MONROVIA, 10 August 2003 — At a corner on Monrovia’s main street, where a road cuts down toward the battle-scarred buildings lining the Mesurado River, hundreds of Liberians squat in rows staring blankly at the gunmen below.
“We come here every day. We want to go home,” Anathasius Carr, a rangy 27-year-old told AFP on Friday. “There’s no food. The fighting has died down, there’s been an improvement, but starvation is killing us.”
From where he was standing, he and his companions could see the New Bridge, which leads across the river to the suburbs which they fled three weeks ago when fighting broke out between rebel forces and the government.
It’s a short distance away, but the bridge is still held by a ragtag mob of President Charles Taylor’s fighters, a force dominated by teenage gunmen with women’s wigs, drug habits and itchy trigger fingers.
“Rice is five dollars a sack over there. Here it’s 100 dollars,” a voice in the crowd cried, summarizing the crisis still facing Monrovia’s 250,000 displaced people as West African peacekeepers arrived in the city.
The ECOMIL force is due to grow over the weeks and months to come, but the 500 or so Nigerian peacekeepers on the ground are already faced with their first big challenge: Reopening the front-line bridges across the river.
North of the Mesurado lies Bushrod Island and Freeport, the city’s main harbor, home to aid warehouses and a deepwater dock capable of receiving the tons of food and medicine needed to deal with the crisis.
The Nigerian general in charge of the peacekeepers, Festus Okonkwo, attempted to meet with the rebel force, LURD, on Friday to discuss taking control of the port. He will try again.
Along with the US diplomats attempting to broker a solution to the standoff, he is facing a tough struggle to convince the rebels to back off their key prize before Taylor makes good his promise to quit the country.
Richard Lee, Monrovia coordinator of the World Food Program, told AFP: “We’ve food stocks in the port. We do need peacekeepers to get in there.”
When the peacekeepers launched their second day of patrols in the government zone the crowds were just as enthusiastic as the day before, with hundreds turning out to cheer them on their way through the Sinkor district.
But among all the smiles and cries of “thank you, Oga” — a Nigerian term for “boss” still remembered in Liberia from the ECOMOG peacekeeping mission in the 1990s — people also gesture toward their mouths. Peace may be coming, but the people of Monrovia are still hungry. When a Nigerian soldier tossed a small pack of biscuits into the throng from the roof of his white armored personnel carrier, there was a mini-stampede.
Annie Yasa, a 24-year-old mother with a solemn face in a city which greets visitors with a smile despite its problems, said: “We want to go back home. Our children are dying. The Nigerians should take the bridge.”
In the West Point district, which bore the brunt of rebel shelling during the three-week-old siege of the city, Medecins Sans Frontieres coordinator Patrick Broh told AFP that some malnourished children were indeed dying.
Aid workers have begun to bring in high energy biscuits as a stopgap measure, but the port remains the key both to the humanitarian mission and to political efforts to resolve Liberia’s latesy five-year-bout of bloodletting.
LURD commanders told US officials Friday that they would only give up the port when they had received an order from their political leadership to do so, and warned that they would fight on if Taylor remained in the country.
Taylor is due to step down tomorow, and Nigeria is preparing to receive him in exile, but there is a small window for Okonkwo’s peacekeepers to get a significant “interposition force” between the two sides.
For the crowd on the bottom of broad street, however, the politics of the situation is secondary to the rumbling in their stomachs. They just want ECOMIL to take control of the situation, and get the rice flowing in.
