A handful of African leaders flew into war-ravaged Liberia on Monday for President Charles Taylor’s long-promised resignation, as rebels besieging the capital threatened to resume fighting if Taylor doesn’t leave the country immediately after handing over to his vice-president.
Taylor, dressed in a dark suit, drove out in the pouring rain to welcome South African President Thabo Mbeki, Ghanaian President John Kufuor, Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano and Togolese Prime Minister Koffi Sama at Liberia’s international airport — now also a base for a West African peace force.
Downtown, Nigerian and South African forces with automatic weapons and armoured vehicles guarded the executive mansion where Taylor had promised to turn over power to Vice-President Moses Blah at one minute before noon. But the ceremony was running late, and Taylor has reneged on his promise to step down before.
Blah waited with other Liberian and regional dignitaries in a gilded, velvet-draped room for Taylor to arrive at the mansion — without electricity and low on fuel, like the rest of the capital.
Outside, Monrovia’s beleaguered people cheered the Nigerian peacekeepers — part of a vanguard peace force meant to build to 3 250 West African soldiers — but reserved celebrations over the former warlord’s resignation until it was official.
The South Africans were part of a 100-strong security detail for Mbeki.
”I can hardly believe it. He has brought too much suffering on the Liberian people,” said Henry Philips, 38, a former security official. ”His absence is better than his presence.”
Many of the undisciplined, often-drugged Taylor fighters who had previously patrolled the area appeared to have slipped away into the city with their weapons.
Rebels have rejected Taylor’s choice of successor — a longtime ally and comrade in arms — and demanded that a neutral candidate be chosen to preside over a transition government until elections can be held.
On Monday, pickup trucks full of armed rebels raced toward the front as insurgents threatened to resume fighting if Taylor stays in the country after turning over power.
”Unless Taylor leaves the country by one minute past noon, I shall attack,” rebel chief of staff Major General Abdulla Seyeah Sheriff said from Monrovia’s rebel-held island port area. ”If Taylor leaves the country, there’ll be peace.”
Taylor has accepted an offer of asylum in Nigeria, but he has also hedged on when he will go.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was not attending Taylor’s resignation, but sent his foreign minister. Obasanjo aides said Taylor was expected in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Monday.
Two months of intermittent rebel sieges have left more than 1 000 civilians dead in Monrovia, as government and insurgent forces duel with the city of 1,3-million as their battlefield. The war has left Taylor controlling little but downtown, referred to derisively by rebels as Taylor’s ”Federal Republic of Central Monrovia”.
Under mounting pressure from the United States and West African nations, Taylor pledged to quit power on Monday. He remained defiant in a Sunday farewell address to the nation, declaring himself ”the sacrificial lamb” to end what he
said was a US-backed rebel war against his besieged regime.
He called the uprising an ”American war” and suggested it was motivated by US eagerness for Liberia’s gold, diamonds and other reserves.
”They can call off their dogs now,” Taylor said of the United States’s alleged support of the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd). ”We can have peace.”
On Monday, US ambassador John Blaney dismissed the charge as he waited for Taylor’s resignation ceremony to begin. ”We haven’t supported Lurd,” he said.
Government officials said the ceremony had been moved from a site in Independence Square to the executive offices since the originally planned venue lay too close to the urban front lines — and rebel guns.
Steel blinds guarded windows against assassination attempts, like a 1996 try on Taylor’s life in the same building, when two aides were killed.
International aid agencies estimate virtually all of Liberia’s roughly three million people have been chased from their home by war, at one time or another.
Taylor launched Liberia’s 14 years of near-constant conflict with a 1989-96 insurgency. He was elected president in 1997 on threats of plunging the country into renewed bloodshed. Rebels — including some of Taylor’s rivals from the previous war — took up arms against him two years later.
Taylor’s ragtag forces, paid by looting, are accused by rights groups and Liberia’s people of routine raping, robbing, torture, forced labour and summary killings.
Rebels, to a lesser extent so far, likewise are accused of abuse.
Perhaps crucially, Taylor made no direct mention in his Sunday address of his promise to leave Liberia.
Closing his speech, he declared: ”I will always remember you wherever I am, and I say, God willing, I will be back.” — Sapa-AP