Weekend of fighting threatens Liberia’s fragile peace

LIBERIA’S week-old peace deal appeared under growing pressure yesterday after a weekend of ceasefire violations and an unconfirmed radio report of a massacre of 1,000 people in the remote and lawless Nimba County.

The reports of fighting also underlined the need for West African peacekeepers to spread out from the capital Monrovia.

US helicopters flew reconnaissance flights on Sunday, ahead of the peacekeepers’ deployment toward the rebel-held second city Buchanan, to secure an area where weekend gunfire triggered an exodus of terrified civilians.

The Liberia Broadcasting System said many civilians had been massacred by rebels in Bahn, some 150 miles northeast of Monrovia in Nimba County, where even the most intrepid foreign aid workers have not dared to venture for three years.

The radio quoted one source in the area as saying 1,000 civilians had been killed, but there was no independent confirmation.

Information Minister Reginald Goodridge said he had no additional information and was waiting to hear back from security officials. “We are monitoring the situation,” he said.

The radio report said Liberia’s smaller rebel faction, known as Model, had carried out the massacre.

But security sources in Monrovia said that although they had reports of many people killed in fighting in the area, they believed it involved the other rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).

Government forces and LURD fighters accused each other of repeatedly attacking the others’ positions at another location some 30 miles west of Bahn, in violation of the peace accord signed on August 18 in Ghana.

In a statement, LURD called on ECOMIL peacekeepers to halt what it described as abuses by a militia supporting exiled former president Charles Taylor.

ECOMIL peacekeepers, so far deployed only in the capital, are eventually due to be joined by soldiers from around the world and become a UN mission, giving them more clout.

The peace deal is designed to set up an interim government to guide Liberia toward elections.

The warring parties settled on Gyude Bryant, a low-profile Monrovia businessman viewed as a consensus builder, to lead the transition.

Caretaker President Moses Blah, due to hand over to Bryant in October, succeeded Taylor, who quit under international pressure earlier this month.

Since Taylor launched a rebellion in 1989 to win power, Liberia has seen little but violence, and has been the epicentre of a regional cycle of bloodshed in which 250,000 people have been killed.

Taylor is now in exile in Nigeria.