MONROVIA, 17 July 2003 — Liberia’s embattled President Charles Taylor will step down in line with a peace formula to end a four-year civil war but is under “tremendous pressure” not to go into exile, his spokesman said yesterday. “The president will leave office but he is under tremendous pressure from his partisans not to leave the country,” presidential spokesman Vanii Passewe said.
Asked whether Taylor would stay on in Liberia, possibly under the protection of armed guards, Passewe said: “I am not saying that, I am just saying there is this pressure.” Passewe recalled a meeting between Taylor and his supporters on Saturday, where they implored him to remain in the country, singing a ditty that went: “You can step down but you cannot leave.”
At the same rally, Cyril Allen, chairman of the ruling National Patriotic Party (NPP) had said: “The president cannot go into exile as he is a traditional chief and traditional chiefs do not depart from their country.”
The main rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), which has been fighting Taylor for four years and last month penetrated into the heart of the capital Monrovia, said the peace process would suffer if Taylor stayed.
“If he stays put, the peace process will be a fragile one,” LURD Deputy President Chayee Doe told AFP from Ghana where West African sponsored peace talks are under way following a cease-fire inked last month by the belligerents.
“In that case we will not walk out of the talks but we will ask the international community to put pressure on Taylor to leave. Everybody wants him to go.” US President George W. Bush has called for the west African leader to stand down, saying “he needs to go in order to create the conditions necessary for a peaceful solution.”
Taylor, a former warlord who played a key role in an earlier seven-year conflict in Liberia which ended in 1997 — the year he was elected — recently accepted an asylum offer from Nigeria after agreeing to quit under a west African brokered peace deal.
The Liberian leader, who now controls only a fifth of his war-ravaged country has not, however, given a date for his departure and has stressed he will not leave until an international peacekeeping force arrives to ensure a smooth transition in Liberia.
Taylor has also been charged with war crimes by a UN-backed court in Sierra Leone for his role in that country’s decade-long civil war, which was marked by extremes of brutality.
The composition of an interim government in Liberia is now in a logjam with the LURD and the government disputing who should lead the caretaker administration.
Sen. Mohamed Dukuly, the leader of the Liberian government delegation at ongoing peace talks in Accra has said Vice President Moses Blah would head the caretaker government in line with the constitution.
But LURD spokesman Kabineh Ja’neh said the rebels would resume fighting if this happened, adding that it would be tantamount to “a declaration of war” which would fuel “street to street combat” and end the peace parleys.
