.
His lawyers argue that as an incumbent head of state the president should have immunity from such charges, that Sierra Leone has no jurisdiction in Liberia, and that the Sierra Leone court is not an official UN or international court.
Sierra Leone must accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction.
The first seven US marines dropped into Liberia from the ships stationed offshore were described as part of a ”liaison element” to provide logistical support for the West African peacekeepers.
The US has a taskforce of about 2 300 marines off the coast, but the White House has been reluctant to involve its forces directly in Liberia. They are already stretched by their commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and other global missions.
And Washington remembers the US peacekeeping nightmare in Somalia a decade ago, when it pulled its troops out after 18 were killed in an October 1993 battle with militia fighters, and the corpses of some of their soldiers were dragged by mobs through the capital, Mogadishu.
But the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, said on Tuesday that any US involvement in Liberia would not fail.
”I don’t know who’s talking about Somalia. This is not the same situation,” he said at a briefing in the Pentagon.
Last night the UN asked member governments to donate £42,8-million in emergency aid to provide food, clean water and shelter for a million people in Liberia.
”This is a country that is desperately in need,” Jacques Paul Klein, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan’s special envoy for Liberia, told a meeting of 50 donor countries. – Guardian Unlimited Â