Liberia's eleventh hour
On the eve of the African Union summit, a hurriedly hashed-out cease-fire between Liberia's warring factions appears to be more of a détente rather than an entente cordiale, writes Gamal Nkrumah
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A woman cries as navy officers refuse her entry onto a ship leaving the Liberian capital Monrovia which has been the scene of a stampede last Thursday when thousands of people tried to flee the war-torn city; a French soldier searches a Congolese man at the Dele checkpoint near Bunia, northeastern Congo. The French international force intensified patrols as hundreds of residents displaced by war flooded home
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The second summit of the 53-member state African Union (AU) commences on 4 July 2003 in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. Outgoing AU Chairman South African President Thabo Mbeki will officially cede power to his Mozambican counterpart Joachim Chissano at the unprecedentedly drawn-out 10-day summit. More than 30 African heads of state and government are scheduled to attend the Maputo summit.
While Africa's debt burden, development, economic recovery and health issues all feature prominently on the AU summit's agenda, resolving civil wars and strengthening peace initiatives in trouble spots such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Liberia look to prove more pressing. The deplorable humanitarian catastrophe among the civilian population in Liberia is of particularly urgent concern. Finding a way out of the political impasse in these war-torn countries is expected to top the agenda at the Maputo summit.
The disastrous situation in Liberia has attracted much attention days before the Maputo summit. Armed opposition groups, fighting a war by proxy against the Liberian government, have rendered much of the country ungovernable. Innocent civilians are caught in the middle. One million people, almost a third of the country's population have sought shelter in the Liberian capital Monrovia.
With this humanitarian crisis rapidly unfolding, there have been calls for a foreign peacekeeping force to enter Liberia. British and French military intervention in Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast respectively has ensured a modicum of peace. Despite the challenge posed by President Bush's public call for his resignation, Liberian President Charles Taylor has spoken in favor of the rapid deployment of a US-led peacekeeping force to Liberia. "It is far more constructive to send a peacekeeping force to Liberia than to simply insist on my indictment," Taylor told Al-Ahram Weekly. The Liberian president said that he is prepared to relinquish power "if it will stop the genocide" in his country.
Still, not all is lost for Taylor. Even by his critics' admission, he commands considerable popular support in Liberia. On the military front, Taylor's elite Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU) is a formidable fighting force, and Taylor has retained the unquestioned loyalty of the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL).
The international community, so far, seems indifferent to Liberia's tragedy. International relief assistance has ground to a halt. Thus far, the international community and especially Western powers, have proven hesitant to dispatch peacekeeping forces to Liberia. However, there is widespread anticipation that US President George W Bush will announce his readiness to dispatch a peacekeeping force to Liberia just before he embarks on his African tour from 7 to 15 July.
With their world collapsing around them, Liberians are demonstrating by the hundreds of thousands in front of the US Embassy in Monrovia in a desperate bid to persuade the Bush administration to sanction US intervention. Thousands of Liberians are fleeing the country, some in utter hopelessness resorting to perilous sea journeys in dugout canoes. Other refugees are caught in the crossfire as they desperately seek a way to escape the country.
Armed Liberian opposition forces, said to control more than 60 per cent of the country's territory, have converged on the Liberian capital Monrovia. The capital comes under periodic attacks so intense that the inhabitants have abandoned the outskirts of the city. Swollen with refugees, the city centre has become a death trap due to the paucity of potable water, food supplies and medicine. The war is killing an estimated 500 Liberians a week, and the civilian death toll is on the rise. Looting, gang warfare and street fighting is rife, compounding the problems of the urban civilian population. Faced with international condemnation of the warring parties' behavior, President Taylor has warned his militias that they will face court martials if they continue to loot residential and commercial properties in the capital.
The chief Liberian armed opposition groups waging war on the Taylor government are the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). Both LURD and MODEL are essentially ethnic-based organisations with atrocious records of gross human rights violations and violence against innocent civilians. MODEL has its strongest support in southeast Liberia among the Krahn ethnic group, while the northern-based LURD, though incorporating a substantial number of Krahn, draws heavily on the backing of the predominantly Muslim Mandingo peoples.
LURD is widely seen as a proxy of Guinea -- its leader Sekou Conneh and his politically influential wife Ayesha have strong ties with the government of Guinean President Lansana Conteh, an archenemy of Charles Taylor. Neighbouring Guinea, Taylor complains, is the springboard from which attacks on his government's strongholds are made. Sierra Leone, meanwhile, has been supporting Guinea's efforts to weaken or overthrow Taylor.
Liberia's neighbour to the east, Ivory Coast, has been propping up MODEL in retaliation for Taylor's backing of Ivorian armed opposition groups. Liberia's chief problem complicating its regional politics is that bilateral relations with each of its three immediate neighbours have been irreparably damaged. Worse yet, Taylor has not endeared himself to the three most influential Western powers in West Africa -- the United States, Britain and France. All three have serious reservations about Taylor's regional ambitions and charge him with politically and militarily destabilising his West African neighbours. Western countries, led by the US, have embarked on a systematic campaign to ostracise Taylor's Liberia from the international community, instituting a United Nations ban on receiving Taylor and his ministers.
Last month, while he was out of the country attending peace talks in Ghana, Taylor was issued an indictment by the UN Special War Crimes Court for Sierra Leone. Outraged, Taylor promptly returned home to denounce the charges alleging he had committed gross human rights violations in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and that he was involved in gun running and diamond smuggling. His detractors claim that he has profited enormously from trafficking 'blood diamonds', produced in war zones.
Nigeria, the most populous and politically influential West African nation, and Ghana, a bastion of democracy and political stability in the region, have taken it upon themselves to resolve the Liberian crisis. Both Nigeria and Ghana work closely within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) -- the 16-member regional economic organisation to which Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone also belong. ECOWAS has sponsored Liberian peace talks and pledged to send a 5,000- strong peacekeeping force. LURD and MODEL declared a truce last week after Liberian government forces checked their advance on the capital. Previous cease-fire arrangements brokered by ECOWAS have failed to hold, and ECOWAS now is asking Washington to contribute meaningfully towards the peacekeeping effort in Liberia. At a recent summit meeting in the Nigerian capital Abuja, ECOWAS Secretary-General Mohamed Ibn Chambas urged the US to contribute troops for the peacekeeping mission in Liberia. "At this point we need to see the US rise up to the occasion," he said.
