LIBERIA-POLITICS: Troublesome Conflict Enters New Dimension

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Edward Ameyibor

ACCRA, Apr 11 1996 (IPS) - The conflict in Liberia entered a new dimension Thursday with reports that U.S. warships were heading for the country while West African nations that have kept peacekeepers there for five years contemplated a pullout.

Three U.S. vessels, including an amphibious assault ship with 500 marines on board, were reported to have sailed for Liberia from the Adriatic sea and were expected to arrive there sometime next week.

The United States has been evacuating its more than 400 citizens from Monrovia, while about 16,000 Liberians have sought refuge in the U.S. embassy compound from fighting that broke out over the weekend.

The latest round of trouble began when police acting on the orders of the country’s interim government attempted to arrest former militia leader Roosevelt Johnson on murder charges.

Johnson, sacked in March as minister for rural development after being deposed as leader of one of two wings of the United Liberation Movement (ULIMO), managed to escape with some of his followers and later linked up with militiamen from his Krahn ethnic group at the Barclay Training Centre (barracks) in the Liberian capital.

He contended that the interim government had no right to order an arrest since all faction leaders were autonomous pending national elections slated for August.

He also said he would not surrender to the police since they were all members of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), headed by Charles Taylor, and therefore incapable of rendering justice.

Heavy fighting, the worst Monrovia has seen since 1992, broke out Sunday when government troops tried to storm the barracks. The fighting, accompanied by looting, continued on Thursday.

There has been no official casualty count, but doctors attached to aid agencies in Monrovia reported treating about 50 people with bullet wounds on Wednesday and Thursday.

The fighting comes eight months after a peace agreement brokered by the Organisation of West African States (ECOWAS) that led to the formation in September of the Council of State, an interim government incorporating the heads of three of Liberia’s factions.

Other faction leaders were given cabinet posts.

The council is supposed to restore peace, disarm Liberia’s roughly 60,000 gunmen, and organise elections culminating in a civilian government on Jan. 1 next year, but this week’s fighting has thrown the process, already jeopardised by earlier unrest, further off track.

Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings, who is the current chairman of ECOWAS, issued two appeals this week to Liberia’s warlords, urging them to halt all hostilities.

On Wednesday, he called on the ruling council “to suspend immediately its action against General Roosevelt Johnson and to seek other avenues to resolve its differences with him and his ULIMO-J militia.”

He also appealed to the interim government “to do everything possible to save the lives of the many Liberians who have sought refuge at the Barclay centre (barracks) as well as the hostages.”

Johnson has been holding 400 hostages, including 20 members of ECOMOG, an ECOWAS peacekeeping force in Liberia since 1990, and a number of Lebanese traders and their families in the Barclay Training Centre.

“It must be made clear to the authorities in Liberia that neither the ECOWAS authority nor the wider international community will be prepared to accept the high casualty rate that would result, were the centre to be attacked militarily,” Rawlings said.

Ghana has also warned that unless Liberia’s factions gave the eight-month peace process a chance to work, ECOWAS could pull out its peacekeepers. Foreign Minister Obed Asamoah said this week that ECOMOG’s withdrawal was an option that was being considered.

Johnson’s forces killed 20 Nigerian ECOMOG troops in Tubmanburg, west of Monrovia, last December, thus breaking the peace agreement, signed in August in Abuja, Nigeria.

His dismissal from the cabinet followed his inability to control his poorly fed soldiers, left to their own devices as he, along with the other warlords, moved into posh residences when they returned to Monrovia. The ULIMO-J fighters’ indiscipline resulted in February in a series of skirmishes in the capital that resulted in four deaths.

This week’s fighting has pitted Johnson’s militiamen, joined by other Krahns from the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) against ULIMO- J, made up of Mandingos, and the NPFL, comprising Manos, Gios and other ethnic groups.

According to Asamoah, “the situation is very dangerous and could easily lead to a tribal war in Monrovia.” He said the Liberian Peace Council (LPC), another faction made up of Krahns, could join in the fray on Johnson’s side and “we shall then have a very nasty situation on hand.”

Rawlings Wedensday despatched his top security adviser, Captain Kojo Tsikata, to eight ECOWAS countries to discuss the crisis in Liberia. Tsikata has already held talks with senior government officials in Nigeria, which contributes 5,000 of ECOMOG’s 7,000 troops.

His other destinations are Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Guinea and Mali which, together with Ghana and Nigeria, form ECOWAS’ Committee of Nine. The committee has spearheaded the search for peace in Liberia, whose six-year civil war has forced at least half of its 2.5 million people to flee the country and has killed more than 150,000.

The envoy’s tasks include getting support for an urgent meeting of the committee. One was to have been held on Mar. 27, but was postponed at the last minute at the request of Nigeria, since it clashed with local government elections there.

If that meeting had taken place, “we could have pre-empted some of the developments now,” Asamoah said, mentioning problems that have jeopardised the August peace accord.

These include a move by some members of the six-man Council of State to call it a co-presidency, thus devaluing the position of its neutral chairman, university professor Wilson Sankawulo.

The Council includes George Boley of the LPC, Alhaji Kromah of the Mandingo wing of ULIMO and NPFL leader Charles Taylor, arguably the most powerful man in Liberia.

Other problems include the need to have a consensus before a council decision can be implemented, ECOMOG’s lack of equipment and shortage of manpower and scant financial support from the international community.

At the height of Liberia’s civil war, which began in 1989, ECOMOG had more than 12,000 troops backed by Nigerian air and naval power which, according to some estimates, was costing Abuja more than one million dollars a day. Nigeria later pulled out much of its heavy equipment and scaled down its contingent.

ECOMOG says it needs a similarly sized force now, but at a meeting of donors in New York in 1995, the largest contribution to the peace operation was just 10 million dollars from the United States.

The West African force is short of basic equipment from radios to trucks, although helicopters and vehicles contributed by the United States and the Netherlands have begun to arrive.

Donors have hesitated to fulfil a pledge of 150 million U.S. dollars for a programme of disarmament, encampment and reintegration of combatants into civilian life, preferring to wait and see if the peace process will hold, especially since previous agreements between Liberia’s factions have been shortlived.