Taylor delays meeting with African envoys as fighting erupts

Liberian President Charles Taylor disappeared from public view on Friday, leaving West African envoys who had come to discuss his departure into exile in Nigeria, waiting in vain to meet him. Ghanaian foreign minister Nana Akufo-Addo told reporters several hours later that the meeting had been postponed until Saturday morning and the delegation would wait to see him then. Akufo-Addo was leading a delegation from The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which decided on Thursday to send Nigerian troops to Liberia on Monday as the vanguard of a multi-national peacekeeping force. ECOWAS also resolved, at an emergency summit in Accra, that Taylor should resign as president and leave Liberia within three days of the peacekeepers arriving. Taylor "vanished" on Friday as fierce fighting resumed between government forces and the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement in central Monrovia. Eyewitnesses said the exchanges of mortar and heavy machine gunfire were the heaviest that had taken place in the capital for several days. At least nine civilians were killed, including four children, they added. One man caught in the thick of the gunfire said he saw two wounded government fighters being driven to a makeshift hospital in the boot of a taxi. Their guts were hanging out of their stomach where bullets had ripped into them. General Benjamin Yeaten, the government's military chief of staff, said Taylor had gone to Buchanan to supervise government attempts to recapture the city from another rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). He urged government soldiers to remain at the posts and continue fighting. "We are fighting a war of survival and I call on all military personnel to get up and gain strength and fight back," Yeaten told reporters on Friday night. "President Taylor is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Liberia and he deemed it necessary to visit the battle frontline, most especially the situation in Buchanan," he added. Yeaten said the government was also battling MODEL fighters in Nimba County in northern Liberia, where they had attacked Toweh, the home town of Vice-President Moses Blah. Seasoned observers of Taylor's behaviour said his reported visit to Buchanan was most unusual. Taylor almost never went to the frontline when fighting was under way , they noted. In order to go to Buchanan, a port city 100 km southeast of Monrovia, Taylor would have had to pass the airport, where the visiting foreign ministers were waiting to meet him, they added. Akufo-Addo flew to Liberia with the foreign ministers of Nigeria, Senegal and Togo to meet Taylor and discuss arrangements for him to resign and go into exile. Although Taylor has been indicted for war crimes by a UN-backed Special Court in Sierra Leone for his role in formenting that country's civil war, he has been offered political asylum in Nigeria. ECOWAS sources in the Ghanaian capital Accra told IRIN that if Taylor failed to show up on Saturday for the delayed meeting, the Nigerian vanguard of the peacekeeping force would go in on Monday regardless. "There will be no delays in the deployment of the force," one official said. "The delegation of foreign ministers and the ECOWAS executive secretary will wait to meet him (Taylor). But should that not happen for whatever reason, the deployment of troops will take place on schedule." Rapid advances by both rebel movements over the past three months have left Taylor's government holding little more than the central and eastern districts of Monrovia and a few nearby towns. His forces lost Buchanan to MODEL on Monday and have been fighting hard to prevent LURD from capturing the rest of Monrovia and the northern town of Gbarnga. A ceasefire agreed at peace talks in Ghana on June 17 lies in tatters and Monrovia's one million population is on the verge of starvation. An ECOWAS summit in Accra on Thursday decided that a force of 1,500 Nigerian troops should move into Liberia by Monday as the vanguard of a 5,000-strong international stabilisation force. It also demanded that Taylor step down as president and leave the country within the following three days. A US naval task force carrying 2,300 marines was due to arrive off the coast of Liberia on Saturday, but Washington has so far been reluctant to commit ground troops to the West African-led peacekeeping operation. This will be the third bout of foreign military intervention in Liberia since the country slipped into civil war 14 years ago. Two previous deployments of ECOWAS forces between 1990 and 1997 both failed to bring lasting peace to the country of three million people, which was founded by freed American slaves in 1847. Friday's fighting in Monrovia was concentrated around three bridges across the Mesurado River which link Bushrod Island, where the rebel-held port is situated, to the city centre and the eastern suburbs. The port has been occupied by LURD since it launched its latest attack on Monrovia two weeks ago. ECOWAS officials said a vanguard of 300 Nigerian troops equipped with armoured vehicles would arrive in Monrovia on Monday from neighbouring Sierra Leone, where they are currently serving with a UN peacekeeping force. The rest would follow from Sierra Leone and Nigeria later in the week, they added. Ghana, Mali and Senegal have each offered to provide 250 men each for the force, the sources said. The ECOWAS summit in Accra decided to boost its strength to 3,250 men by the end of August. ECOWAS Executive Secretary Mohamed Ibn Chambas, who accompanied the four ECOWAS foreign ministers on their mission to to Liberia, told the Associated Press: "We will go and explain the decision of yesterday....The decision was very clear in its plain meaning: We will put in the troops on Monday. We expect him to be able to leave within three days. It's not a coup d'etat - it's a constitutional change of power." Citing Taylor's own pledges earlier to hand over power once peacekeepers arrive in Liberia, Chambas added: "He had made public undertakings. That's what the leaders of the region expect him to do." However Taylor's spokesman, Vaanii Passawe, called the Accra decision "a draft proposal", saying that Taylor would leave when he felt like it. "Any political arrangement that will take place in Liberia, will depend on [ongoing] negotiations in Accra between the warring parties of Liberia," he told reporters. LURD chairman Sekou Damate Konneh expressed scepticism that Taylor would go quietly. "Taylor is not going to leave except by force," he told reporters. "After the peacekeepers have been on the ground for three days, call me back then and we'll see." A LURD commander on Bushrod Island, General Kemoh alias "K1", told IRIN by telephone that his forces would not withdraw from the Freeport area until the West African peacekeepers arrived to take complete charge of security in Monrovia. Even then, the LURD would only withdraw to the Po river on the northern outskirts of the city after government troops withdrew from the city centre to Schiefflin barracks on the highway to the airport, he added. General Komeh admitted that his forces had burst into warehouses in the port belonging to the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in order to distribute some of the food there to thousands of civilians in the areas under LURD control. "The civilians complained of starvation," he said. "We did what we were supposed to do. The people were hungry and the WFP warehouse was full of food, so we used the food for the Liberian people because it was meant for them." Gregory Blamo, the acting head of WFP's office in Monrovia, said he had no idea how much of the 9,000 to 10,000 tonnes stored there had been removed. "People have reported seeing our food out in the LURD controlled areas. The LURD have also been seen using our trucks for transporting the food," he told IRIN. In New York, the UN Security Council started to examine a draft resolution presented by the United States to approve the immediate deployment of a multinational force with a robust mandate to stop the clashes in Liberia. This would be transformed into a UN peacekeeping force by October. "We submitted to the council a draft resolution that would mandate a multinational force that would go into Liberia in support of the ceasefire and the humanitarian situation and which would also pave the way for the prompt creation of a UN peacekeeping force thereafter," US Ambassador John Negroponte said. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said earlier this week that the rapid deployment of the ECOWAS vanguard force to Monrovia was "absolutely essential."