MONROVIA, 3 August 2003 — Embattled Liberian President Charles Taylor agreed yesterday to step down on Aug. 11, a week after West African peacekeepers arrive to try to end the bloodshed in his ravaged nation.
“At 11.59 a.m. on Monday (Aug. 11) I will step down and the new guy will be sworn in,” he said after meeting with envoys from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) who had come to Monrovia to tell him to resign and head into exile.
One of the envoys, Ghana’s Foreign Minister Addo Akufo Addo, said after the meeting that Taylor had also “reiterated his commitment to leave the country after formally handing over power.” The Liberian warlord-turned-president, whose resignation announcement came six years to the day after he was sworn in as president, did not say who his successor might be.
Nigeria, the region’s economic and military giant, had offered Taylor asylum if he agreed to resign as president of a nation that has suffered more than a decade of recurring civil wars that have killed hundreds of thousands. It is also sending a 1,500-strong advance guard of peacekeeping troops who are due to start arriving tomorrow in Monrovia to enforce a truce agreed in June by the warring government and rebel forces but largely disregarded.
ECOWAS had insisted Taylor leave within three days of the arrival of the first troops. But the Ghanaian foreign minister seemed to have dropped that ultimatum, saying that the Liberian president has to be “congratulated” on agreeing to step down.
As Taylor made his statement, fierce fighting between rebels and government forces continued in Monrovia, as well as in Buchanan, the southeastern port and second city. The main rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rose up against the warlord-turned-president nearly five years ago and now controls four-fifths of the country. The rebels have been besieging the capital for the last two months.
More than 200,000 displaced people are living rough there amid a crippling shortage of food, water and medicines. Hundreds have died in the fighting.
Yesterday government forces fought their way across two front-line bridges in what was an offensive aimed at recapturing the city’s rebel-held port. Loyalist troops crossed the two key bridges, the site of a two-week standoff with the rebels, under a heavy barrage of rocket and mortar fire and entered Via Town, a city district separating central Monrovia from the port area.
