Rebels hit port city as envoys back peace force

REBELS attacked government forces in Liberia’s second-largest city yesterday, stepping up war against President Charles Taylor on a second front as insurgents in Monrovia pressed their siege of the bloodied capital.

As fighting erupted in Buchanan, an Atlantic coastal city 60 miles south-east of the capital, West African, US and UN envoys negotiated a long-promised peace force for Liberia seen as crucial to ending the latest round of warfare.

Launching the offensive in Buchanan was the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, the country’s second-largest rebel group which until recently had largely heeded ceasefire pledges.

“We received attack in Buchanan,” Defence Minister Daniel Chea said. “There is fighting going on there now.” Workers of the British aid group Merlin also said there was gunfire in the city.

Buchanan contains the only significant port still in government hands, after rebels of the main rebel group - Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy - seized Monrovia’s port on July 19.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled to Buchanan in recent days, escaping the rebel siege of Monrovia, now in its ninth day.

The Movement for Democracy in Liberia has fewer fighters than the larger group but is believed to be better disciplined and better armed. It is allegedly backed by neighbouring Ivory Coast, which seeks to block incursions onto its soil by Liberian fighters.

In Monrovia, government and rebel forces continued to battle for strategic bridges leading from the port to the city’s downtown, the symbolic heart of Taylor’s government.

One rocket, fired by Taylor’s troops from a high building, fell short and ploughed into the bedroom of a home on the government-controlled side of the capital, injuring eight civilians, aid workers said. Shelling and other fighting accompanying rebel assaults on the city have killed hundreds of civilians since June. With Monrovia’s port in rebel hands, the refugee-choked city of more than 1.3 million is desperately short of food, water and aid. Hunger and disease are building.

Insurgents are driving home their three-year-old war to force out Taylor, a former warlord blamed in 14 years of near-continual conflict in once prosperous Liberia.

Monrovia’s people increasingly speak of the promised peace force with impatience, and despair. “We are hoping the peacekeeping forces are coming this week to relieve us of all this misery,” said the Rev Franklin Holt, president of Monrovia College, where up to 2,000 people have taken shelter in the campus’ concrete buildings. “They are very late. Extremely late.”

The United States has said West African nations and the UN must take the lead in any multinational rescue mission.

Officials of debt-strapped Nigeria, the region’s military power, say debates about who should bear the cost are slowing deployment, and have asked the United States for greater assistance.

Under international pressure to intervene, President George W Bush has ordered US ships to take up positions off the coast of Liberia to offer still-unspecified support. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Sunday repeated US insistence that any American role would depend on the West Africans deploying first, and on Taylor leaving.

Taylor, offered asylum by Nigeria, says he will leave only when peacekeepers arrive. Since June, the embattled president has held out promises to resign, only to hedge on timing or renege.