Under the gaze of top African leaders who attended the formal ceremony in the war-torn capital Monrovia, Liberian vice-president Moses Blah was sworn in on Monday as the West African country’s 22nd president.
The prospect of peace in Liberia, after 14 years of almost constant warfare, hinges on former president Charles Taylor’s final exit, seen as a turning point not only for his suffering countrymen but also for the rest of West Africa.
”It’s not only important, it’s critical,” Mohamed ibn Chambas, the executive secretary of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), said Monday of Taylor’s planned departure for exile in Nigeria, which has offered him asylum.
”President Taylor is living up to his promise … It’s a fresh start for Liberia, and we have no doubt that this process is irreversible,” he said.
The conflict here, which has claimed about 250 000 lives and scattered tens of thousands of refugees into neighbouring countries, has a complicated history in which regional powers have allegedly played a hand.
Taylor (55) is accused of fuelling conflict elsewhere, and neighbouring states Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire are widely considered to have supported rebellion within Liberia.
Taylor is indicted for war crimes by a United Nations-backed court in Sierra Leone, where he allegedly armed and trained the Sierra Leonean rebels during a barbaric decade-long civil war, in return for the so-called ”blood diamonds” mined by them.
He has accused Guinea of backing Liberia’s main rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd), and officials in Conakry say Taylor has also given support to Guinea’s own rebels.
Taylor’s government has also said Ivorian soldiers have crossed into Liberia to battle alongside a newer rebel movement, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model).
West Africans led by Chambas’s Ecowas bloc have sent a clear message to Taylor, now something of a regional pariah, that they are fed up with the conflict, which has created thousands of refugees and destabilised other governments.
On June 4, in Ecowas-brokered peace talks in Ghana, Ghanaian President John Kufuor — the current chairperson of the bloc — said Liberia’s ”killing fields” had been a scourge to the region.
”It has caused a humiliating damage to West Africa’s collective image and has reduced the region’s attractiveness as an investment destination,” he said.
On the same day, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, West Africa’s military powerhouse, which has sent peacekeepers for a second time into Liberia, said the region had paid a heavy price.
”The people of Liberia have bled enough. The people of West Africa have made enough sacrifices for Liberia,” he said.
If peace were to ensue after Taylor leaves, it would be a landmark success for regional peace-brokering efforts, and could reinforce further West African peacekeeping efforts.
It would not come too soon, as a humanitarian crisis has been pending in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, where about 250 000 people have been displaced and hundreds more have died in a two-month-long rebel siege.
Food, electricity, medicines and hope are in short supply, and civilians who have borne the brunt of the conflict are desperate for international aid, which has been slow in coming, despite the deployment of the Nigerian soldiers.
The Lurd, which holds more than 80% of Liberia along with the smaller Model insurgent movement, on Monday said it would not withdraw from the starved capital until Taylor was truly out of the country.
”Some of the clouds of suspicion will be lifted with the departure of Mr Taylor,” the rebels said in a statement on Monday.
But worries persist that Taylor’s departure will not end the cycle of violence, but rather leave a power vacuum to be filled by other parties to Liberia’s conflict.
Sam Jackson, Taylor’s Minister of Economic Effairs, warned on Sunday that Taylor’s departure would precipitate a wave of looting and violence.
”There’s a calamity waiting to happen,” he said. — Sapa-AFP