Sniper fire as Monrovians await arrival of peacekeepers

WEST AFRICAN military officers searched for camp sites and made other preparations yesterday for the long-promised deployment of peacekeepers to Liberia’s rebel-besieged capital.

Meanwhile, Monrovia’s newly hopeful people awoke to only scattered gunfire.

Love Marshall, aged 16, sang as she danced her broom across the floors of an abandoned downtown hotel, battered and crowded by refugees from two months of rebel offensives.

“We want peace,” she said, even as snipers with President Charles Taylor’s militias occupied the heavily damaged building’s upper levels, overlooking the rebel-held port.

Despite occasional gunfire, no mortar explosions could be heard in Monrovia yesterday, bolstering the rising hopes of the battered city’s people.

Pressured by fellow regional leaders and the United States, Taylor promised Saturday to resign a week after the expected arrival today of 300 Nigerian peacekeepers. However, he refused to say when he would leave Liberia, as he has promised to do previously, and as West African leaders and the United States demanded.

A top government official cast doubt on whether Taylor will ever leave Liberia.

“The international community should give him a break. He’s made the ultimate sacrifice,” in giving up office, Information Minister Reginald Goodrich told The Associated Press on Sunday. “No one should ask him to do more.”

The Nigerian soldiers are to be the vanguard of a planned 3,250-strong force meant to impose calm between Taylor loyalists and rebels pressing home a three-year campaign to oust Taylor by capturing Monrovia. The remaining members of a 10-person assessment team laying the groundwork for the peacekeeping force were gathering supplies and surveying the main airport, said Col. Theophilus Tawiah of Ghana, the future force’s chief of staff.

Peacekeeping officials said the force expected rebels to withdraw from Monrovia’s port soon after the peace troops arrive, allowing food and other goods to reach the mission, aid groups and the nearly cut-off capital’s desperately hungry people.

West African force members were seen escorting a truckload of fuel through Monrovia where extreme scarcity has driven prices up to $25 a gallon. A half-ton of high-energy biscuits, part of an eventual 12-ton shipment, also arrived in Monrovia on Saturday, according to the World Food Programme. Separately, Save the Children said it planned to fly a jet loaded with 30 tons of emergency supplies, including cholera and rehydration kits, baby clothes and five tons of high-energy biscuits, to Liberia later yesterday.

At the Ducor Hotel, where Marshall sang and swept, other refugees said they hoped the force would be joined by troops from western nations, particularly the United States.

Liberia was founded in the 19th century by freed American slaves, with military backing from the United States government.

“We like the Nigerians, but we want some few Americans or British, to help them out and ensure the stability of our country,” said Timothy Holpe, aged 45.

Mortar barrages, gunfire and other fighting during the siege has killed well over 1,000 civilians in the city of 1 million, now crowded with hundreds of thousands of refugees. Tens of thousands of the war-displaced Liberians, beset by hunger and disease, are holed up in schools, churches and a soccer stadium.

Defence Minister Daniel Chea reported heavy fighting yesterday in Buchanan, Liberia’s second-largest city, where he said government fighters were trying to “push the rebel scumbags out.”

It wasn’t possible independently to confirm the report. Representatives for the insurgents weren’t available for comment.

Taylor said he would step down the morning of August 11 “and the new guy will have to be sworn in by midday.” Taylor has said he will hand power to one of two longtime colleagues, Nyundueh Monkomana, Liberia’s speaker of the house, or Moses Blah, his vice-president.

Taylor has been promising to surrender power since June 4, when a UN-Sierra Leone court announced a war-crimes indictment against him for his support of rebels in that country in a brutal civil war. However, he has reneged or hedged on previous pledges.