Bush promises to send troops after Taylor leaves

The United States has promised to send troops to Liberia, but only in a second wave of peacekeepers, once President Charles Taylor has stepped down and left the country. Taylor has said he is ready to take up an offer of exile in Nigeria, but the question of who will replace him at the head of a transitional government charged with organising fresh elections remains unresolved. Peace talks between Taylor's representatives and two rebel movements in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, were supposed to have hammered out the shape of an interim administration by Thursday 17 July. However diplomats in West Africa who have been following the talks closely said on Tuesday that more time would be required. The participants in the peace talks agreed to thrash out the shape of a new transitional government within 30 days when they signed a ceasefire agreement on 17 June. However, the talks were interrupted by a renewed outbreak of fighting and Taylor's attempt to backtrack on his offer to stand down. As a result they have made slow progress. US President George Bush said on Monday he was prepared to send a limited number of US troops to Liberia for a short period to support a West African intervention force in the country until the United Nations could take over responsibility for peacekeeping operations. Bush, who had been resisting pressure from African and European governments and the UN to send US troops to Liberia, made the announcement after a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Washington. "I told the Secretary-General that we want to help, that there must be a UN presence, quickly, into Liberia," Bush told reporters. The president said he was waiting for a report from a US military assessment team in Liberia, before taking a final decision on the size of a US military operation to help end 14 years of civil war in the country. "What I am telling you is we want to help ECOWAS. It may require troops. But we don't know how many yet. And therefore it's hard for me to make a determination until I've seen all the facts," Bush said. "He [Annan] and I discussed how fast it would take to blue helmet whatever forces arrived, other than our own, of course. We would not be blue helmeted. We would be there to facilitate and then leave," Bush said. Military officials told reporters that 100 US military personnel, three helicopters and one C-130 Hercules transport plane from the US European Command flew to West Africa at the weekend to support the US assessment team. They would operate from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Senegal. Annan said the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was thinking of sending a vanguard of 1,000-1,500 troops into Liberia. Taylor would then leave and more international forces, including probably US troops, would arrive. "This is something that they have worked out amongst themselves and are now discussing in Accra with the US team...Eventually UN blue helmets will be set up to stabilise the situation, along the lines that we've done in Sierra Leone. Once the situation is calmer and stabilized, US [troops] would leave and the UN peacekeepers would carry on," Annan added. Bush has consistently demanded that Taylor leave Liberia before any US forces arrive. However Taylor has insisted that international peacekeeping forces arrive in the country to maintain order before he goes into exile. Diplomats following the peace talks in Accra said on Tuesday that some progress had been made in reducing the number of Liberian leaders aspiring to replace Taylor from 42 to less than 10. But they added that more time would be needed to negotiate a political settlement to underpin the shaky month-old ceasefire. Potential nominees for the interim president included Theresa Leigh-Sherman, leader of the Mano River Women Network for Peace; Togba Nah Tipoteh of the Liberian Peoples' Party, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a former UN official and presidential candidate; Ruth Perry, who served as interim president before the 1997 elections that brought Taylor to power, and Sekou Conneh, chairman of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement. Ghanaian President John Kufuor, the current chairman of ECOWAS, has talked of putting peacekeeping troops into Liberia within the next week and Nigeria has put two army battalions on standby. However, diplomats said the arrival of the first peacekeepers could be delayed further unless a Joint Verification Team (JVT) is allowed in rapidly to establish the ceasefire positions of the combatants on the ground. The team, which includes representatives of the Liberian government, LURD, and another rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) has been stuck in Sierra Leone for the past two weeks awaiting the green light to move in and begin work. The JVT, which also includes representatives of the UN, African Union, United States and the International Contact Group on Liberia, is due to map the positions held by each of the warring parties before peacekeeping forces are sent in to keep them apart. President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria made a one-day trip to Conakry on Sunday to discuss the situation in Liberia with Guinean President Lansana Conte, who is widely seen as the LURD's main backer. "We will now move rapidly to prepare the ground for President Taylor to take advantage of the asylum offered him," Obasanjo told reporters after the meeting. Taylor said on Monday he expected to leave Liberia shortly for Nigeria. But he gave no date. "I am not giving any time frame," he told US-based Fox News. "I believe that my time is in the hands of God. Only God will determine when that time is appropriate," Taylor said. The UN evacuated its international staff from Liberia in early June following a LURD attack on Monrovia, but an advance party of UN officials flew back to the city on Tuesday to prepare for a full-scale resumption of relief work there. Annan said last week that UN staff should return to Liberia. At the same time, he named Jacques Klein, a US diplomat who formerly served as head of the UN Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as his Special Representative for Liberia to lead and coordinate UN activities in the country.