Liberia 'basically destroyed', says UN envoy

Liberia is “basically destroyed” and the country’s only hope is for the international community to quickly send more aid to the war-ravaged West African country, the UN’s special representative to Liberia has said.

Jacques Paul Klein, an experienced US military adviser who headed the UN mission in Bosnia, welcomed news that Nigeria planned to send the first troops of a multinational force, but expressed doubt that the force would arrive in Liberia within a week as promised.

He also welcomed the US decision to provide $10m (€8.7m) to help the peacekeeping force deploy and he urged the United States to play a greater role.

“In Liberia now we stand between two options: hope and disaster,” Klein said after briefing the Security Council behind closed doors. “Hope that we can quickly move troops in, stop the killing and stabilise the situation. Disaster if nothing is done.”

Rebels are battling to oust Liberian President Charles Taylor, a former warlord who launched the country into 14 years of near-perpetual conflict in 1989.

Fighting between rebels and government troops in Monrovia has killed hundreds of civilians since Saturday, leaving bodies lying in the capital city’s streets and aid workers burying corpses on the city’s Atlantic Ocean beaches.

“I personally think an American presence of some kind, because of Liberia’s long association” is needed, Klein said.

The United States has not said whether it would contribute soldiers the peacekeeping force in Liberia, founded in the 19th century by freed American slaves.

John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said the $10m would be used to move soldiers, ammunition and other supplies into Liberia. But he indicated that the United States would send money, but not soldiers.

“My understanding is that the decision in principle has been made,” he said. “The two battalions that have been identified are Nigerian battalions. We’ve decided to provide the material support that I just mentioned to you – the 10 million.”

West African leaders announced on Wednesday that two Nigerian battalions totalling 1,300 soldiers would go to Liberia as the vanguard of what regional leaders said should be a 3,250-member peacekeeping force to separate Liberia’s warring sides.

Yesterday, UN diplomats speculated on reports that US ships in the Mediterranean would be sent to Liberia.

US defence officials in Washington said two of the three ships in the USS Iwo Jima amphibious ready group, which carries a total of 2,300 Marines, had entered the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

The officials, however, said the Marines were not expected to become part of a Liberia peacekeeping force but might be moved off the coast of west Africa in case Americans need to be evacuated.

Klein said the two battalions weren’t nearly enough to secure Liberia and said more money was desperately needed. With no country taking charge of the peacekeeping operation, the United Nations has been forced to take resources from the UN force in Sierra Leone, known as UNAMSIL.

“The country is basically destroyed,” Klein said. “The problems we’re going to have are the funding issues. We’re using UNAMSIL funding, that is the mission in Sierra Leone... There’s no mandate to do this, but we’re going to do it anyhow.”

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has recommended that the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone withdraw by December 2004.

Klein said borrowing resources from the Sierra Leone operation to help Liberia would create another set of problems, but that Annan felt he had little choice.

Klein said it would take the Nigerians “at least seven to ten days” to arrive in Liberia.

“I’m pleased that there will be one battalion on the ground to at least show that there’s some mature parties out there willing to engage and take this seriously while people are dying of cholera, dysentery dehydration,” he said.

After Klein’s briefing, the Security Council urged the rebels “to immediately stop its indiscriminate shelling of Monrovia” and for both sides to commit themselves to a peace agreement.

UN Ambassador Inocencio Arias, the current Security Council president, said the council hoped the international community would support the West African peacekeeping force and urged Taylor to leave Liberia as he had promised.