African peacekeepers 'in Liberia by Monday'

Pushed by the United States and the United Nations, West Africa’s leaders have broken a deadlock and announced that a long-promised peace force will be sent to Liberia’s war-torn capital within days.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Liberians spilled into Monrovia’s streets, celebrating the arrival of an advance military team.

Flashing peace signs, waving handkerchiefs and shouting for joy, residents and refugees came out of hiding places yesterday to welcome the 10-member team, which included one American – the first sign of a rescue.

“We want peace!” crowds chanted, thronging streets in front of the heavily-guarded US embassy.

In Accra, Ghana, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo and other West African leaders pledged to deploy the first 1,500 peacekeepers by Monday and to get embattled President Charles Taylor out of the country three days later.

The announcement came after weeks of promises to intervene, repeatedly stalled by deliberations over funding and broken ceasefires in Monrovia.

Over two months of rebel siege has killed more than 1,000 civilians in the capital, a city of one million that is choked with hundreds of thousands of refugees.

With the Atlantic Ocean port and the city’s water plant cut off by fighting, hunger, thirst, and epidemics of cholera are rife in Monrovia, hit nearly night and day by mortars, rockets and gunfire.

Nigeria, West Africa’s military power, was expected to provide two battalions, the vanguard of what regional leaders said should be a 5,000-strong foreign force.

The first battalion would arrive on Monday, peeling off from a United Nations deployment in neighbouring Sierra Leone, said Col Theophilus Tawiah, the future force’s chief of staff.

West African foreign ministers were due in Monrovia today, to meet Taylor.

The first task of the vanguard force would be to see that Taylor left, the heads of state declared in their statement.

Taylor, indicted by a UN-backed war crimes court for supporting rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone and blamed for 14 years of conflict in Liberia, is to hand over power to a successor within three days of the troops’ arrival, and accept an offer of exile in Nigeria, the leaders said.

The West Africans did not specify whether Taylor had agreed.

Since shortly after the rebels opened their attacks on the capital in early June, Taylor has said he would give up power. But he and his aides have repeatedly hedged on the timing, or reneged outright.