MONROVIA, 15 October 2003 — Businessman Gyude Bryant was sworn in as Liberia’s new interim leader yesterday with the task of steering the war-torn west African country to elections in 2005.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Gloria Scott administered the oath of office, in which Bryant swore before Parliament to defend Liberia’s Constitution as well as peace accords reached in August. The new president in turn swore in his vice president, Wesley Johnson.
Several west African heads of state were on hand for Bryant’s inauguration, which comes two months after the flight into exile of disgraced President Charles Taylor, who was at the center of two successive wars over the last 14 years.
Although Taylor pledged Monday to support the peace process, he has been accused of meddling in Liberian affairs and yesterday claimed that a plot was afoot to chase him out of Nigeria, his exile home.
Taylor’s wife, Jewel Taylor also voiced her hopes for the country. Jewel said she was in Monrovia simply to visit and to attend the induction ceremony.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and his Ghanaian counterpart John Kufuor were present for the swearing-in ceremony as was the president of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, a former president of Mali. West African troops serving with the United Nations Mission to Liberia (MINUL) were posted outside the Parliament, and took positions at major intersections in the Liberian capital Monrovia.
Bryant, 54, a successful entrepreneur and politician who helped set up the Liberia Action Party (LAP), arrived in Monrovia from neighboring Ghana on Monday to a joyous welcome from thousands of Liberians chanting: “We want peace, no more war.”
Seen as an independent player in Liberian politics, the soft-spoken Bryant will lead a 21-member government divided out under the August peace pact among Taylor loyalists, rebels, the political opposition and civic groups.
Rebels who fought for four years to oust Taylor pledged late Monday to start disarming as soon as the power handover was completed.
“Right after the inauguration ceremony, we will start volunteer disarmament,” said Sekou Damate Conneh, head of the main rebel movement, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), and who will be part of the transition government.
Taylor issued a statement from his exile home in Nigeria late Monday urging “all my partisans — supportive well-wishers as well as armed combatants — to support the peace process. The war is over.”
A former warlord who turned president, Taylor quit under intense international pressure on Aug. 11, handing over temporary power to his deputy Moses Blah.
Obasanjo has reportedly warned Taylor not to interfere in Liberia’s fragile peace process, and the UN special representative in Liberia, Jacques Klein, said last month that Taylor had jeopardized peace gains by telephoning Blah and seeking to prolong his influence in the country.
Taylor alleged yesterday that unidentified enemies were planning to attack Nigerian peacekeepers in his country — which make up the bulk of MINUL — and put the blame on him.
He said he feared a plot to turn the people of his host country against him and persuade them to compel him to leave.
“The strategy afoot is to orchestrate a scene whereby Nigerians and other soldiers serving in Liberia are brought in harm’s way with armed combatants believed to be my loyalists, so as to attribute it to Charles Taylor,” he said.
“It is their plan that at such a time, and God forbid, the people of Nigeria would then look at me with jaundiced eyes and consider me an enemy of the Nigerian people, thus exposing me to danger,” he said.
