Monrovia starves in sodden chaos

There is no escape from the fighting in the Liberian capital Monrovia, where a million people are starving to death, lashed by torrential rains, harassed by wild-eyed gunmen and afraid to venture out for fear of being hit by stray bullets or blown up by the mortar shells that land randomly in the city centre. "Everybody is trapped, it doesn't really matter which direction you go in," one foreign visitor to Monrovia told IRIN by telephone on Tuesday as forces loyal to President Charles Taylor traded automatic arms fire with rebels in the background. "This is a people being slowly starved to death," he added. "There are no food supplies coming in and there is no rice left. There is very little food and there is rain coming down. There are appalling sanitary conditions. People are very sick, lots of coughing and respiratory diseases." From the north, fighters of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement have been battling their way into the city centre for the past 11 days. LURD have seized the port and according to local businessmen who are anxiously trying to keep track of imported goods trapped there, they have emptied its warehouses of rice and other food stocks. From the southeast, another rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) is closing in on the international airport. MODEL fighters seized the port city of Buchanan, 100 km down the coast from Monrovia on Monday and declared that Robertsfield international airport - the capital's last remaining link with the outside world, would be their next target. "The feeling here is that they will run out of food within a week," said the foreign visitor, adding that he had watched displaced people in the Samuel Doe sports stadium boiling up leaves and roots scavenged from patches of greenery to make a thin broth. "Something will have to give in the next three or four days, otherwise LURD will starve the city into submission," he added. The little food that is available has rocketed in price and is beyond the means of most Monrovia residents, up to 300,000 of whom have been forced to flee their homes by three LURD attacks on the city over the past two months. "Very few of them have any money and there are no aid agencies operating other than the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), MSF-France, MSF-Belgium and Merlin," the foreign visitor said. He described how on Monday he accompanied officials of the medical charity Merlin on a fruitless search to buy food supplies. "The price of a large (45 kg) bag of rice has rocketed from US $20 to $75, but even then they were unable to find any." Monrovia's frightened civilians mostly cower indoors - if they are lucky enough to find somewhere with a roof - avoiding the dangers of the street. "Everywhere you go, every single house, every stairwell, anything that can offer shelter has people hiding behind it," the foreign visitor said. "Most of them have no food and no water - although it is raining so they catch some water from the roofs and everybody has a bit of water." And although the government and rebel forces are supposed to be fighting each other, it is the civilians caught in the middle who have suffered the most, getting hit by wildly inaccurate gunfire and the random firing of mortar and rocket propelled grenades. The government says over 1,000 people have died in the latest battle for Monrovia. "As you go round town, the only injured and wounded people you see are civilians," the visitor said, adding that the wards of John F Kennedy hospital, the main hospital in Monrovia, told exactly the same story. "You only see the odd wounded soldier there," he noted. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) talks of sending in a peacekeeping force to restore order and allow humanitarian agencies to resume relief work and the United States has put a sea-borne force of 2,300 marines on stand by for possible intervention. However, neither wants to go in until an effective ceasefire has been established on the ground. The foreign visitor said there was a fat chance of that. "Neither of the sides are capable of controlling their forces to observe a ceasefire," he said. "It would break down immediately." He bitterly attacked the international community for mouthing words of concern, but doing nothing concrete to alleviate the suffering. "Nobody is covering themselves in glory here, whether the regional powers or the US," he said. "The feeling here is that the Americans are behind LURD and that they have brought them here and want them to come in and end the thing." The visitor, a veteran of many African conflicts, said he had never seen such human misery. "In Somalia it was just famine. Here there is the rain too...it is like the Warzaw ghetto," he said, referring to the Soviet siege of the Polish capital when it was still occupied by Nazi forces in 1944.