Taylor agrees to cede power on August 11

Embattled Liberian president Charles Taylor has agreed to cede power on August 11, West African envoys and Taylor’s spokesman said today.

The announcement came after envoys presented Taylor with a Thursday deadline, set by his fellow regional heads of state, to cede power.

“It is anticipated that on Monday the 11th he will formally hand over power,” said Nana Akufo-Addo, Ghana’s foreign minister.

Akufo-Addo spoke after he and other regional delegates met Taylor in the Liberian leader’s mansion, as fighting surged in the city outside.

Taylor’s spokesman, Vaanii Passawe, confirmed the new August 11 date.

There was no word, however, of when Taylor might leave the country and head into exile, as regional heads of state have also demanded.

“West African leaders seemed to understand that leaving the country within three days is not practical,” Passawe said after the talks.

Taylor has made repeated pledges to leave Liberia since June 4, when a UN-Sierra Leone court announced a war-crimes indictment against him for his support of rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

The Liberian leader has repeatedly made and broken other accords in 14 years of Liberian conflict, which Taylor, then a warlord, began at the head of a small insurgency in 1989.

Today’s meeting appeared to make some progress by committing Taylor to a date to leave power.

Authorities did not say to whom Taylor would transfer power.

He previously has said it would go either to Liberia’s speaker of the house or vice president.

Heads of state, in a summit late last week in Accra, Ghana, committed themselves on Monday to sending peacekeepers to Liberia, where rebels pressing a three-year-old war to oust Taylor have Liberia’s capital under two months of deadly siege.

By Thursday, three days after the deployment, Taylor must leave, the West African leaders said then – an unusually forceful message to a peer, delivered under strong UN and US pressure.

Rebels are waging an intensifying campaign to capture Monrovia and oust Taylor, who won the presidency in 1997, after emerging as the strongest warlord in the country’s 1989-96 civil war.

Fighting accompanying two months of rebel offensives have killed well over 1,000 civilians in Monrovia.

Hostilities have cut off the port and the main water plant, leaving the city of more than 1.3 million desperately short of food and water, and falling prey to cholera.

Heavy fighting broke out again at Monrovia’s port today, where rebels are battling to cross bridges toward downtown, the heart of Taylor’s government.

Pickup trucks full of government fighters rolled toward the city’s front. Residents and fighters claimed Taylor’s forces had crossed over into Bushrod Island, site of the rebel-held port.

“We are crossing in numbers,” yelled one government soldier, bouncing by in a pickup.

West African leaders have pledged to deploy at least 300 Nigerian forces on Monday, to be followed days after by troops of Ghana, Senegal and Mali.

West Africans have called for a total of 5,000 regional peacekeepers.

The UN Security Council approved deployment of the multinational force yesterday. The deployment was to last two months, and to be followed by UN peacekeepers.

Saturday marked six years to the day since Taylor took office for a six-year term as Liberia’s president, after emerging as the strongest warlord in a seven-year civil war that he had launched.

Taylor’s camp has insisted that his term actually lasts until January – saying that is the constitutionally set date for the oath of office to be delivered.