West African Group to Send Troops to Liberia
By FELICITY BARRINGER
NITED NATIONS, July 23 — With Liberians in the besieged capital of Monrovia running out of food and water and rebel forces breaching key defensive lines in the city, a regional West African group under intense pressure from the United Nations announced today in Senegal that it would send at least 1,000 peacekeeping troops to the besieged capital of Monrovia within the next two weeks.
At the United Nations in New York, officials reported that a vanguard battalion of Nigerian infantry could be transferred to Monrovia from its current peacekeeping duties in Sierra Leone as early as next week, if logistical and financial hurdles can be overcome. In addition, Nigeria has offered a second battalion, of 650 men, the group of West African foreign ministers announced.
The arrival of a Nigerian vanguard could begin a sequence of events that, United Nations officials hope, would end with the departure of President Charles G. Taylor and a firm American commitment of peacekeeping troops. Earlier this week, the Pentagon has moved an amphibious group carrying 2,000 marines into the Mediterranean Sea.
In an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Mr. Taylor said he would step aside "within 10 days" and hand power to Yundueh Monorkomna, the speaker of the Liberian House of Representatives.
But announcements of plans that will take days to bear fruit meant little to tens of thousands of displaced people in the capital, whose situation was growing more desperate by the hour. Esther Johnson, who was wounded in a rocket attack earlier this week, told Agence France-Presse today: "People are dying too much. We have no food, no drinking water. If this situation carries on we have to jump into the sea."
Meanwhile, The Associated Press in Monrovia reported that rebels took control of the Stockton Bridge, a strategic point that puts them in position to cut off the road to the main airport and encircle the capital. A cease-fire announced by the rebel group on Tuesday never took hold.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in recent days as the rebels have advanced from the north, although the death toll figures have been a matter of dispute. Whatever the total, deaths have come so rapidly and amid so much small arms fire that bodies are left in the street as heavy rain continues to fall. The fighting has made cemeteries inaccessible, so this week the dead were buried in the city's beaches.
The A.P. reported that since this weekend the fighting cut off any new supplies of food and water.
Aid workers faced the same threats as the people they had come to serve. Oxfam America, which has about 10 workers in the Liberian capital, received reports today that cholera was rapidly spreading, according to Nathaniel Raymond, a spokesman at the group's Boston headquarters.
"We cannot find food to buy," Mr. Raymond quoted Paul Jaiblai, an Oxfam water engineer, as saying. "We drank our last drop of water from the tank this morning. How are we going to manage? Only God knows."
In Washington, a State Department official said that this account was consistent with the information he was receiving from the area.
The announcement of the West African peacekeeping force, made today in the Senegalese capital of Dakar by a spokesman for the Economic Community of West African States, renewed the hope that international intervention in Liberia would finally occur. Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, has been on the phone to regional leaders and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell almost daily, pressuring for quick action.
But as one United Nations official said today: "A lot of hopes in the past with this deployment have come and gone. Money remains an issue." He was referring to the West African countries' request for financial and logistical support to get their troops into Liberia with food, water and the necessary military supplies — like Jeeps, tents and ammunition.
And one of the United States prerequisites, an internationally recognized peace accord, has yet to be announced by negotiators in the Ghanaian capital of Accra. "Getting the troops there won't do anything unless they can broker some sort of political agreement to have a replacement for Taylor for the short of medium term," a state Department official said today.
In an interview published in The Washington Times today, Mr. Powell said, "We do have a historic link to Liberia, and we do have some obligation as the most important and powerful nation on the face of the earth not to look away when a problem like this comes to us."
He added, "We looked away once in Rwanda, with tragic consequences," referring to a 1994 genocide there. |
