Morgues overflowing in battle for Monrovia

Mortuaries were filled to overflowing in the Liberian capital Monrovia today as the battle for control of the city continued.

Health minister Peter Coleman said between 200 and 300 civilians had been killed and 1,000 wounded in two days.

There was no word on government or rebel casualties.

Mortuary workers put the civilian toll in the ”hundreds,” describing morgues stacked with dead.

Shells and rockets pounded refugee crowded neighbourhoods as rebels pressed home their three year war to oust President Charles Taylor.

Soldiers commandeered private vehicles to collect more broken bodies from the streets of Monrovia at daylight today, working to a backdrop of pounding rain and crackling gunfire.

The fighting shattered a truce and raised the possibility of a deadly endgame for Liberia’s civil war: an all-out battle among undisciplined armies for the city of one million residents, now also packed with hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Taylor pledged to live or die with his troops, with rebels on three sides of the city and the Atlantic Ocean on the fourth.

The US Embassy opened the gates of its residential compound to Liberians seeking shelter, and thousands of them crowded in yesterday – hoping proximity to the Americans would mean safety.

Hours later, three pieces of ordnance – believed either mortars or rockets - landed within the high-walled compound and exploded, sending those taking refuge there running. Survivors rushed out bleeding victims, some missing limbs – using a wheelbarrow and bloodstained shirts as stretchers.

“Everybody in the world is sitting to watch us die,” a refugee, Suah Kolli, cried at Monrovia’s John F Kennedy hospital, where hundreds overflowed the hospital’s wards and sprawled, moaning and bleeding, in slippery hallways.

Government forces have lost at least 60% of the country to two rebel groups determined to drive out Taylor, who has been indicted by a UN war crimes tribunal that has accused him of fuelling West Africa’s conflicts for 14 years.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nigerian General Abdulsalami Abubakar, lead mediator for the Liberia talks, likewise condemned the fighting and urged all sides to honour their accord.

Last night, Britain’s UN Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock said the US was the “natural candidate” to intervene and enforce a ceasefire.

Liberia, a nation founded in the 19th century by freed American slaves, for decades was sub-Saharan Africa’s richest country, profiting off timber, rubber and close business ties to the US.

A 1980 rebellion overthrew the American-Liberian elite of returned slaves that had ruled Liberia since its founding.

Taylor, a US-educated warlord trained in the guerrilla camps of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, launched the country into war at the head of a small armed force in 1989.

The seven-year civil war that followed killed up to 200,000 and left the country in lasting ruin.

Taylor emerged from the conflict as the strongest warlord, and won presidential elections the following year.