On August 11, at 11.59am exactly, Liberian President Charles Taylor will resign, paving the way for a lasting peace in West Africa’s most war-ravished country. Or not.
He will step down quietly, in accordance with the demands of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), leaving his deputy, Moseh Zeh Blah, to take his place. Or not.
He might even take up Nigeria’s very generous offer of asylum (and no doubt immunity) in a newly refurbished mansion overlooking the shores of the Creek Town river in Calabar. Or not.
It is three days before the Ecowas deadline for Taylor’s exit and no one really knows what he’s going to do. But if 14 years of instability and bloodshed under Taylor has taught Liberians anything, it is that his promises are worth less than the breath he expels to utter them.
Taylor has two options: he can leave as promised or he can choose to stay and fight it out in Monrovia. Neither option is all that rosy. If he stays, no one will support him other than his dwindling numbers of loyalist soldiers, whose capacity’s have been drastically weakened by a four-year punitive arms embargo against him by the United States and Britain (the world’s two most prolific arms dealers).
At the same time, the main rebel faction, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, enjoys considerable support from a coalition of interests opposed to Taylor.
They have a great deal of support from remnants of the former Samual Doe government as well as defectors from Taylor’s camp. Their leader, Sekou Conneh, has close links with neighbouring Guinea — a long time enemy of Liberia’s present rulers — and has regularly received arms shipments from the Guinean government.
On the other hand, if Taylor steps down he may lose the only bargaining chip keeping him from being indicted by a United Nations-backed war-crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone over his support for the rebels there. Having unconditionally promised to leave, Taylor is now relentlessly back-tracking, saying he will only leave if the indictment is dropped.
For its part, the UN is keen for Taylor not to get immunity out of this. Having been charged with supporting a group of thugs who made their name by chopping off the voting hands of innocent Sierra Leoneans, it would be a travesty if he were able to use his position as a warlord to permanently evade the hearing. Yet the latest reports from Nigerian negotiators suggest that this is precisely what he is trying to do.
In a sense Taylor is the most powerful actor in this whole drama. He knows that his exit is the only thing that can bring an end to a desperate crisis that has seen hundreds of civilians killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced. He may be content to dither until the international community is brought to its knees.
Meanwhile, delays in the roll-out of the peacekeeping force (it was originally scheduled for July 4) has exacerbated the humanitarian situation in and around Monrovia. The process has been held up partly by the US’s refusal to commit urgently needed well-equipped troops to the capital.
As US military interventions go, its hard to think of any in the past 50 years that have been less committal than this one. Although a grand total of seven US marines have now finally showed up in Monrovia, the Bush administration moved quickly to quell rumours that this was an advance party for a larger deployment.
Last Friday the US sent warships to the coast of Monrovia, but says it will only deploy troops once a ceasefire is in place, which, as Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told the BBC, is rather like sending a fire engine to the scene of a fire but only promising to help when the fire is out.
Ultimately, the real hope of the peacekeeping force is that it can manage without the US, whose lack of interest in the problems of the African country it created is only too apparent.
But concern that the 3 000-strong Nigerian-led peacekeeping force won’t be up to the job may be overstated. The Nigerians have a long experience of peacekeeping in the region (in Liberia and 10 years in neighbouring Sierra Leone under very similar conditions) to draw on. But they are poorly funded.
Reactions to the US’s stance on Liberia are mixed. Their fear of ”another Mogadishu” has certainly been greeted with understanding. Less understandable is the US’s deliberate delay in committing troops in order to score points against the International Criminal Court.
The Bush administration said they would not commit peacekeepers unless they can have full exemption from being prosecuted for war crimes. And they made a real point of delaying the decision to assist the urgently needed peacekeeping operation until extreme provisions to that effect are entered into the resolution.
Here the revulsion of the international community about US politicising the lives of Liberians is quite in order.
It would be ironic if the US’s contempt for the International Criminal Court ends up helping one of the world’s worst despots — who came to power by forcing young boys to go on cocaine-fuelled killing sprees — to escape international justice.