ROME/MONROVIA, 4 August 2003 — The UN food agency has begun airlifting food into Liberia’s besieged capital for the first time since fighting erupted last month, and is appealing for the creation of a safe aid corridor to get more in overland.
A half-ton of high-energy biscuits arrived in Monrovia on Saturday from neighboring Sierra Leone, the World Food Program said yesterday. It’s part of a 12-ton consignment that is slated to feed 100,000 hungry Liberians in the city, at hospitals and in camps.
Separately, the Save the Children aid group said it planned to fly a jet loaded with 30 tons of emergency supplies to Liberia later Sunday.
“It is an expensive operation, but we have no choice,” Manuel Aranda da Silva, WFP’s West African regional director, said of the airlift operations. “People are crying out for food and this is the only way we can get aid into the city at the moment.”
Rebels waging a three-year campaign to oust Liberia’s warlord-turned-president, Charles Taylor, forced their way into the city on July 19, taking control of the country’s main port with its UN and commercial warehouses full of food.
WFP says it hasn’t had access to its warehouses since then.
Mortar barrages, gunfire and other fighting during the siege has killed well over 1,000 civilians in the city of 1 million. Tens of thousands of the war-displaced, beset by hunger and disease, are holed up in schools, churches and a soccer stadium.
Aid workers have appealed to both government and rebel forces to agree to a safe aid corridor across the front line so that relief supplies can get in more quickly over land.
“We need access to our stocks and we need it now,” Aranda da Silva said in a statement. “Quite simply, the humanitarian corridor is a matter of life and death for tens of thousands of people in Monrovia.”
The Save the Children plane is carrying 8.5 tons of cholera and rehydration kits, 150 bales of baby clothes and heavy plastic sheeting for emergency shelters, the group said.
The shipment also includes five tons of high energy biscuits, 10,000 collapsible jerry cans and enough water purification tablets to supply 10,000 families for 30 days.
Taylor has promised to resign Aug. 11 after the expected arrival of peacekeepers.
The first soldiers of a long-awaited west African peacekeeping force can expect a rapturous welcome if they arrive today as planned in the besieged Liberian capital.
Ukrainian troops on short-term loan from the United Nations force in neighboring Sierra Leone will secure Monrovia’s Robertsfield airport, allowing the first Nigerian peacekeeping battalion to be brought in, UN officials said.
After the first 776-strong infantry force is in place, a second will be airlifted in from Nigeria by a US contractor.
Ghanaian, Malian and perhaps other units will follow and the force grow to between 3,000 and 5,000 troops, say officials from the ECOWAS regional grouping.
Their robust UN mandate will give them authority to intervene to protect civilians, prevent cease-fire violations and escort much-needed aid.
International officials hope that the deployment will end the controversy that has delayed the latest attempt by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to bring succor to its most beleaguered member. The force has so far received less support than its founders would have liked from Liberia’s historical partner, the United States, with whom Nigerian officials have been haggling over the cost of deployment.
Yesterday a tiny group of west African soldiers guarding an advance body of officers scouting the terrain, was cheered by refugees clogging the streets around the US Embassy and EU missions in Monrovia’s diplomatic quarter.
“They must come, they must come. The Nigerians must come,” wailed 24-year-old Vrola Chea, a refugee from Monrovia’s embattled suburbs whose eyes were damaged when a shell burst over her head.
Junior Jackson, a wizened middle-aged man who described himself as a major in President Charles Taylor’s forces but has no gun, no uniform and apparently no men under his command, agreed.
