MONROVIA, 31 July 2003 — Dozens of civilians have been killed in fighting between rebels and President Charles Taylor’s forces for control of Liberia’s second city of Buchanan, residents said yesterday. Rebels seized the strategic port city on Monday, tightening the noose around Taylor, a former warlord who is battling with another rebel faction for control of the capital Monrovia.
“There are bodies all over the place. Dozens of people have been killed,” said one resident by telephone. “The wounded are on the streets and there is no way to treat them.” The reports revealed a city sinking into the kind of horror that has gripped Monrovia, where seesaw battles around key bridges have raged for 12 days with hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire.
Another resident said the dead in Buchanan were being carted away in wheelbarrows when it was safe to retrieve them. West African pledges to send in peacekeepers have been hobbled by haggling over who should pay and concerns about the fighting on the ground. About 1,500 Nigerian soldiers are on standby to enter Monrovia’s streets but regional leaders want a truce first.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday asked the Security Council to approve the immediate deployment of the troops, saying he was deeply concerned. Rebels promised another cease-fire on Tuesday but like four other truces declared recently it never took hold. The government swiftly rejected it and the fighting never paused.
In Monrovia, the sound of gunfire ripped through the dawn air yesterday near the heavily contested Stockton Creek bridge on the road that bypasses the centre toward Taylor’s residence and the international airport. Sporadic shots rang out elsewhere and mortar fire killed one person in the West Point shanty district.
Taylor’s forces failed to recapture all of Buchanan on Tuesday in a heavy counterattack against rebels of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model), Liberia’s smaller rebel group. Residents said the rebels were hunting for officials of Taylor’s National Patriotic Party and also the Buchanan-based Oriental Timber Company, a big earner of the revenue that Taylor used to buy weapons in defiance of a UN embargo.
Among Model’s fighters are many people from the Krahn tribe of late dictator Samuel Doe, who was murdered during the civil war begun by Taylor nearly 14 years ago.
Model and rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), the rebel faction in Monrovia, hold two-thirds of Liberia and want Taylor, who has been indicted for war crimes by an international court, to leave now. “We have hardly any food left and there is nowhere to go. I didn’t even eat yesterday and I don’t know what I will find today,” said laundryman Sanders Sneh, 26, in Monrovia.
